More Honky-Talk

[Rakesh Bhandari]

1. John StC mentions Robert Rydell's book on the world faires and colonial
exhibitions of the early 20th, a main text in one of Donna's chapters of
her recently completed dissertation. Not being a dweeb, she is asleep
looking into her eyelids, and I don't have the chapter with me. The world
faires and colonial exhibitions are fascinating for many reasons: the
change in the representation of the other from caged savage as
incommensurable other at the 1899 faire to full-scale pavilions depicting
modernized colonies; the breathtaking beauty of the fresque constructed
for, say, the French Colonial Exhibition of 1931, a beauty which drowned
out the horrific realities of red rubber; the attempt to instill in
faire-goers a sense of membership in a Greater (modernized) France. The
colonial exhibitions were the first representations of the world as a
global village.

2. I think Justin got Wojtek wrong. It's not only, as countless critics
have underlined, the crying absence of proper precautions to ensure that
race is not confounded with other factors or that the effects of racism
have indeed been accounted for.  Wojtek questioned the validity of the
inference from the racial IQ gap which remains after SES-like variables
have been (putatively) controlled for to the existence of heritable racial
differences in cognitive ability. That Murray and friends are borrowing
authority by clothing man's most dangerous myth in pseudo-scientific
discourse is proven by their refusal to simply look at any  evidence not of
the paper and pencil kind, in particular Lewontin's evindence of the
underlying genetics through protein polymorphisms, which speaks for or
against the liklihood of the existence of heritable deep racial differences
in complex behavioral characteristics.

 Now there has been the important discovery of higher risks among Europeans
for cystic fibrosis  or Sub Saharan Africans and people of the
Mediterranean for sickle cell or Eastern European Jews for Tay-Sachs. But
outside of the particular function of those genes, there is nothing about
genetics to sugest that other, more general functions and behaviors will be
dictated by a gene or small group of genes.

Anyways, actual scientific studies in the interaction between nutrition,
cellular development and neuorological sequencing have exposed as deeply
reductionist any attempt to reduce behavior to the simple firing of neuro
transmitters.  (see Richard Lewontin, Jonathan Marks, John Vandermeer, L
Cavalli-Sforza)

 And it shouldn't have to be pointed out Michael Jordan suggests only his
own exceptionality, not that of blacks; on last count, a black kid has a
better chance of getting hit by lightening than becoming a shooting star in
the NBA. There is little chance our son (yet to be conceived) will be a
point guard and no chance at all he will be an economist.

rakesh