Miles Jackson wrote:
>
>
> --race is the social phenomenon to be explained; it's not the
> exogenous variable in your path model!
>
My mother believed that southern whites constituted a race.
I discovered this about 50 years ago; I was on leave from the USAF, chatting with her, when she made the claim that she could "tell" a person was southern by his/her appearance. I couldn't talk her out of this illusion.
Here's the background for that. She was the daughter of a fruit farmer in southwestern Michigan (a very small area with a longer growing season because of the lake). Prior to WW2 there would be large numbers of southern migrant workers (called "Arkies" in Michigan) arrive each summer, and usually there would be one or two (sometimes three) migrant families living on my grandfather's farm. (In one side of a garage or unused barn, in a tent.) Of course there were sharp cultural differences (as well as objective differences of interest) between the migrant workers and the local farmers and their families, and a fairly consistent set of beliefs about those "Arkies." Probably my mother had never really been faced with many of them except in contexts that made identification easy.
So they _were_ a race -- at least as much (and as little) as are Blacks or any other group so labelled.
Miles's point is so obvious that what is hard to explain is why he should have to argue it.
>From Fields:
****** When virtually the whole of a society, including supposedly thoughtful, educated, intelligent persons, commits itself to belief in propositions that collapse into absurdity upon the slightest examination, the reason is not hallucination or delusion or even simple hypocrisy; rather, it is ideology. And ideology is impossible for anyone to analyse rationally who remains trapped on its terrain.[11] That is why race still proves so hard for historians to deal with historically, rather than in terms of metaphysics, religion or socio- (that is, pseudo-) biology.
======== 11. A well-known historian once illustrated this fact for me in the very act of denying it. Challenging me for having made a statement to the same effect in an earlier essay (Barbara J. Fields, "Ideology and Race in American History," in _Region, Race and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward_, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, New York, 1982), he declared: "Someone could accept the evidence that there is a racial disparity in IQ and still believe in integration." Well-intentioned, but trapped in racial ideology, he cannot bring himself to question the scientific status of race itself, let alone IQ. Nor, although an accomplished user of statistical methods, can he perceive the fallacy of statistical studies claiming to have eliminated the social determinants of intelligence and isolated the genetic ones, while perforce using social criteria -- there are no others -- to assign subjects to their proper "race" in the first place. ========= ******
The belief that _anything_ can be explained by "race" is itself the essence of racism.
Carrol