When Misconceptions Get WSJ Ink

January 18th, 2008 · No Comments · ·

There’s a big Hitch~~ens~~ in this guy’s premise.

The Perils of Identity Politics - WSJ.com

What are we trying to “get over” here? We are trying to get over the hideous legacy of slavery and segregation. But Mr. Obama is not a part of this legacy. His father was a citizen of Kenya, an independent African country, and his mother was a “white” American. He is as distant from the real “plantation” as I am. How — unless one thinks obsessively about color while affecting not to do so — does this make him “black”?

Far from taking us forward, this sort of discussion actually keeps us anchored in the past. The enormous advances in genome studies have effectively discredited the whole idea of “race” as a means of categorizing humans. And however ethnicity may be defined or subdivided, it is utterly unscientific and retrograde to confuse it with color. The number of subjective definitions of “racist” is almost infinite but the only objective definition of the word is “one who believes that there are human races.”

I was going to let this tripe by Christopher Hitchens go. But the more I thought about it, the more I was convinced I should not leave it alone.

Hitchens is either onerously uninformed or intentionally lying in his claim that genome studies have proved race does not exist. On the contrary, what scientific studies have shown is that race can currently be determined genetically and anthropolologically, but not yet serologically.

My understanding is that there’s a good chance that in the future we’ll be able to discern a man’s surname simply by having his genetic sample. We’re already able to determine his general set of ancestral tribes. Perhaps Razib from Gene Expression will pop in and give us the skinny on this.

Hitchens’ use of Obama as an example is fallacious and weak, but effective in that it might persuade the uninformed.

So, I just could not let Hitchens off the hook on this. You see, I’m dedicated to the death of political correctness before it becomes the death of Western Civilization. The concept that race is merely a construct is a big problem for me because its sole purpose is to weaken the type of thinking and belief that encourages people to hang on to their heritage.

While not all of those who would deny the existence of race have the intention of erasing the knowledge of heritage from future generations, enough of them do intend to make it a big problem. I don’t know whether Hitchens would like to see the death of heritage, but it sure seems as though he is embarrassed enough by his own to take extraordinary steps to deny it.

For years, I declined to fill in the form for my Senate press credential that asked me to state my “race,” unless I was permitted to put “human.” The form had to be completed under penalty of perjury, so I could not in conscience put “white,” which is not even a color let alone a “race,” and I sternly declined to put “Caucasian,” which is an exploded term from a discredited ethnology.

I almost feel bad for Hitchens because he’s in denial of something that can be so incredibly rich, informative and helpful in the exploration of each person’s own unique humanity…if only he is not politically corrected from embracing it.

Toward these ends, I’d encourage my readers to visit Gene Expression and, also, read this article over at PBS.

Is Hitchens simply misinformed, or is he being intentionally deceptive?

I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt in hope that he’s only spouting long-held preconceptions and prejudices rather than being intentionally misleading. Still, he does mislead in trying to pass off something certainly not settled, and likely to be proved false, as if the science is decided in his favor.

It’s little things like this that we let slip by that push us further down the road toward letting the insanity that is political correctness destroy us.

HT - Steve Sailer via VDare