Letters to the Editor

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Dear Sir: What is bad about racism? The word "racism" is interpreted quite differently by different people. When I recently accused a "white superiority" believer of racism, he rejected this label, saying, "I am not a racist, because I do not hate the blacks. Racism means hating the other races." Well, does it? I think not! Racism really means something else. It means dealing with the race problem in terms of absolutes: "White versus black," "different," "superior," "better." Racism deals with the racial problem in terms ofPlatonian concepts offixed, underlying essences. Such essentialism is not only fallacious, but it is a very dangerous ideology. Unfortunately , however, most ofthose who object to racism base their arguments on the very same invalid ideological foundation. They fear, as is evident from their entire line ofargument, that any demonstration ofa mean difference, however slight, between two population groups, such as blacks and whites, would show that the BLACK is different from the WHITE. This, precisely, has been the invidious thesis of all racist books on intelligence differences between whites and blacks. How nonsensical this thesis is can perhaps best be illustrated by an example. All six finalists ofthe ioo-meter dash in the last Olympics were black. Does this provethattheBLACK runsfaster than the WHITE? Suppose we had 100,000 whites run against 100,000 comparable blacks. Would all 100,000 blacks come in before the first one ofthe 100,000 whites? The answer is obvious. Even if there should be a small difference in the mean values of the running speed of the two groups, their population curves would surely overwhelmingly coincide. When we compare groups ofpeople—and it does not matter whether we are comparing whites and blacks, Protestants andJews, Russians and Americans or whether we are dealing with partially genetic traits or largely environmentally determined traits—in all such comparisons we find invariably that the curves for most human traits largely overlap. Therefore, to assume that an individual belonging to one of the populations will be different in a given trait from an individual belonging to anotherpopulationmerelybecauseforthistraitthereis ameandifference betweenthepopulationsissimplywrong. To make a clear distinction between "types" and "populations" is the decisive difference between modern biology and the obsolete ideology ofessentialism. The latter has to do with uniform types. This way ofthinking has been designated by Karl Popper as essentialism, because it relates variable phenomena to a reputedly existing underlying "essence." Essentialist thinking is emphatically rejected by the biologist who only recognizes variable populations, each individual having his own unique mixture oftraits. The 505 fact that populations may differ from each other in the mean values for various traits is totally irrelevant when it comes to a consideration ofthe qualities ofa single individual. Mean values are mathematical abstractions. A given individual has to be dealt with on the basis ofhis own personal characteristics and not those ofthe mean values ofhis population group. What is the lesson from this? It is that it is wasteful and irrelevant to concentrate on trying to prove that the mean values ofany two human populations are either identical or different. Quite likely, it will be found that no two human populations have entirely identical mean values for any human trait, whether genetically or environmentally determined . But this is totally irrelevant because the vast majority of the individuals of either of the two compared populations will fall within the same range of variation. It is unscientific and altogether unfair to make statements about a member ofa population based on the mean value ofthe entire population to which he belongs. It is simply not correct to say that the BLACK runs faster than the WHITE or the BLACK is more musical than the WHITE or whatever generalizing statements one cares to make. This includes reference to intelligence, whether measured by an IQ test or in any other way. Anyone who makes absolute statements about populations thinks in essentialist terms. Essentialist thinking applied to a comparison ofhuman races inevitably leads to racism. Individuals should bejudged only on the basis oftheir own qualities, not on that ofthe racial group to which they belong. Ernst Mayr Museum ofComparative Zoology, Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138 Dear Sir: Joel Hildebrand may...