system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
The rhetoric of "justifying racism using science" is a red herring. CMV.

Racism is a philosophy of treating a particular group as inferior because of the *claimed* superiority based on *claimed* correlations between some arbitrary characteristics eg. skin colour and intelligence.

But if someone makes a claim that can be used to bolster a racist ideology - it doesn't make the claim racist. 

Let me try to elaborate. 

If someone makes a claim that "blacks" are on average less intelligent than "whites" based on study X one can make an attack on the validity of the study. 

One can also make a case against the ethics of such a study: i.e. it is harmful to study such trends as they negatively affect groups that are already marginalised.

What I think I am uncomfortable with is calling the science "racist".

This has the effect of accusing the party presenting the findings of doing so in order to further a racist agenda and making a case for treating a group poorly/as inferior - which I believe is an unfair accusation.

It also has a more insidious effect. Since we are hinging our practice of tolerance and equality on something being true. Science is sometimes morally inconvenient and it is important to frame our ethics to reflect this. To do otherwise is basically subverting science to serve an agenda.

To summarise:

Science is sometimes morally inconvenient, and our ethics must accommodate this instead of hoping science will be morally convenient.

It is not valid to call a study "a support of racism" because it can be used to bolster racist ideologies. For example:

The Nazi eugenics program wanted to eliminate a certain group of people based on supposed "inferior" traits.

But someone who comes up with a theory for why this might work (or might not) should not be accused of supporting the eugenics program.

The jump from these findings to action, and what that action should be is an issue distinct from the findings themselves.


It is valid to attack the ethics and validity of a study. It is also valid to question the motivations of the study. But it isn't valid to call it racist because it can be used to support racism.

To an extent this of course also extends to sexism, but I haven't seen as much of this attitude with science that can be used to justify sexism.

I posit that this is because people see it as more "obvious" that differences between sexes exist than races (truth value of the claim aside) and are also more tolerant of sexism than racism. But this is a different debate for a different time.

CMV.

PS. I feel like my past few CMV's have been overly broad, and involved some amount of moving goalposts. So I will limit my focus here:

Is there any established trend of the authors of such science supporting racist causes to make the accusation of "justifying racism using science" a valid accusation? This of course is an attack on the ethics of the science - which is a valid opposition.


On a more fundamental level I believe in this:

Group X has poor eyesight compared to group Y is not racist.
Group X has poor eyesight compared to group Y and hence we should treat them as inferior is a racist claim.

If there is a problem with the above 2 statements and you can convince me of the error there - I will offer a delta.

Cheers!
gpt
Scientific consensus has supported the vast majority of racist claims in the past, even those which we now know are obviously false. So when a study appears to provide evidence of some commonly believed racial disparity, basic pattern recognition indicates what the first question should be. How might systemic racism on the part of the researchers have affected the result?

But very few scientists do this. Many get offended when you suggest they ought to; they tell you to stop "politicizing science", as though science lives in some kind of platonic realm independent of those who execute it. This reaction is either ignorant or racist.