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0:00
I'm extremely interested, for reasons that we will
0:05
talk about, that so many of you placed this quote around the 2000s, because in fact it got resurrected around then. I started teaching it again exactly in 2004-ish. But it comes to us from—nobody got it quite right, but some of you were closer—this is a quote from Patterns of Culture by Ruth Benedict, first published in 1934. So she didn't know it, but this was between the wars. It was after what they called the Great War,
0:43
what we now call World War I. Nobody really at the time thought there was going to be a World War II, so they called it the Great War. Some people called it the First World War, not expecting a second one. But you can kind of tell this is talking about the rise of
1:06
various regimes in Europe and the kind of thing that was going on in Germany at the time.
1:14
It does also refer to that colonial-imperial mentality, so I don't want to count that one out either. But it's from quite a long time ago. Yet to me—and I'm interested that you think it's around the 2000s—it
1:34
comes back to us. We will come back to why that happened and why Ruth Benedict and this idea come back to us from the 1930s into the present. Today we read about the issue of race and ethnicity—Chapter 3. So I want to talk about how we classify, how we have classified people, and the idea of biological race, where that originates from. And then we'll talk about some of these lessons from the 1930s until the 2000s and now.
2:22
This is a map of what are called skin color variations, where people would go around with little tabs and measure—usually on the inside of people's arms, because you're less likely to be dramatically exposed to the sun there—to try to figure out your variation from 1 to 30 in terms of skin color. And this is a map of the skin colors of the people who lived in these geographical areas around 1492. You can see that the darker skin colors are in the tropics and
3:09
the lighter skin colors are in the northern hemisphere and the far southern hemisphere. Why is this? Why do people even have different skin colors?
3:45
It's basically a natural-selection evolutionary mechanism. There's been some debate about why exactly this occurs and how—there are different genetic mechanisms and different distributions for sun protection. But vitamin D absorption seems to have a lot to do with it. It actually emerged fairly recently in human history, so maybe within the last 50 or 60,000 years, maybe even less. So it's a relatively recent trait.
4:22
Homo sapiens emerge in Africa. That is the birthplace of almost all Homo evolution. And for those of you who've been with me in Intro, or with Professor Sugandhi, or with Professor Anderson in biological anthropology, you know that there were other types of Homo creatures running around back then. We have Denisovans and Neandertals and now Homo naledi—a pretty wide range of variation back then. But when it comes to Homo sapiens, what do we know about our own kind
5:06
genetically speaking, compared to that wide range we had back in the day?
5:20
The Homo sapiens are the last remaining species; all these other groups kind of went away. So back in the day there was a lot more genetic variation. In today's world, we're a very uniform species genetically. We're very much the same. To the extent that there is genetic diversity, we can find it in Africa. As González notes on page 54, almost all of human genetic diversity can be found within the continent of
5:54
Africa. The people in Eurasia and in the Americas are basically just a subset of that greater genetic diversity that happened within Africa. But again, it's not a huge amount of diversity. Now, before people started moving around—sailing
6:13
across the ocean and getting on planes—people of course moved slowly. They moved and traveled a lot, and people have always been migrating, going back and forth, interbreeding, intermarrying, and trading with each other. If you got cut off from other Homo sapiens, you probably would die, because you have to keep doing these kinds of things. But basically, in the olden days, if you took a walk from the very northern latitudes all the way
6:44
down to the southern latitudes, you would find what we call a clinal distribution of skin tone. The skin tones would vary gradually all along the way. And sure, if you put somebody from one end together with somebody from the other end, they would look very different. But there's no place along this walk—and you could take that walk from east to west, or within even some places like India itself—there's no place at which you say, "Aha, I've crossed the river,
7:20
the river between the Whites and the Blacks." There's always going to be variation, and villages that would be basically the same as their neighbors. As you go along these lines, the differences become pronounced only across distance. So that applies both to the east-west variation and to the different processes that make us call people Asians or Europeans. It actually applies—later on she talks about fair-skinned
7:48
and darker-skinned people in India. So there's also phenotypic variation within the Indian subcontinent, as well as within Australia, as well as within the Americas. People who came into the Americas, some of them developed darker skin, or maybe depigmented if they were in the north. It's hard to say whether this is a reaction after or before. But the point is that all of this was gradual variation from place to place.
8:19
Now, we've always been interested in physical and biological differences. People have always looked around and noticed that people were of different heights, shapes, colors, and all kinds of things. But the idea that those should be grouped into races comes to us quite recently in human history. It comes to us from that colonial period—from the 1600s through the 1800s, or the 1500s through the 1800s if we want to be more precise—when people from certain areas of the world
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went to other areas of the world and then shackled people, put them onto boats, transferred them to other parts of the world, and made them all work next to each other on plantations. They tried to organize what was a gradual diversity—this clinal variation—according to the plantation and other labor systems of the New World, or the Americas I should say, into these blocks of people. And most of our racial categories in the United States are actually based on a very
9:42
poor sample of human variation. For example, at that time, people from India or Australasia weren't around very much in the Americas, so they didn't really come into these original classification schemes in the United States. So it fell to people like our famous Linnaeus, who gave us that genus-species designation we still use today, and who was one of the first Europeans to classify people into kinds or
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blocks. His first classification used six different human kinds, including Wild Man and
10:35
Monsters. If you look back at some of the pictures and descriptions he used for this, you'll realize that—as González states—he was relying on accounts from sailors.
10:58
The sailors who were drinking too much of the hard stuff, that is to say. He had these ideas of people who were part of humanity, maybe. So I just want to point out that among the earliest
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schemes—just because we still have this idea from Linnaeus—we don't have the Homo ferus and the Homo monstrosus anymore, but the idea has kind of stuck with us that there are people from
11:32
the Americas, Native Americans, Asians, Africans, and Europeans. And he gave them colors. I was taught a song in Sunday school. You don't know this song? "Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world. Red and yellow, Black and White, all are precious in his sight."
12:05
There are the colors right there in a row. They come to us from good old Linnaeus. And then he had a whole bunch of things to say about the people. So my first point is: I don't know that we should take these categories any more seriously than we take the Homo ferus and the Homo monstrosus categories. Now, as González notes, afterward Blumenbach came along and tried to systematize this and make it
12:33
sound a little more scientific. From him we get the word that some White people like to use to describe themselves: they say they're Caucasian. I think they use it because it sounds more sciency.
12:56
That's what Blumenbach believed. He was fascinated with one particular skull from the Caucasus and said that it was the perfect human being. It was probably because that's where Noah's Ark was supposed to have been found, so they were the best Europeans. He actually thought that the other Europeans were degraded forms of the people in the Caucasus, which is in present-day Georgia—the country of Georgia, not the state of Georgia.
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What's also interesting is that a lot of people within Europe looked down on the people of the Caucasus and would think, "What do you like those people for? Why do you think they're the perfect ones?" It's a strange terminology. And for those who think it's more scientific, it's not. So we have Blumenbach's groups. Others put people into three groups. Some had seven groups. Others had 37 groups, or 45 groups. Which one of these is right?
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None of these is right—because you can't do it. The fact that all these people were measuring things and trying to group people up: biologically speaking, yes, there is human difference. There is genetic variation, physical variation, skin color variation, lactose-tolerance variation, malarial-resistance variation, all kinds of great human variation. It simply does not sort into groups that do anything but overlap with each other and are always interbreeding.
14:35
Now, back in the 1930s, when Benedict was talking about that racial snobbery and trying to minimize the idea of race—which was pretty huge back then, very entrenched—and as we'll read about, Boas was right there too. Here's
14:55
what happened to these people, to Boas and Benedict. As Charles King put it on page 13 of Gods of the Upper Air, which we'll be returning to on Thursday: they were dismissed from jobs, monitored by the FBI, and hounded in the press. The people who were trying to fight against the racial classifications and fight for people to be more culture-conscious really got persecuted for it, or they didn't rise as far as they should have because of the overwhelming snobbery at the time.
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So this was the situation in the 1930s. By the 1990s, it did seem that that point of view from anthropology—from Boas and Benedict and the "one human race" people—seemed to be winning, or in ascendance, you might say. It's not that ethnocentrism and racism had disappeared, but it seemed like people were mellowing out about it.
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One reason for that is that the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, and various activists, fought hard for rights and to be seen as full human beings. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was someone who read and cited Benedict and others and was in contact with people in anthropology. This is something I think we sometimes lose sight of—or that our Gods of the Upper Air book loses sight of—the importance of people who were putting their bodies on the line in order to
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make change in their society. It wasn't simply the scientists and the academics who were doing it. But there were a couple of really good statements within anthropology about this. One was from Frank Livingstone, who in 1964 wrote that "there are no races, there are only clines." What he meant is that you can't group people into blocks—White and Black and Caucasian, or whatever you want to call it. The only thing we see when we look
17:28
out at the human species is a range of variation according to geographic distribution. If you lined everybody up from lightest to darkest, you'd have a perfect continuum of variation.
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This got a huge amount of support from Richard Lewontin's work in the early 1970s, in a classic article called "The Apportionment of Human Diversity." He was one of the first to kind of grind up the human genome—the DNA from different places—and he discovered that there was more diversity within any so-called race than there was between different races. So the issue seemed pretty settled in terms of the science: these biological classifications were not going to work.
18:22
The other thing that started—people began to think—instead of seeing the divisions of society as biological races, people started to talk a lot more about ethnicity and cultural variation. People began to see ethnicity as a kind of liberatory force against the colonialism that had been in place. González talks about this idea that people had an ethnic identity that deserved recognition.
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Around the 1990s, there was an idea that as people talked to each other, and as we had these new technologies—telephones, planes, televisions, things where we could see each other—we didn't have YouTube yet, but we were getting there—the idea was that because people were talking to each other, because of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Soviet Union, people would get to know each other. And that the hard edges, you might say,
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of religion and ethnicity would go away once people talked to each other more.
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So for the most part, since anthropology was kind of winning out there, the people who called themselves anthropologists mostly wound up in the academy, teaching and writing books.
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They weren't fighting these battles out there anymore. They were fighting with each other, getting all theoretical, trying to get good jobs and write funny books. We saw this a little bit—I talked to you about this maybe two classes ago—that
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in some ways cultural anthropology was at its best when it was fighting all these stereotypes from the outside, from a renegade position. As anthropologists joined the academy, you got the development of all these subfields and theories and hierarchies.
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So by the 1990s, things seemed strangely good. It's hard for me to convey what was going on in, say, 1999, when the United States was paying down its national debt. In fact, we were paying it down so fast that some economists said, "Oh, you don't want to do it that fast, you're going to pay it off too fast, so maybe slow down on the payback." I know it's hard to imagine, 24 trillion dollars later, that that was what was going on. So what happened? The idea that people
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were going to soften the edges of religious and ethnic ideas got pretty much blown apart, as other things did. And we just had the commemoration of these events over the weekend.
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Now, at the time, there were some anthropologists—many anthropologists, I hope—and many diplomats and other people who said, "Okay, what we should do now is get all of our alliances together and portray the people who did this as criminals. This should be about law, order, and public safety. By doing that, we'll all unite together. We'll empower people to hunt down the criminals who did these despicable acts." So that was what some people wanted to do.
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We didn't get that, did we? We got something else: the War on Terror. So instead of criminals, it became a war.
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Now, what happens? There are good parts to having a war, but what do you get when you're having a war? What does a war do?
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You rev up the nationalism. Wars usually rev up the nationalism. That's why that
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Ruth Benedict quote came back—because people were being thrown into contact with each other, and the response was racial snobbery and nationalism.
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What else do wars do? What do you get if you call something a war?
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When you're at war, there's a certain amount more that you can do, right? You can just roll in.
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"All's fair in love and war." A lot of things get justified in wars that you wouldn't do in peacetime. You get wartime powers—the whole idea of having different codes of law during a war.
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So it revs up the nationalism, the us and the them. And there's something else you can usually get from people if you call something a war: it's a good way to spend a lot of money. We talked about paying down the debt; now we'll just rev up the military and rev up the debt. I'm not trying to say that this was wrong. I'm just trying to say that this was an approach people used, and it didn't necessarily have to be that approach. The reason
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so many anthropologists and diplomats argued against it is also this: if you say you're at war with somebody, what does that do to the people on the other side of the world?
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They war back. In some ways, it makes them bigger than they are. It makes them into heroes. Now they're fighting a war. Now they're the people fighting the enemy. So the language—I'm not saying the language of criminality is always a good one, that has its own problems—but if you want to go to war,
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you have to watch your metaphors, because people get crazy. Now, given that we were at war,
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a lot of the ideas about race and ethnicity also came into question. That idea that anthropology had sort of won the battle, won the war on race, got turned back around. So up until 2001, I think a lot of people accepted the idea that race is a social construction, not a biological reality. But after 2001, a lot of people said, "No, race is more than a social construct." Now, from my point of view, a lot of the people who said "race is just a
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social construct, those people are crazy" misunderstood the idea of social construct. When anthropologists and others said that race is a social construct, that doesn't mean we're in any way denying that there is variation, that there is genetic diversity, that biology matters. It's simply saying that it can't be grouped biologically into meaningful categories, and that the categories we construct, we build, are social ones.
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When we say something is a social construction—we can do this with gender too—that means it's a very real idea. It has real effects in the world. It doesn't mean it's just something we've made up in our heads and are goofing around with. So social construction means it's very real, and it also means it's very social.
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A lot of people, when they say something like "race is a social construct," think it means they can be whatever they want to be. It doesn't really work like that. So González gives us a couple of interesting examples on page 62 from Dr. Kim TallBear, talking about genetic-ancestry tests and people who want to claim to be Indigenous based on those tests.
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Dr. TallBear says it's not just a matter of what you claim, but a matter of who claims you. It's not just who you claim to be; it's what the social group is that is claiming you. And later in this section, González talks about whether you can become Black—about
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the person who was basically saying that she was African American. Again, this is part of a social grouping. It's not that your individual choices don't matter, but there's a social aspect to it. So in general, when people say race is a social construct, it's
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often misunderstood to be something it's not. It is very real. Biology still exists. It just means that our social stuff is important. The other thing that happened since 2001 is that, for some reason, forensic anthropology got very popular. People would come in with a bone and say, "Aha, let's go find the criminal. It's a White guy." This is not a biological anthropology class, so we could go over elsewhere why we can make an analysis of skeletal remains,
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and talk about ancestry percentages and ancestry estimations and how they might translate into
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racial classifications in today's world. But basically, the ability of forensic anthropologists to analyze ancestry does not validate the idea of biological race. The other thing that's happened is that ancestry companies say they can swab your DNA and tell you that you're 18% Irish and 32%
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Italian, French, all those things. I won't get into the numbers of this, but if you just do your genetics back
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25 generations or so—a thousand years back—you'll find that you have many, many ancestries. So again, both of these things have to do with entertainment value and the ability to monetize. The other thing that has happened is that, politically speaking, it's been very advantageous for politicians—and this has happened here and in other places—to stir up this idea of ethno-nationalism, or to encourage people to identify as a certain race or ethnicity.
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So, to recap: from the 1930s, when some of the anthropologists were speaking against the idea of race and ethnocentrism, they really got persecuted for it. We'll read more about that in Gods of the Upper Air. By the 1990s, we kind of had it tamped down a little; we were winning on that. And then since about 2001—which is why it interested me that so many of you put this quote in the 2000s—there's been this revival of race and ethnic ideas.
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Now, one question is: well, what do we do? Should we in anthropology and elsewhere just bring back cultural relativism, those ideas from the 1930s of being culturally conscious? This will actually be one of your potential essay topics for your first essay—I'll give you those in a couple of days. You could write about whether we should just bring these ideas back from the 1930s, if that's the kind of ethnocentrism we're seeing.
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A lot of anthropologists did. Like I said, I started teaching Ruth Benedict's book around 2004, the early 2000s. And a lot of anthropologists put this up on their Facebook page or background—something Ruth Benedict may have actually said at one point. I haven't actually been able to locate whether she wrote this down or not, but close enough. She had this idea for sure, which is that "the purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences." So in some ways,
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a lot of anthropologists felt they needed to take up the cultural-relativism claim again.
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I think that's a decent idea. I don't think it's necessarily wrong. But I think
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we need to enhance our thinking on it. So what I've drawn up in this next part of class are seven lessons for how
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I think—using the textbook and using anthropology—we might try to use these ideas but adapt them to the world we're living in.
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The first lesson is that, when it comes to ideas of race and ethnicity and ethnocentrism and racism, it's more than simply using different words, different terminology. It's even more than changing the way people think about the world. That's why in the last class I thought it was so important that we look at the parts of culture as not just what we think, but also as what we do and what we have. Because simply changing the way people talk about race,
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or the way people think about ethnicity, didn't address what is called systemic or structural racism—which is more about what people have, their material position in life, and the advantages and disadvantages people have in different parts of society. One measure of structural racism, for example, is the average wealth difference between Whites and Blacks in the United States, which by various measures is something like 12 to 20 times as much
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in terms of the wealth you're starting out with. There's a wealth gap that actually has not changed, and may even have increased, since the 1960s, since the Civil Rights Movement. So although some of the terms have changed, and although hopefully the way we act with each other has changed, a lot of the systems and structures are still embedded in our society. This is one lesson about how we apply cultural relativism in today's world: it's not simply a matter of
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educating people. Benedict and Boas believed fervently that if you simply educated people, they would change. And there has been change, but that doesn't necessarily address the systemic racism of our society.
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The other thing I think we need to understand better is what we might call the biological consequences of racism. What happens to people?
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Social and political experiences can have a direct effect on a person's physical health.
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There's a connection between the two,
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and what someone's potential in the future might be, just because of what they experience.
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I would go with physical health—don't shy away from it. The early anthropologists very much tried to separate culture from biology, because people were trying to claim that biology determined culture, and so they wanted to separate those two. But it's very important to understand that the things we believe and do have biological implications. If I have 10 times as much money as you, I'm going to be able to get better healthcare. My
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school's probably going to be better. Things are going to be generally better for me. The anthropologist Clarence Gravlee has talked about how race becomes biology. The idea is that we have these ideas and behaviors—and especially the systemic racism—and
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those things become part of people's lives: their stress levels, their maternal health, their access to education and healthcare. These things start to become physically manifest. There's a kind of amazing study that González talks about, about the birth weights of people with Arab surnames in the United States, in Los Angeles, after September 11th.
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Here was a population that already faced discrimination, but the discrimination really revved up. The researcher—it wasn't González, it was
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Professor Diane Lauderdale—was looking at what happened to the birth weights of people who were all of a sudden subjected to different kinds of ethnic slurs
39:26
and discrimination. She found that the infant birth weights declined afterward, in comparison to pre-9/11. And again, this is in Los Angeles, which was not at all near where the attacks took place. So we can see in various ways that ethnocentrism and racism can have biological consequences.
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One of the other lessons I think is very important is that we often think about racism as simply being mean, or discriminating, or being prejudiced against other people. What else goes on?
40:20
What else is race about? It's not just being mean.
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Getting more opportunities than other people. Yes—the idea González discusses here is White privilege: that people are born with unearned privileges. These days, the idea of White privilege has become kind of—it used to just make people upset; now it's kind of made fun of.
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González cites John Scalzi, who wrote a really interesting blog post about ten years ago, in 2012, where he tried to put this into different language for those of us who bristle at the word privilege. As he put it, being a straight White male means you're playing the game of life at the lowest difficulty setting.
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What he said at the beginning of that article was that, sure, privilege is a fine word to use. But since straight White males don't like that word and react to it in a weird way, he wanted to put it in a different way they could understand, so they wouldn't be quibbling with it so much. This blog post became—he actually recently did a follow-up to it in 2022, ten years later—one of his biggest hits. So if you want to know how to talk to people who don't want to talk about race,
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you might take a look at this. It's been an interesting idea. He revisited it ten years later in 2022 and said it's basically correct:
42:28
the lowest difficulty setting still applies, as relevant as ever. And he wrote that he was sure a bunch of straight White men would maintain it's still not accurate, as they would have in 2012, and that they're entirely wrong—and what a privilege that is, to be completely wrong and yet suffer no consequences for it. So I would recommend him—he's definitely not an anthropologist, just a person who knows how to
42:58
write pretty well and is a straight White male himself, so maybe he can get through
43:08
to people. It's an important concept about race.
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That said, I also think there's an important lesson: just because I might have White privilege, that doesn't mean our whole society hasn't suffered because of our own racism. In a recent book by Heather McGhee called The Sum of Us—which is now being turned into a podcast, so you can listen to it instead of reading it—McGhee writes about the idea of what racism costs everyone. She uses, from the cover of the book, the example of swimming pools. All these cities and towns in
44:06
this country used to have these beautiful public swimming pools. A lot of them in the 1960s were told they had to desegregate the pool—you couldn't just have only White people in your swimming pool. But many of the towns decided that, instead of desegregating the pool, they were just going to fill it up with sand. No swimming pool—nobody gets to swim. And so McGhee asks: why do we do this to ourselves? Why can't we have good things?
44:44
A lot of people think the same thing about having a national healthcare system. Whenever we try to do it, we run straight up against the idea that some people are going to benefit more than others. So I would recommend reading or listening to that—really interesting stuff.
45:09
The other lesson is about the idea of ethnicity and how people think of it.
45:18
A lot of people, when they use the word ethnicity or a culture group,
45:24
think that the people within that ethnic group are all kind of the same, all homogeneous.
45:34
They think people in ethnic groups are stuck in time; they don't change; they have their traditions. We often talk about ethnic groups as bounded, having boundaries, being isolated from each other—and that the people who are part of these groups are the way they are because of their culture. "Well, you know how those people are; it's their culture that makes them the way they are, and they're all the same."
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Now, if that's what you think about people in a certain group,
46:25
you might as well just use the same old term of race. That's what the race idea was all about: lumping people together as homogeneous, tradition-determined, bounded, isolated units. That's why in the last class I was so insistent that we think about culture as heterogeneous, variable, changing and dynamic, interconnected and always in contact—something
46:58
that people discuss and think about and are always changing. So the big lesson, up to number five, is that just changing the words around doesn't necessarily solve how people think about each other and how they behave. It's not good to use
47:19
bad words about people—but changing the words doesn't necessarily change anything if you have the same idea, just using ethnic terms instead of racial ones. So again, we need to see culture as dynamic and interconnected, and not just replicating those old racial ideas.
47:48
Why do we want to watch out for cultural appropriation? What is that?
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It could really hurt someone's feelings, and it's not appropriate. It's
48:30
disrespectful. You can appreciate cultures—you don't want to appropriate them.
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Some things in cultures are really important,
48:55
and taking them can be offensive. You have to try to understand the culture.
49:06
This takes some education—people
49:13
have to educate themselves—but I think you can figure it out. You'll know it when you see it.
49:28
I think a seventh lesson is that these ideas—discrimination,
49:38
racism, ethnocentrism, and throw in sexism—occur along multiple dimensions, what we now call intersectionality. There are different aspects to this that come up in various ways.
49:59
The caste system, for example, is separated out,
50:07
and there's discrimination toward those who are in a lower position. It's kind of the same concept of discrimination, but not by skin color—it's that you're born into it and you can't change it.
50:30
It's an interesting thing—there's a pretty recent book that talks about this. We usually use caste to refer to systems on the South Asian subcontinent, systems in which you're born into a certain occupational class. But a lot of people over the years have wondered to what extent some of the same ideas might apply here in the United States. This is not necessarily a perfect analogy, but it can be worth thinking about—to what degree some of these things might be useful in how we
51:14
think about our own society and some of the race-ethnicity alignments we have here as well.
51:30
The other idea I want to bring up from this section—which González also uses with
51:37
India, about the categories of skin color, but it happens in many parts of the world, including the United States—is the idea that the fairer-skinned, even within a particular group, have a kind of advantage, or are advantaged in terms of their life prospects.
52:02
We do this in the United States too, although we don't talk about it much. If you look at psychological studies of how people view
52:12
those who might have lighter skin but fall into the Black category, versus people who have darker skin but are also in the Black category, you see differences in the ways they're treated, both within their own communities and outside of them. It's part of a multi-dimensional idea of race and ethnicity that we need to take part in understanding. So, going back to the first question: should we just bring back cultural relativism?
52:44
I guess it's better than nothing. It's better than not saying anything at all. It's better than just sticking it out in academia. But we need to update it for today's world. And many of the people I've cited here, and that González cites, are actually writing from outside of anthropology. So at least for me, there's a need to get more in touch with what's going on out there. The old-fashioned cultural relativism is better than nothing,
53:20
but it definitely needs some adjustment in order to work in today's world.
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