![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xiphiasThere's an essay in the April 1976 issue of ANALOG magazine, by L Sprauge de Camp, titled "The Breeds of Man." It's about race.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
james_nicoll, probably because he doesn't have enough pain in his life, has been looking through the recent history of how race has been portrayed in 20th century science fiction. And he mentioned this essay, and asked if anyone had a copy of it. Lis DOES, indeed, have most of the ANALOG magazines of the Seventies, so pulled it out. James asked if she could summarize it.
And she tried. And it broke her brain.
So I tried next. And, after a day, and many breaks for playing with cats, eating burritos, and shooting Flash-game aliens and orcs, I got all the way through.
So, here's my summary. I'd encourage anyone else who has access to the essay to read along, and double-check my summary to make sure that it's accurate and fair.
Okay, Lis bounced off of this thing, so she handed it off to me to try to summarize. Let me see if I can do better than she did.
"Everyone agrees that the human race should be made as genetically perfect as possible. But who defines 'perfection'?"
1. The dumber a person is, the more vehement they are about the topic at hand, and lots of dumb people have said lots of things about race vehemently. Therefore, let ME tell you how it ACTUALLY is, because I'm smart, and therefore can be really INTELLIGENTLY vehement about it.
2. "Breeds of domestic animals", "subspecies of wild animals", and "races of humans" are basically the same thing. And things like "the French", "the Jews", and "Aryans" are not races, since those are nationalities, religions, and languages. So anybody can become French, Jewish, or Aryan. Anybody who speaks English, Russian, or Hindi is, of course, Aryan. [So, if you wanted to join the Nazi party, all you had to do was speak Russian, since the Nazis and the Russians were so friendly?]
3. If you compare me to Hitler for writing about race, you totally lose the argument, because fourteen years from now, Mike Godwin will say so.
4. People have tried to group people by skin color, which is stupid. It's TOTALLY more sensible to group people by their skull shape. Or maybe the percentages of blood types within the group. Because, like American Indians have different percentages of blood types than the people they're related to, so they're different than the people they're the same as. So they're the same, which is why we can compare them, but they're different, so we can't. Because they're the same and different.
5. The default, normal human being is the Swede, like Fictional Erik. Humans are tall, slender, and pinkish. When you go south, you find humans that look like a fictional guy named Juma, and east, you get to a fictional guy named Sojo. They've all got obvious physical differences, such as the fact that the black guy is stinkier, and the Japanese guy is less stinky, with Erik being medium stinky. And Swedes are generally like Fictional Erik, Japanese are generally like Fictional Sojo, and Congalese are generally like Fictional Juma. While there ARE people like Juma in Sweden, and Erik in Japan, they're minorities, so they don't count. [It's not like the French, Jews, or Aryans, obviously.] [Also, defaut humans are males. I mean, there probably ARE female humans, because mamals use them to reproduce, but they're not important.]
6. We naturally follow the color distinctions of Baron Cuvier of the Nineteenth Century, since I'm using modern terms and showing how modern science makes this all make sense, which is why I want to use century-old definitions. So we know that these people are Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid, for instance. Of course, Cacasoid people aren't ALL pinkish like Erik; the Caucasians go all the way into India, so the fact that some Caucasians are as dark as some Negroids shouldn't bother us -- we should remember that we are DEFINING the terms here, and we KNOW that Indians are like Swedes, because we say so. And that makes it true.
7. Negroids come from sub-Saharan Africa. Caucasoids come from Europe, North Africa, and Southern and Southwestern Asia. Mongoloids come from the rest of Asia, the Pacific rim, and North and South America. We know this because -- LOOK! A MONKEY!!
Oh, wait, there wasn't a monkey there. Anyway, while you were looking at the monkey, I TOTALLY proved that.
There are boundaries where people are KINDA one of those and KINDA something else, but we're going to ignore that, because, y'know, why not?
Now, the majority of humans are Caucasiod, because they're the default, normal humans. And maybe a third of humans are Mongoloid, and maybe ten percent are Negroid. We know this because I made it up. We can divide Caucasoids into light Caucasoids and dark Caucasiods. Because, y'know, why not? And those split up about half and half, too.
Then there are, like, miscelaneous groups who don't fit into the other categories, like Hotentots and Bushmen, who can be distinguished by their big butts. Also, there are Australian aboriginies, who are probably a lot like Neanderthals. And there are Polynesians, who are kind of a mix of everything. So, that's, like, six groups -- three big ones and three teeny ones, but there are also things that are difficult to classify, so we'll ignore those.
And smaller divisions than those six are stupid. MY divisions make sense, but once you get to smaller ones, like Nordic, you're just being silly.
Some of the smaller, silly divisions are Nordic, the Alpines, the Mediterranean, the Amenoid, and the Hindi. And here are the descriptions of each one, so you know how to distinguish them. And THEN you can get into things like the "Baltic", but, c'mon, that's OBVIOUSLY simply a Nordic/Alpine hybrid, right? TOTALLY makes sense. Blah blah blah Negroid subtypes Mongoloid subtypes enclaves of other subtypes geographically surrounded by subtypes . . .
7. Remember how I said that "Aryans" were a group that you could join just by learning a language? I totally lied. First, they were probably Alpines. Also, they don't exist any more. But then people think they do. But they're wrong. Alpine people assume that Aryans were probably Alpine. Nordic people assume that they were Nordic.
The point is that lots of stupid books were written claiming that Jews are inferior to Germans. Or whatever.
8. Remember how I said that Jews weren't a race, a while back? And then I spent a a bunch of pages talking about how stupid it was to be comparing the Jews and the Germans and stuff? Turns out that the Jews AREN'T a "race", but rather a "race lite" that I made up the word "ethnos" for. Gypsies, too. And African-Americans. (Well, "American Negro", since the word "African-American" hadn't been invented yet.)
[Holy crap this essay is a mess. I'm starting to skim here because it's just painful to read. Do I seriously have twenty more pages of this crap to wade through?]
9. Now, let's talk about fossils. And evolutionary traits. Polynesians are fat because they swim a lot. It's totally not fair that guys like me go bald.
10. Nurture vs. nature. For political reasons, lots of people say that differences between groups are totally because of people's backgrounds and educations. Like, Communists, for instance, say that. This leads to stupid crap like Lysenko [okay, fine, point to de Camp]. But saying so doesn't make it so. People are against "tracking" in schools, because it's racist, which means that everybody gets the worst possible education. [Fine, partial point to de Camp].
People like Arthur Jensen and William Shockley have been shouted down for saying stuff like this, which TOTALLY abrogates their freedom of speech.
[Oh, crap. We're now getting into the arguments that I remember from "The Bell Curve", a book in which I bounced off of at the introduction, where the author stated flat out that he was assuming all the things that he was intending to prove, thereby DEFINING "begging the question."]
When twins are raised separately, their IQs match each other's more closely than non-related people raised together.
11. Physical differences between races. Nilotes are fantastic jumpers, Tebetians are better at high altitudes, Eskimos are better at withstanding cold. . .
[Crap. I just have to take a break. My brain hurts. I lasted longer than Lis did, though.]
[Why didn't you put a "memetic prophylactic required" warning on this request? Well, I suppose that opening "genetic perfection" quote served the same purpose.]
. . . okay, where were we? Julius Caesar beat up Gauls even though Gauls were bigger and stronger, because he had better technology . .
12. Over time, intermarriage makes races more similar, and environmental factors, specifically climate, make races more different. If there was no intermarriage, humans would speciate into non-interfertile groups.
13. *blink* *blink* What? Um. Writers of historical fiction, like Robert E. Howard, have assumed that Britain started out with small, dark people, who were invaded by blond Nordic people, but actually, Britian was probably mostly Nordic before the Norse invaded, and got less and less Nordic as Nordic people invaded.
No, I swear, that's what it says.
14. Just because Negroids have smaller brains than Caucasians doesn't mean they're dumber. [. . . but I really have a bad feeling that you're eventually going to get around to telling us what it is that DOES mean that. . . ] Also, we can't make any assumptions about races' relative competencies based on starting actual useful civilizations, since pretty much every race has created solid, real civilizations.
15. "'Intelligence' is a vague term, but it essentially means 'mental power', just as "strength" means physical power." [Oh, good. What does "mental power" mean?] After all, we can consider a fictional Nobel Prize winner named Professor McBrain, and a fictional heavyweight boxing champ named Ahmed Jones, and we can TELL that Professor McBrain is smarter, because he has a "Mc" in his name, meaning that he's of Scottish descent, and Ahmed Jones has a name that suggests that he's African-American, so Jones is stronger, because we KNOW that a lot of black people are FANTASTIC atheletes.
Anyway, "strength" is made up of a lot of factors, and so is "intelligence." We try to have IQ tests to test a sort of general "intelligence" situation, but even that's a bit flaky, because of cultural bias. If you didn't grow up caring about time, you're going to be crap at a timed test. If your culture is base around talking things out communally, you're not going to do well on your own. If you're totally paranoid about weird doctors calling you out of your classroom and doing weird tests on you, you're probably not going to do that well on said weird tests. If you don't know the word "opposite", you're not going to do well on writing down the opposite of words.
16. Ah, HERE are the bell curves. So, you test a group and blah blah blah you know all this stuff. Of course, if one group is better than the other, it doesn't mean that the EVERYONE in the one group is better than EVERYONE in the other. The percentage of the lower group that's higher than the average of the higher group is the "crossover." A "crossover" of 50% means that the groups are equal. In Caucasoid/Negroid intelligence tests, whites show an advantage of 15%. [We've apparently forgotten that "Caucasoid" doesn't mean "white," since it includes India.]
Now, some of this is due to environment, because in the "Kaiserian War" [the what the fuck now?] although whites scored better than blacks on the Army Alpha Test when they were from the same area, Negroes from Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio scored better than whites from Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, and Mississippi. [So, y'know, even though blacks are dumb, white trash is dumber.] Also, when Negro children move from the country to the city, their IQs go up.
17. But, just because we can demonstrate that environment affects IQ, does that REALLY mean that environment affects IQ?
We can divide this into "genotypic intelligence" and "phenotypic intelligence." Clearly, "phenotypic intelligence" is environmental, but, well, hey, who knows, maybe there's this other thing, too? Let's just go ahead and assume that it exists and then argue about it.
I've read a bunch of the research, and I don't understand it. Therefore, let me tell you what it means.
Some people [who? citation needed. I swear, I've never before had this much sympathy for Wikipedia editors] say that we shouldn't even ASK these questions because blah blah blah hurt feelings blah blah PC blah blah Rosicrutians what the fuck blah blah blah.
Hey, who knows? Maybe primitive barbarians are SMARTER than us civilized folks because NO L SPRAGUE DE CAMP EVOLUTION DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY NO NO NO NO NO
18. Some people think that genotypic intelligence is the same for all groups of humans. We can call these people "egalitarians." Some people think it's not. We can call these people "inegalitarians". "Inegalitarians" aren't racist, of course, because LOOK! A MONKEY! People who say that inegalitarians are racists are Marxists.
Anyway, inegalitarians are scientific, smart people who take a real, honest look at these sorts of questions. Egalitarians, of course, are fuzzy-minded hippies who just don't want to face reality.
So I was totally going to throw in with the inegalitarians.
But. . .
19. But, see, over in Japan, there's this group of people called the Burakumin who have been consistently discriminated against in similar ways to how African Americans have been discriminated against. And -- here's the thing -- they're EXACTLY PHYSICALLY LIKE OTHER JAPANESE. Their only distinctions are historical and socioeconomic. And the IQ differential is EXACTLY that same 15% that we saw between whites and blacks.
20. Of course, we shouldn't go TOO far overboard. I mean, Japan's not the same as the United States. So maybe it's just socioeconomic, but, remember, the people that say that are dirty hippies. So we have to keep in mind the probability that the dirty hippies are wrong, even when our data show that they might be right.
So, y'know, remember that almost all African Americans are ACTUALLY mixed-race, so maybe they're benefiting from their white genes. Or maybe Caucasians and Negroids are equal, but Mongoloids are smarter. Or dumber. We just don't know.
21. But remember, even if it DOES turn out that whites are smarter than blacks, don't forget that that doesn't mean that a SPECIFIC white is smarter than a SPECIFIC black.
There. I survived.
james_nicoll, probably because he doesn't have enough pain in his life, has been looking through the recent history of how race has been portrayed in 20th century science fiction. And he mentioned this essay, and asked if anyone had a copy of it. Lis DOES, indeed, have most of the ANALOG magazines of the Seventies, so pulled it out. James asked if she could summarize it.And she tried. And it broke her brain.
So I tried next. And, after a day, and many breaks for playing with cats, eating burritos, and shooting Flash-game aliens and orcs, I got all the way through.
So, here's my summary. I'd encourage anyone else who has access to the essay to read along, and double-check my summary to make sure that it's accurate and fair.
Okay, Lis bounced off of this thing, so she handed it off to me to try to summarize. Let me see if I can do better than she did.
"Everyone agrees that the human race should be made as genetically perfect as possible. But who defines 'perfection'?"
1. The dumber a person is, the more vehement they are about the topic at hand, and lots of dumb people have said lots of things about race vehemently. Therefore, let ME tell you how it ACTUALLY is, because I'm smart, and therefore can be really INTELLIGENTLY vehement about it.
2. "Breeds of domestic animals", "subspecies of wild animals", and "races of humans" are basically the same thing. And things like "the French", "the Jews", and "Aryans" are not races, since those are nationalities, religions, and languages. So anybody can become French, Jewish, or Aryan. Anybody who speaks English, Russian, or Hindi is, of course, Aryan. [So, if you wanted to join the Nazi party, all you had to do was speak Russian, since the Nazis and the Russians were so friendly?]
3. If you compare me to Hitler for writing about race, you totally lose the argument, because fourteen years from now, Mike Godwin will say so.
4. People have tried to group people by skin color, which is stupid. It's TOTALLY more sensible to group people by their skull shape. Or maybe the percentages of blood types within the group. Because, like American Indians have different percentages of blood types than the people they're related to, so they're different than the people they're the same as. So they're the same, which is why we can compare them, but they're different, so we can't. Because they're the same and different.
5. The default, normal human being is the Swede, like Fictional Erik. Humans are tall, slender, and pinkish. When you go south, you find humans that look like a fictional guy named Juma, and east, you get to a fictional guy named Sojo. They've all got obvious physical differences, such as the fact that the black guy is stinkier, and the Japanese guy is less stinky, with Erik being medium stinky. And Swedes are generally like Fictional Erik, Japanese are generally like Fictional Sojo, and Congalese are generally like Fictional Juma. While there ARE people like Juma in Sweden, and Erik in Japan, they're minorities, so they don't count. [It's not like the French, Jews, or Aryans, obviously.] [Also, defaut humans are males. I mean, there probably ARE female humans, because mamals use them to reproduce, but they're not important.]
6. We naturally follow the color distinctions of Baron Cuvier of the Nineteenth Century, since I'm using modern terms and showing how modern science makes this all make sense, which is why I want to use century-old definitions. So we know that these people are Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid, for instance. Of course, Cacasoid people aren't ALL pinkish like Erik; the Caucasians go all the way into India, so the fact that some Caucasians are as dark as some Negroids shouldn't bother us -- we should remember that we are DEFINING the terms here, and we KNOW that Indians are like Swedes, because we say so. And that makes it true.
7. Negroids come from sub-Saharan Africa. Caucasoids come from Europe, North Africa, and Southern and Southwestern Asia. Mongoloids come from the rest of Asia, the Pacific rim, and North and South America. We know this because -- LOOK! A MONKEY!!
Oh, wait, there wasn't a monkey there. Anyway, while you were looking at the monkey, I TOTALLY proved that.
There are boundaries where people are KINDA one of those and KINDA something else, but we're going to ignore that, because, y'know, why not?
Now, the majority of humans are Caucasiod, because they're the default, normal humans. And maybe a third of humans are Mongoloid, and maybe ten percent are Negroid. We know this because I made it up. We can divide Caucasoids into light Caucasoids and dark Caucasiods. Because, y'know, why not? And those split up about half and half, too.
Then there are, like, miscelaneous groups who don't fit into the other categories, like Hotentots and Bushmen, who can be distinguished by their big butts. Also, there are Australian aboriginies, who are probably a lot like Neanderthals. And there are Polynesians, who are kind of a mix of everything. So, that's, like, six groups -- three big ones and three teeny ones, but there are also things that are difficult to classify, so we'll ignore those.
And smaller divisions than those six are stupid. MY divisions make sense, but once you get to smaller ones, like Nordic, you're just being silly.
Some of the smaller, silly divisions are Nordic, the Alpines, the Mediterranean, the Amenoid, and the Hindi. And here are the descriptions of each one, so you know how to distinguish them. And THEN you can get into things like the "Baltic", but, c'mon, that's OBVIOUSLY simply a Nordic/Alpine hybrid, right? TOTALLY makes sense. Blah blah blah Negroid subtypes Mongoloid subtypes enclaves of other subtypes geographically surrounded by subtypes . . .
7. Remember how I said that "Aryans" were a group that you could join just by learning a language? I totally lied. First, they were probably Alpines. Also, they don't exist any more. But then people think they do. But they're wrong. Alpine people assume that Aryans were probably Alpine. Nordic people assume that they were Nordic.
The point is that lots of stupid books were written claiming that Jews are inferior to Germans. Or whatever.
8. Remember how I said that Jews weren't a race, a while back? And then I spent a a bunch of pages talking about how stupid it was to be comparing the Jews and the Germans and stuff? Turns out that the Jews AREN'T a "race", but rather a "race lite" that I made up the word "ethnos" for. Gypsies, too. And African-Americans. (Well, "American Negro", since the word "African-American" hadn't been invented yet.)
[Holy crap this essay is a mess. I'm starting to skim here because it's just painful to read. Do I seriously have twenty more pages of this crap to wade through?]
9. Now, let's talk about fossils. And evolutionary traits. Polynesians are fat because they swim a lot. It's totally not fair that guys like me go bald.
10. Nurture vs. nature. For political reasons, lots of people say that differences between groups are totally because of people's backgrounds and educations. Like, Communists, for instance, say that. This leads to stupid crap like Lysenko [okay, fine, point to de Camp]. But saying so doesn't make it so. People are against "tracking" in schools, because it's racist, which means that everybody gets the worst possible education. [Fine, partial point to de Camp].
People like Arthur Jensen and William Shockley have been shouted down for saying stuff like this, which TOTALLY abrogates their freedom of speech.
[Oh, crap. We're now getting into the arguments that I remember from "The Bell Curve", a book in which I bounced off of at the introduction, where the author stated flat out that he was assuming all the things that he was intending to prove, thereby DEFINING "begging the question."]
When twins are raised separately, their IQs match each other's more closely than non-related people raised together.
11. Physical differences between races. Nilotes are fantastic jumpers, Tebetians are better at high altitudes, Eskimos are better at withstanding cold. . .
[Crap. I just have to take a break. My brain hurts. I lasted longer than Lis did, though.]
[Why didn't you put a "memetic prophylactic required" warning on this request? Well, I suppose that opening "genetic perfection" quote served the same purpose.]
. . . okay, where were we? Julius Caesar beat up Gauls even though Gauls were bigger and stronger, because he had better technology . .
12. Over time, intermarriage makes races more similar, and environmental factors, specifically climate, make races more different. If there was no intermarriage, humans would speciate into non-interfertile groups.
13. *blink* *blink* What? Um. Writers of historical fiction, like Robert E. Howard, have assumed that Britain started out with small, dark people, who were invaded by blond Nordic people, but actually, Britian was probably mostly Nordic before the Norse invaded, and got less and less Nordic as Nordic people invaded.
No, I swear, that's what it says.
14. Just because Negroids have smaller brains than Caucasians doesn't mean they're dumber. [. . . but I really have a bad feeling that you're eventually going to get around to telling us what it is that DOES mean that. . . ] Also, we can't make any assumptions about races' relative competencies based on starting actual useful civilizations, since pretty much every race has created solid, real civilizations.
15. "'Intelligence' is a vague term, but it essentially means 'mental power', just as "strength" means physical power." [Oh, good. What does "mental power" mean?] After all, we can consider a fictional Nobel Prize winner named Professor McBrain, and a fictional heavyweight boxing champ named Ahmed Jones, and we can TELL that Professor McBrain is smarter, because he has a "Mc" in his name, meaning that he's of Scottish descent, and Ahmed Jones has a name that suggests that he's African-American, so Jones is stronger, because we KNOW that a lot of black people are FANTASTIC atheletes.
Anyway, "strength" is made up of a lot of factors, and so is "intelligence." We try to have IQ tests to test a sort of general "intelligence" situation, but even that's a bit flaky, because of cultural bias. If you didn't grow up caring about time, you're going to be crap at a timed test. If your culture is base around talking things out communally, you're not going to do well on your own. If you're totally paranoid about weird doctors calling you out of your classroom and doing weird tests on you, you're probably not going to do that well on said weird tests. If you don't know the word "opposite", you're not going to do well on writing down the opposite of words.
16. Ah, HERE are the bell curves. So, you test a group and blah blah blah you know all this stuff. Of course, if one group is better than the other, it doesn't mean that the EVERYONE in the one group is better than EVERYONE in the other. The percentage of the lower group that's higher than the average of the higher group is the "crossover." A "crossover" of 50% means that the groups are equal. In Caucasoid/Negroid intelligence tests, whites show an advantage of 15%. [We've apparently forgotten that "Caucasoid" doesn't mean "white," since it includes India.]
Now, some of this is due to environment, because in the "Kaiserian War" [the what the fuck now?] although whites scored better than blacks on the Army Alpha Test when they were from the same area, Negroes from Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio scored better than whites from Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, and Mississippi. [So, y'know, even though blacks are dumb, white trash is dumber.] Also, when Negro children move from the country to the city, their IQs go up.
17. But, just because we can demonstrate that environment affects IQ, does that REALLY mean that environment affects IQ?
We can divide this into "genotypic intelligence" and "phenotypic intelligence." Clearly, "phenotypic intelligence" is environmental, but, well, hey, who knows, maybe there's this other thing, too? Let's just go ahead and assume that it exists and then argue about it.
I've read a bunch of the research, and I don't understand it. Therefore, let me tell you what it means.
Some people [who? citation needed. I swear, I've never before had this much sympathy for Wikipedia editors] say that we shouldn't even ASK these questions because blah blah blah hurt feelings blah blah PC blah blah Rosicrutians what the fuck blah blah blah.
Hey, who knows? Maybe primitive barbarians are SMARTER than us civilized folks because NO L SPRAGUE DE CAMP EVOLUTION DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY NO NO NO NO NO
18. Some people think that genotypic intelligence is the same for all groups of humans. We can call these people "egalitarians." Some people think it's not. We can call these people "inegalitarians". "Inegalitarians" aren't racist, of course, because LOOK! A MONKEY! People who say that inegalitarians are racists are Marxists.
Anyway, inegalitarians are scientific, smart people who take a real, honest look at these sorts of questions. Egalitarians, of course, are fuzzy-minded hippies who just don't want to face reality.
So I was totally going to throw in with the inegalitarians.
But. . .
19. But, see, over in Japan, there's this group of people called the Burakumin who have been consistently discriminated against in similar ways to how African Americans have been discriminated against. And -- here's the thing -- they're EXACTLY PHYSICALLY LIKE OTHER JAPANESE. Their only distinctions are historical and socioeconomic. And the IQ differential is EXACTLY that same 15% that we saw between whites and blacks.
20. Of course, we shouldn't go TOO far overboard. I mean, Japan's not the same as the United States. So maybe it's just socioeconomic, but, remember, the people that say that are dirty hippies. So we have to keep in mind the probability that the dirty hippies are wrong, even when our data show that they might be right.
So, y'know, remember that almost all African Americans are ACTUALLY mixed-race, so maybe they're benefiting from their white genes. Or maybe Caucasians and Negroids are equal, but Mongoloids are smarter. Or dumber. We just don't know.
21. But remember, even if it DOES turn out that whites are smarter than blacks, don't forget that that doesn't mean that a SPECIFIC white is smarter than a SPECIFIC black.
There. I survived.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-25 11:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-25 12:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-25 01:31 pm (UTC)Serious as a very serious thing. And taken seriously. It wouldn't have been as brain-breaking if it was a satire.
And, at the time, this was a relatively non-racist take on the issue. The logic sucks, he's starting from premises that don't have any basis, the writing is all over the place, but he acknowledges the existence of environmental factors, which is more than a lot of other "theorists" were doing at the time.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-25 02:50 pm (UTC)Incidentally, there is an utterly unrelated SF novel entitled The Breeds Of Man by F.M. Busby. It's not about race; it's about sex.
Wandering vaguely closer to topic:
Please tell me that this survey of race in 20th century SF is going to include Mack Reynolds? He wrote a lot of stuff in the 70s that touched on race. The North Africa trilogy is the most obvious.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-25 05:56 pm (UTC)As I recall Mack Reynolds, he had his ... peculiarities but unlike a lot of authors was a world traveler and IIRC not always as a pampered tourist. That said, did you know Gutenberg has both Border, Breed Nor Birth and Black Man's Burden ?
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-25 07:47 pm (UTC)Mack Reynolds had issues with writing female characters, but actually dealt with issues of race which put him ahead of the game for his time. (Especially in comparison to the essay
Actually, yes I did! I have the deadtree Ace double, but I've been contemplating suggesting the North Africa trilogy for the next Yuletide fanfic exchange, so I went hunting to see how available it was. Police Patrol 2000 A.D. is another example of Reynolds dealing with racial themes. Reynolds also drills deeper than race to ethnicity; he distinguishes between Tuareg and Dogon, between American black and Jamaican black, between Irish and Polish. But I should stop fangirling in someone else's LJ.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-25 09:55 pm (UTC)I think there was also an unsanctioned foray into Soviet territory at some point.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-25 01:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-25 06:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-25 07:00 pm (UTC). . . what?
Dear 1979:
High-tech manufacturing is done primarily by China, India, and Korea. Because the United States doesn't have the scientific and technological know-how to do it.
Love, 2012
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-25 07:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-26 04:43 am (UTC)O.o
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-26 10:44 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-25 12:44 pm (UTC)Thank you, that was glorious.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-25 02:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-25 03:00 pm (UTC)If they ever stop publishing on pulp and go online- or ebook-only, will they have to change their name again?
The Past is a Different Country; They Do Things Differently There
Date: 2012-06-25 03:14 pm (UTC)2) I don't remember that essay, I think '76 was a bit over a year before I started subscribing regularly, but the tl;dr version sounds like a summary of Linnaeus's original five subspecies overlaid with a half-hearted rebuttal of Nazi race theory. I'll point out that as of 1976, that really was pretty close to the state of the art in scientific thinking about race.
3) You mention The Bell Curve, which is a lot more recent than 1976. I would also mention Guns, Germs, and Steel, for a rather different perspective, but it's also a lot more recent than 1976. To paraphrase Diamond, "Why was it the Europeans who conquered everybody else, and not somebody else?" is still an ongoing topic of research. And as anybody following current politics will tell you, "Because the European sub-species of humans is just plain better than all of the rest" is still a widely held opinion -- among members of that sub-species.
Re: The Past is a Different Country; They Do Things Differently There
Date: 2012-06-25 07:10 pm (UTC)Who are often engineers.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-25 03:32 pm (UTC)Thank you for, um, waltzing with that grenade. Or something.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-25 07:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-26 03:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-26 09:48 pm (UTC)D