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12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A penetrating exploration, October 21, 2004
I am really glad that I bought this book even though I initially hesitated after reading a very detailed but lukewarm review for it in this reviewers' section. Personally I loved the book. I am admittedly no expert on the subject, but the author struck just the right tone for me. He presented detailed scientific information demonstrating why "race" was not a genetically valid means of categorizing humans. But he did so in a persuasive and highly readable manner, which educated the lay person, without (in my opinion) compromising the scientific-ness of his narrative. I was especially impressed with the introductory chapter explaining the meaning of genetic variability and genetic distance, and showing how they contradicted the belief in race as a biological construct. Also, I have in recent years read several books concerning black dominance in certain sports. But it was this author's perspectives on the subject that I found most convincing. I believe that Prof. Graves accomplished the goal he set out to meet, and that was to show far beyond a reasonable doubt that the punitive concept of "race" as it has been used to bludgeon people of African ancestry, while favoring Europeans has no place in modern science nor society.
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16 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Who are we really?, August 31, 2005
This review is from: The Race Myth: Why We Pretend Race Exists in America (Mass Market Paperback)
Joseph L. Graves, a professor of Evolutionary Biology, explains in THE RACE MYTH precisely why Americans insist that race does exist even though genetically, as human beings, we are pretty much the same. The exception are differences caused by geography or environment. Examples we have all heard are the genetic diseases that certain "races" are more susceptible to such as sickle cell anemia in black people. He showed that although the people of Syria and Ghana don't look alike, they share they sickle cell gene and malaria. Kenyans and Ghanaians do resemble each other but the similarities end there. The Kenyans don't have the sickle cell gene, which is a defense mechanism against malaria, because in the high altitudes of Kenya, there are few mosquitoes and none carrying malaria. This is an example of how environment and geography play an important part in genetics.
He explains that the race myth exists in America as an outgrowth of European dominance. When they first landed in the New World, they sought aid and advice from the indigenous people but that quickly faded as they decided to take the land from the previous owners. In addition, they began to import stolen Africans to cultivate the large tracts of land in their search for wealth. In order to make the system work, they had to establish the idea of "race" and along with that, the notion of superiority and inferiority. The Europeans were of superior intelligence, Indians down a notch and Africans on the bottom. According to Graves, this structuring of "race" is actually a social construct to maintain control. These ideas have persisted and are obvious in the distribution of employment, education and wealth in America. He goes on further to explore the myth that African Americans are more athletically inclined than European Americans including the history of the NBA and how and when African Americans began to "dominate" that sport.
In conclusion, Graves calls for each of us to do our part in dismantling this social construct and to work for justice and equality. While he admits that everyone will not read or heed this book, history has shown that even small groups can bring about change and he urges us to do our part.
Even though I've been hearing that race was a social construct, I have never seen it broken down and explained so thoroughly. Graves does an excellent job of giving us the scientific facts with the social examples to back his arguments. He demonstrates time and again how similar we are as human beings. He explains the so called gap in African American and European American scores on tests such as the SAT, the LSAT and the GRE, which are used to determine which students go to what college or university. He explores the poverty, the under funded educational systems that exist in this country and how that affects the outcomes. He does a marvelous job of showing how this is by design and not by accident. He most definitely takes the authors of The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray, to task for reenergizing the claim that genetics explained the differences in test scores. I would recommend this book for all thinking human beings.
Reviewed by alice Holman
of the RAWSISTAZ™Reviewers
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Wishful thinking .., January 4, 2012
Here's a quote by Noam Chomsky on race: "A scientist, like anyone else, is responsible for the foreseeable consequences of his acts... The scientist who undertakes this inquiry [into race and IQ] must therefore show that its significance is so great as to outweigh its costs... [In fact], the inquiry has no scientific significance and no social significance, apart from the racist assumption that individuals must be regarded not as what they are but rather as standing at the mean of their race category, it follows that it has no merit at all...What we do as scientists, as scholars, as advocates, has consequences, just as our refusal to speak or act has definite consequences. We cannot escape this condition in a society based on concentration of power and privilege... We may and should recommend the simple virtues: honesty and truthfulness, responsibility and concern. But to live by these precepts is often no simple matter." -- `Equality: Language Development, Human Intelligence, and Social Organization' (1976). In Chomsky on Democracy and Education, ed. Carlos Otero, 2003, pp. 117-9. Chomsky is about as egalitarian a thinker as you can get, yet he has far too much intellectual integrity to subscribe to race denialism. What he says instead is that scientific endeavor should be relevant to our social goals. Here's a quote by Richard Dawkins on racial classification: "We can happily agree that human racial classification is of no social value and is positively destructive of social and human relations. That is one reason why I object to ticking boxes in forms and why I object to positive discrimination in job selection. But that doesn't mean that race is of `virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance'. This is Edward's point, and he reasons as follows. However small the racial partition of the total variation may be, if such racial characteristics as there are are highly correlated with other racial characteristics, they are by definition informative, and therefore of taxonomic significance."
-The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution by Richard Dawkins Houghton Mifflin, New York, 2004 Dawkins has barely spoken about issues of racial classification in his long and distinguished career, and we can assume the reasons are to do with Chomsky's point: Racial classification is of little interest. This is NOT the same thing as races dont exist. The truth is, Graves is the one pretending.
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