Over at the National Humanities Center’s On the Human website, Paula Moya has posted a fascinating piece on cultural neuroscience, science reporting, and race. Go check out the discussion going on there and then, if you wish, consider these thoughts on cultural comparison.
This is an extended version of my comment on Moya’s short essay A Story in Two Parts, With An Ending Yet To Be Written. The NHC invited me (along with others) to write a brief response, but I was so enchanted by the subjects Moya discussed that I spent a chunk of time this week reading some of her references and trying to wrap my brain around the psychology involved. Important lesson: psychology articles are not entirely transparent for a lay person! But not unreadable for all that, except where the statistical analyses get beyond the remains of my never-more-than elementary background in stats.
Anyway: Writing in a witty fairy-tale mode, Moya discusses the work of the social psychologists Shinobu Kitayama and Hazel Rose Markus. Kitayama has done considerable work on the mismatch between theories of the self derived from the study of Americans (and Western Europeans) and the self-concepts found in other societies, like Japan and China. In comparative studies, he and his collaborators have shown how concepts of the self as “independent” or “interdependent” influence cognition and behavior even at the most basic level. Moya discusses some recent work by Jinkyung Na and Kitayama on spontaneous trait inference, that is, the practice of inferring a person’s traits from that person’s behavior. (The essay, “Spontaneous Trait Inference is Culture Specific: Behavioral and Neural Evidence,” is forthcoming in Psychological Science. Moya’s post directs us to a press release from APS on the research, and I was able to look at a preprint thanks to APS’s public relations office.) This inference, when it ignores the constraints context can place on behavior, has been described as a “fundamental attribution error” endemic to human cognition. But it turns out that Na and Kitayama’s subjects, drawn from Michigan undergraduates, do not all infer traits to the same degree. And Na and Kitayama show that some of the variation in trait inference is explained by varying self-concepts: those students with more interdependent self-schemas were less prone to spontaneous trait inference. And this variation was apparent even in a subtle test of “spontaneous” or automatic trait inference, a lexical decision task that never explicitly asked subjects to make judgments or infer personality traits. The same variation was even apparent, to some degree, on an EEG (though I don’t know enough to understand the underlying physiology of this part of the research).
But the main part of Moya’s, and Na and Kitayama’s, story is that the students were members of two ethnic groups, European-American and Asian-American. The former were more likely to favor the independent self-schema and to infer traits. Moya documents the way in which reporters have taken even advance press releases about this study and made stories implying that scientists have “proven” that East and West think differently, that Europeans can’t help their prejudices, and that Asians and whites have different brains. Moya and Hazel Markus, in their recent anthology of essays on race in contemporary American society, have developed a very useful conceptual model for talking about moments like this. Those science reporters are doing race: that is, they are doing the cultural maintenance work of reproducing racial categories and the stereotypes and inequalities that go with them. Moya and Markus argue that this work is, indeed, what race is: not a biological essence or a bundle of phenotypic characteristics but “a dynamic set of historically derived and institutionalized ideas and practices” (Doing Race, 21) that produce social hierarchies. They are taking a result which is, for Moya and for Kitayama et al., about a cultural variation in and influence on cognition and turning that result into a spurious justification for racial categorization.
All the way down
In other words, the point should be that culture goes all the way down into brain physiology, not that a genetically fixed brain physiology goes all the way up into individual attitudes. In the case of the work Moya is discussing, the irony of the misconstruction is particularly acute: the subject of the research is whether everyone regularly attributes a person’s behavior to that person’s fixed characteristics—which is a part of the cognitive apparatus underlying racism (via judgments of the form “She’s doing that because she’s Chinese, and that’s how Chinese people are”). This mode of attribution is rooted in the brain, but it is culturally specific and correlated with an independent view of the self.
It strikes me that this work shows that questions of ethnicity and cultural difference are great matches for cognitive-scientifically influenced humanities research. It has sometimes seemed that cognitive approaches in the humanities were opting for a strongly universalist version of “human nature” that plugged its ears to the many critiques of the idea that “our” cultural products contain straightforward, decontextualized lessons about the essence of the human. But of course few questions could be closer to the heart of the ways in which culture and human biology interact than those of identity, ethnicity, and race. Those questions are ideal domains in which humanists interested in neuroscience and psychology could show the power of those disciplines in clarifying the breadth and complexity of cultural variation. I think Moya’s response to Linda Martín Alcoff’s comment on her post is an eloquent elucidation of this point.
Seeing Moya’s discussion also reminded me of a recent Behavioral and Brain Sciences article I had seen: Joseph Henrich et al., The weirdest people in the world? Henrich et al. discuss how an overuse of experimental subjects from WEIRD [“Western, Educated, Industrialized, Democratic, and Rich”] societies, especially American university students, has distorted psychologists’ accounts of human nature. It isn’t just that the subject pool has been only one very specific slice of humanity; it’s that, from the perspective of globally comparative work that has been done, WEIRD subjects are frequently some of the oddest of the lot. One of Henrich et al.’s specific examples is, in fact, comparative research on the “fundamental attribution error,” which turns out, as they say, to be “less fundamental elsewhere.”
In the work of Kitayama et al., weirdness comes home: the fundamental attribution isn’t even fundamental here, in the US, if one draws from an ethnically or culturally mixed pool of subjects. One doesn’t even have to leave the class and age bracket of University of Michigan students to see the variation. This leads to a point which is supplementary to Moya’s central, and crucial, argument that “human difference really matters—but not in the way most people think it does” because cultural difference is not a product of the supposedly biological difference of race. This second point is that culture is not like race: cultural categories can’t be handled the way racial identities get handled. Otherwise we will “do culture” in the way that we still, in many harmful ways, do race.
As Moya says, in contemporary discourse too often culture is just used as a “proxy” for race. This struck a chord for me with a well-known argument in my field of twentieth-century literature: Walter Benn Michaels’s claim in Our America (1995) that US discourse (and not just US discourse) has been dominated by a racialized concept of culture at least since the rise of anti-immigrant nativism in the first decades of the twentieth century. (Michaels’s work is certainly not without problems, but I think the basic genealogy and critique of some of the most common ways of speaking of “culture” are still telling.) But if culture refers to institutions, patterns of behavior, habits of thought, customs, etc., it is clearly an error to think of it as a fixed attribute of a person.
Moya wryly tells the story of Kitayama’s career as that of a man from “the land of Interdependence” who is schooled in social science in “the land of “Independence.” Her fairy-tale style helps to underline a difference between that simplified mythical world and the one we inhabit. Work like Na and Kitayama’s shows that the United States is not exactly the land of Independence: after all, their study focused exclusively on Americans but discovered a wide variation in the use of independent or interdependent schemas of self. Can we then say that “American” culture is a culture of independence and expect all Americans to believe in the ideology of the independent self? Or that all Japanese regard the self as fully defined by relationships? It wasn’t simply the case that European-Americans were Independents and Asian-Americans were Interdependents.
The necessity of further fuzziness
After years of education at the hands of Language Log, I have learned to try to find out whether (what reporters describe as) apparently categorical differences are really average differences between variables with overlapping distributions.* Though the European-Americans in Na and Kitayama’s subject pool were more likely to score higher on a measure of independent self-conception than the Asian-Americans, both groups showed considerable variation on the measure. And the “effect size” (I believe that’s difference in means divided by joint standard deviation) for the experiments in the study are all moderately big but less than 1.0. That is to say, there is at best only a fuzzy connection between ethnicity, inter/independent self-concept, and spontaneous trait attribution as measured in Na and Kitayama’s work. The cultural variable of independent vs. interdependent self concept is not neatly, categorically explained by ethnicity.
The important result is at a tangent to the attention-grabbing question of ethnicity and the insidious cultural work of doing race. It has to do with the relationship between self-schema and trait attribution. That is the “cultural specificity” Na and Kitayama are trying to demonstrate, though again the association is tendential and noisy rather than definitive. But that’s to be expected; as Hazel Markus and Kitayama explain in a recent theoretical essay Moya cites, independent and interdependent schemas of the self are probably available in every culture, but the frequency with which people use them varies widely. These uses are then consequential for many kinds of behavior. It is this relationship among variably distributed cultural representations and behaviors which is the real object of study and the empirical core of human cultural difference, a relationship which is shaped only in part by the processes that yield what we call “race” and “ethnicity.”
To put it in a series of rhetorical questions: Do Asian-Americans have “a” culture and European-Americans another? Are those respectively Asian and European? Eastern and Western? Are they both nested within a larger American culture? What are the boundaries of “a” culture, and what is the relationship of a given individual to a culture, whether that individual has race or ethnicity done to her or not?
For me, these issues resonate with some of the most important open questions in literary studies today. First question: what is the relationship of an individual writer or reader to a widely distributed cultural representation or ideology? E.g., what does the realization that America is not 100% the Land of Independence but that it is p the Land of Independence, 0 < p < 1, tell us about particular engagements (by an individual or subgroup or a genre) with the idea of the independent self?
Second question: what are we going to do with the ethnic, racial, and national boundaries that literary and cultural studies use to divide up the cultural field? If we are not going to use those divides to “do race,” what else will we do with them? Or will we be able to invent new frameworks? The national framework, in particular, gets less and less comfortable by the day (witness the fervor of attempts to think about world literature, world history), but we’re still living with it and reproducing it.
How can we begin a conversation about cultural difference that helps all of us see complex variation rather than categorical oppositions? Perhaps it’s time to develop a culture-concept that does not fall so easily into national and racial categories. But frankly I still do not know what such a concept would be. Suggestions welcome.
But first make sure you read Moya’s post. Great contributions in the comments by Linda Martín Alcoff, Ramón Saldívar, and Lupe Carrillo, too [edit 5/9/11: and many others!]. Skip the long one by whatshisname.**
*For examples on a topic related to that of Kitayama’s work, see Mark Liberman’s posts David Brooks, Social Psychologist and How to turn Americans into Asians (or vice versa), or, even more powerfully, his takedowns of pop-psych stereotypes about gender and language use (e.g.: David Brooks, Neuroendocrinologist and Gabby guys: the effect size). I never finish one of those posts without kicking myself for not taking statistics and probability in college.
**And despite all that Arcade discussion about the values of the informality of the blog, I’ve decided to refer to everyone involved, even people I know personally, by scholarly last names. However! First names in comments, please. This reminds me of the first day of every semester.
Do Asian-Americans have "a" culture and European-Americans another? Are those respectively Asian and European? Eastern and Western? Are they both nested within a larger American culture? What are the boundaries of "a" culture, and what is the relationship of a given individual to a culture, whether that individual has race or ethnicity done to her or not?
Similarly, as many Americans know something of Newtonian physics, does that make Newtonian physics an aspect of specifically American culture? What about those in other nations that know Newtonian physics? One can multiply such questions.
It makes sense to talk of American birds; American birds are simply birds that live in America. But that is not a category in biological taxonomy. If we had a taxonomy of culture -- which we don't, though we have informal notions of national cultures and regional cultures and, of course, East and West -- it's not at all clear to me that I would follow geopolitical boundaries. In fact, one of the jobs of nationalist ideology is to create the appearance cultural coherence in the nation which such coherence does not, in fact, exist.
I found a lot of this interesting but maybe overly binary. I don't see that fundamental attribution errors = racism, though of course one reason for making such an error, in a particular case or in many particular cases, might be racism. Moya's sly narrative relies, as I think she means to point out, on the fact that all (fictional) narrative requires attribution of traits to (fictional) characters. And her sly narrative also seems to me to mean to point out (but see, I'm not being so sly in attributing intention here) that attributing reasons for doing things to headline writers, etc. is, well, inevitable. As you say, the difference seems one in degree, not kind, and it does seem to me that the results you and she report are on the very obvious side of the social science spectrum: of course culture affects styles of attribution and degrees of assignment of responsibility. Cf. Strawson's great article on "Freedom and Resentment." I imagine that age differences correlate far more with cultural differences when it comes to attributing traits. The older you are the more you know that people aren't easily slotted, and the more you might ask follow up questions. Not that there wouldn't be a cultural difference there too: Confucianism might encourage greater flexibility in making attributions than, say, the echo chambers of political lobbying among like-minded people, whether the Tea Party, the Green Party or (to bring it back to the question of age and life-experience), the AARP. At any rate it's not either/or. You write:
But both are demonstrably true. Culture goes down, brain physiology goes up. The debate becomes arid and the attributions of bad faith nasty when the ideas get polarized. I worry about moments like this. You say:
Presumably because she writes:
Well, if I were Fiona MacRae (See: “Why People with a European Backgrounds Can’t Help but Judge a Book by Its Cover,” MailOnline.com. 13 April 2011. 14 April 2011 (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1376398/Why-people-Europe...)) I would be pretty upset at the vicious parody, at having these words, this racist claim, foisted upon me. And I would wonder about Moya's own tendency to make fundamental attribution errors. (And to insist on Fiona's blue eyes.) Or take what her fairy tale says about the "man" who wrote the Science Daily headline. (How does she know he's a man, by the way? I guess either you're male or have blue eyes if you write these kinds of headlines.)
Which may be fine. But it does say so in the press release, so it's not the headline writer from the APS who came up with the terminology. So that she makes a really unwarranted accusation when she summarizes:
No. Not "even though." Because. The press release says: "The researchers studied the brain waves of people with Caucasian and Asian backgrounds and found that cultural differences in how we think about other people are embedded deep in our minds." The headlines aren't foisting anything on to the press release.
Also, to make a disciplinary remark: right now there are two broadly different attitudes towards, let's call it biologism in the account of culture, especially literature. The Literary Darwinists (e.g. Joseph Carroll) tend to be highly inflexible in their views of what humans do in all cultures and why they do it. The Cognitivists as represented, e.g. in Lisa Zunshine's new anthology, Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, will often cite Raymond Williams and a lot of other Marxist (as well as deconstructive, poco, and pomo insights) and unlike Carroll and his followers tend to be on the academic left, not the academic right. They talk about universals too, but at a much more sophisticated level -- one highly influenced by Chomsky's views of a universal grammar -- than do the Literary Darwinists. The point being that culture and the brain interact, and each is affected by the other. Anyhow, I guess I'm thinking that Moya's take on Kitayama and Na is misleading and unfair.
William Flesch's response to Andrew's response to my On the Human post is symptomatic and revealing for how some people respond to any discussion about the doing of race, but it doesn't do much to illuminate the serious issues under discussion in my posting.
I have the impression that Flesch doesn't like my post because I've had the temerity to take cultural difference seriously and to identify in a thought-provoking as well as scholarly way the processes by which race is done in our society. Or perhaps he just doesn't like me. First he says I'm "sly," then that I'm "vicious," and finally that I've been "misleading and unfair." His posting seems designed more to shut down the conversation by describing me in ways that would put me outside the circle of serious academic engagement than to engage the issues under discussion in an informed and interested way.
My posting doesn't imply that spontaneous trait attribution is racist. What it does indicate is that it is not "universal' to all humans and that it is culturally shaped. This is the primary point of the Kitayama and Na research. Age may also be a factor in the tendency to engage in spontaneous trait attribution, but I don't at this point know that. When one takes social science empirical research seriously, as I do, one would want to see what the research indicates on that specific point.
Second, in writing my posting in the form of a fairy-tale, I am depending, to some degree, on a knowledgable and discerning reader who understands both the form of the fairy tale and the role of characterization in a fictionalized tale. Characters are necessarily types, and Kitayama and McCrae are both fictionalized characters (even if loosely based on real people), as the note that precedes my posting gently points out. The purpose is not to give realistic depictions of actual people, but to create characters that index recognizable positions in a dynamic system of social relations. In fact, if you look at pictures of the real Fiona McCrae online, you'll see that she doesn't appear (or didn't to me, anyway) to have blue eyes at all. Sure, McCrae could be upset with me, but she'd be missing the point of my story. Kitayama's real wife could be equally upset with me for creating the allegorical character of Connie, but I suspect that she'd be both more understanding and more generous than Flesch has been. And if the fault lies with the APS rather than with the editor who wrote the headlines I found, it doesn't negate my point as much as displace it by one level. The point about how a scientific study about culture has gotten framed as a study of race remains the same.
Fortunately for me Shinobu Kitayama liked my post, which I suspected he would. Also fortunately for me, I have gotten a number of really thoughtful and engaged replies on the On the Human website.
http://onthehuman.org/2011/05/story-in-two-parts/
The conversation is still ongoing, and will be open until this Friday. I invite anyone interested to visit the website and see for themselves.
I don't think I've quite deserved Moya's response, but on the other hand she doesn't think she deserved mine, so I'll just try to clarify a little, apologize some, and defend some of my critiques a little. Since we've never met (or did we once? it's possible) the issue of what you imagine about people whose words you read comes up here too, as well as in her story.
So I regret "vicious" (too strong) and "sly."
I regret "sly" because at first I meant it as a term of praise: but when I'd started commenting I found myself objecting to her piece more than I did on first reading, so I should have taken "sly" out since it was no longer a part of what was first meant to be a positive comment, about the fact that in order to understand narrative you have to do the kind of attributing that is in question. It seemed slily self-reflexive to demonstrate the point at issue by writing a fairy-tale-ish story about it. I thought that was cool, and I wish I'd communicated some of that, but obviously I didn't.
And I have to admit that I somehow missed or undervalued the disclaimer at the top: "Nota bene: All characters in the following story—regardless of any real or imagined resemblance to an actual human person—are thoroughly fictionalized. The issues under discussion, however, are very real." I'm very sorry not to have noted that, at least.
But to get substantive: I didn't claim that her post implied "that spontaneous trait attribution is racist." I wondered whether Goldstone wasn't too close to that claim, not Moya's, when he wrote: "the subject of the research is whether everyone regularly attributes a person's behavior to that person's fixed characteristics—which is a part of the cognitive apparatus underlying racism." I took that to mean that those who made fewer fundamental attribution errors might turn out to be less racist. I don't think that necessarily follows, but maybe I was misunderstanding?
As for Fionna McCrae, gentle disclaimer notwithstanding, her fictional counterpart gets footnoted as writing a real article and as intending to write it because she believes that "race is in our DNA, after all." Since Goldstone understands Moya's post as "documenting" a failure in science reporting, "symptomatic" to use Moya's word about my post, of a certain kind of objectionable discourse or way of thinking, it matters that Moya now denies that she's doing that, since as she says it was a fairy-tale (albeit with footnotes). I accept that the press release was inaccurate (not having seen the article yet, which I gather isn't out) and wrongly and symptomatically framed the issue in terms of race. (But did Kitayama not vet it? Does anyone know the usual process when an organization puts out a press release?) But what strikes me is that the two articles she footnotes don't assert that DNA explains the difference - they're clear that it's culture, not genes.
Still I would accept the argument that people who write press releases are trained to know what the press wants, so the revised point she makes in her response to me might be valid. But it does add a link to a chain of inferences that's pretty long already. The article itself seems to rely on a chain of inferences, she makes some more based on its coverage, and Goldstone then adds a couple to those. It may all be true; my questions are meant to be questions, not denials.
The problem is that "when one takes social science empirical research seriously, as [she says she does], one would want to see what the research indicates on that specific point." I completely agree. I was just speculating. But I'd also like to suggest that I wasn't speculating any more than she and Goldstone were. Headlines on lightly rewritten press-releases are taken as evidence of the way science reporters are "doing race...doing the cultural maintenance work of reproducing racial categories and the stereotypes and inequalities that go with them" (as Goldstone puts it). This may be true, but it's a leap. So I'd like a better example. Since I too take empirical social science research seriously, I think it's okay to note cases where the examples are not as advertised, and need further and fictionalized framing to work, which is what I was doing.
Moya compares her characterization of "Fiona," not as the disclaimer says a real person, but someone "thoroughly fictionalized" with her characterization of "the allegorical character of Connie" whom "Kitayama's real wife" could be upset by if she completely missed the point, as I have and as the real Fiona MacRae might or might not. But note that it's not that hard to distinguish between an allegorical character like Connie, footnoted in her original piece like this: "I take the nickname for this allegorical character from the word reconocimiento, which is Spanish for recognition"; the fictional Kitayama who is it would seem much more than an allegory of the real Kitayama (if Connie is our standard for allegorical character); and Fiona, footnoted like this: "Fiona MacRae, “Why People with a European Backgrounds [sic] Can’t Help but Judge a Book by Its Cover,” MailOnline.com. 13 April 2011. 14 April 2011." I don't know any real Connie referred to anywhere in the whole context here, but there sure is a real Kitayama and a real MacRae, and I really don't think it's wrong to wonder who's doing race when the latter's fictionalized counterpart is described (as at least two of the comments noteapprovingly) as having blue eyes. The comments see the fairy tale as partly about a "blue-eyed Eurocentric conspiracy" (well it's a fairy tale, right? it's not real! So it's okay), an interpretation that I don't think Moya disowns.
So yes, if I were the real Fiona MacRae I would find the parody vicious. Maybe that's just me. I don't think Moya is vicious; I thought the parody was (and it gives rise to the comments about the "blue-eyed Eurocentric conspiracy" I noted.
So to repeat, I don't think Moya is vicious, I think the parody of MacRae was, well strong. If I were MacRae I would find it vicious. I thought that my adoption of a kind of propositional attitude made that clear ("If I were MacRae...I would be upset") but I see that it wasn't. Anyhow, even at worst I was saying a) the parody was vicious (though I meant to say I would find it vicious if I were MacRae); b) that her narrative was sly (which I originally meant as praise, a little like another commentators adverb "cunningly" about how she presents her narrative; and c) that her take was misleading and unfair. In using all these adjectives, overly harsh as some of them might be, I was not attributing their corresponding traits to her, but to local argumentative and rhetorical moments.
She thinks, but I don't know why, that I might object to her temerity in taking cultural difference seriously. That's speculation, and it's false. I take cultural difference seriously too and I do not object either to her temerity or to taking cultural difference seriously. That's why I didn't find the results she reported surprising. I just wanted to register the fact that there was less resistance to these results than her fairy-tale suggested, or that at least the resistance she pointed to wasn't actually quite what she said it was. I don't resist these results either, so mistaken or not, I do object to being taken as symptomatic of that resistance. I could be wrong about myself, but I think Moya has gone beyond the evidence of my comment to castigate me.
But I agree that I was somewhat onesided and unnuanced in my original comment (maybe here too: it's the nature of commenting that one loses control over one's tone). Anyhow, this is a real apology, but also a real reassertion of the thing that I wanted to focus on in my original comment: that nothing in the account she gives of Kitayama's work is inconsistent with the real insights of congnitve cultural studies. In fact it seems to add to them.
Once again, as in the past with numerous of his previous posts on this forum, I am deeply impressed first by Andrew's ability to "get it," and then to articulate the issues raised in such a comprehensively scholarly and thoughtful way. I am in the process of writing my replies to the various posts on the On The Human website, including Andrew's, and I will return to this forum to post my reply here as well. But this is just a quick reply to thank him for being such an terrific interlocutor.
Thanks, Paula, for your kind words. It's a privilege to be among your interlocutors on this occasion, and I'm glad to see the discussion over your story in two parts continuing in multiple venues.
The tone of Bill Flesch's commentary has hindered constructive discussion here, so I'm not going to comment directly about that. On to my own further thoughts, especially as I read Lee's new post.
I was rather proud of my "all the way up, all the way down" phrases, but I think I overdid it a bit. I should have left room for biology to go all the way up, too, as long as we can do that without, well, doing race. Or, more generally, without forgetting the complexity of the genetic, developmental, and environmental factors that contribute to variation, difference, and agency. Lee gets it right in his post when he suggests that we should think of the biological and the cultural as co-extensive. A neuroscientist friend also helpfully suggested that we should think of the "up" and the "down" as two ways of interpreting the same data.
On a slightly different topic…One of the questions I tried to pose above, and which I take Paula to be posing, was this: how are we to relate individual behaviors to the fuzzy, distributed, but consequential cultural patterns and trends researchers like Kitayama elucidate for us? This is a central concern of literary and cultural studies, one of the basic challenges for our interpretive arguments, especially when we are operating in contextualist mode. It's also at stake whenever Kitayama or other researchers want to interpret a particular subject's behavior as "culture-specific" in the first place. Even more challenging are phenomena like the doing of race—or, to use a phrase Moya and Markus avoid, perhaps for good reason, structural racism. Scholars of race still, I think, debate how to understand the possible differences between participating in a society-wide racist process and carrying out a consciously racist act. Can I say that a particular act or piece of writing does race and not accuse the agent or author of racism? In my ignorance, I often resort to terms like "participation" or "complicity" (or "subversion" or "ironization" or "protest" or "analysis") when I am trying to cope with this issue, but I am pretty sure I am oversimplifying the issue when I do. Yet I also feel that this way of talking is quite common, especially given the culture-concepts we normally work with in literary studies. Time for more reading and more research.
Andrew,
There's so much to say about your post that it's daunting, especially since I am supposed to be writing my response to the posts on the On the Human website. But just one thing I have to respond to:
You ask:
Absolutely. Part of understanding how race is done in contemporary society is recognizing race as a historically-derived and institutionalized system of ideas and practices that operates regardless of individual intention. The way Hazel and I talk about it in regular English is by saying that we all do race everyday, individually and institutionally, with intention and without. So, we're not saying that some people aren't racist; we are saying that one needn't be racist to do race. Doing race, under this view, is not always a question of attitude, but it is always a question of one's implication in a structure that produces racial inequality.
Just wanted to post this here as well because I feel strongly that it deserves attention for being the terrible sort of irresponsible "race science" that goes on far too frequently today, and I want to raise awareness of this incident. There is already pressure on Kanazawa to resign, and Psychology Today should definitely apologize.
Gabriele Contessa has posted a letter she wrote to the LSE here and has suggestions for action to take regarding Kanazawa's outrageous article. She writes, "I hope you'll join me in expressing your outrage at open racism being passed as science by e-mailing Professor Rees's PA at v.mizgailo@lse.ac.uk. (You'll receive a silly stock e-mail in return)."
Quoting from the Guardian article by Nanjala Nyabola, whom I wholeheartedly agree with:
I was told that this was off-topic when mentioned in a comment on Lee's follow-up post. Brian Leiter, another contributor to Onthehuman, has been flagging this issue and I think it relates to much of the discussion of "doing race" here. So just to explain why I think this is relevant to the original post, in order to assuage any similar concerns on this comment.
Andrew's statement that "culture goes all the way down into brain physiology, not that a genetically fixed brain physiology goes all the way up into individual attitudes" reflects in this article that it is not merely brain physiology that culture goes down into, but also surface physiology, a point that Lee had made, underscoring the collapse of Cartesian dualism that is needed to see how statements about the physiology of mind/brain and the physiology of appearance actually have far more in common than they may initially appear. How do the notions of interdependence and independence affect judgments of appearance?
Kanazawa is himself a scientist, a writer, and a journalist. How do these overlapping identities perceive his attitudes toward race and culture? How does he, as a "public intellectual," interpret and formulate "the ethnic, racial, and national boundaries that literary and cultural studies use to divide up the cultural field"?
I do not have answers to these questions but they seem of crucial importance to me and quite relevant to Andrew and Paula's points.