Buried in today’s abhorrent executive order that purports to “restore truth and sanity to American history” is perhaps one of the most frightening and repulsive positions that the Trump admin has asserted thus far: that race is not a social construct, but a “biological reality.”
The exhibit further claims that “sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism” and promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating “Race is a human invention.”
This may seem innocuous at first blush, but scientific racism is the foundational belief underlying eugenics, slavery, apartheid, and genocide. It was the center of Nazi ideology and formed the basis of its entire social policy, including the Holocaust. It was used to uphold slavery and later segregation in the U.S.
Now, decades after it was wholly discredited by the scientific community, the most fascistic government in the country’s history has decided to bring it back. No prizes for those who correctly guess why.
This is profoundly dangerous and everyone needs to start talking about it now, before it’s too late.
Originally Posted By u/lelieldirac At 2025-03-27 11:15:35 PM | Source
So, what you are describing is the false dichotomy that proponents of scientific racism rely on to convince people.
The accepted scientific consensus agrees with your take. It isn't radical to say "there are biological differences between men and women, including in how they think." Quite the opposite. The issue is science isn't very good at promoting itself (partly due to how precise scientific studies are--"men are better at spatial awareness in this specific circumstance, with these specific parameters, but our study is not conclusive in the general case. More work is needed." That kind of thing. People want more concrete answers than "hormones definitely affect how we think, but figuring out precisely how is more difficult."), so grifters come in with half-truths and "common sense" takes that convince people that don't know any better that scientists are dumb.
More to the point with regards to race, there are differences between ethnicities. They just aren't what proponents of scientific racism say they are. The actual differences are mostly aesthetic or related to things like body type, eye/hair color, and height, that kind of thing (I should also mention that even defining a specific "race" is a significant hurdle in and of itself--we say race is a social construct for a reason). And, to reiterate, this isn't a radical stance in the actual scientific community. "Scientific racism" is a misnomer--there's nothing scientific about it beyond aesthetics.
Edit: I've edited this with clarifying statements like a dozen times already, so I should stop lol. I hope you all get my meanings.
This is SUPER helpful and thoughtful and I thank you.
Like when we start doing research in a nuanced and scientific way then the folks who aren’t part of the scientific community can very easily “wildly gesture” racism and say “it’s science”.
So it is not that there aren’t differences, it’s that if we aren’t very careful then valid research can get inaccurately used to support racism/sexism.
I don’t remember the details but I feel like way back the president of Harvard said something about sex differences and got fired and what he said didn’t seem incorrect to me. It really bothered me. But maybe it was more “in a leadership position you need to be aware of how people will twist your words” than “what you said was true but we want to pretend it’s not”.
allometric differences between sexes are somewhat corellatable but that's basically where it ends. brains themselves are far too plastic to have solid corellations, much less causations. And on top of this, measuring cognitive abilities in a useful way is basically entirely unsolved. Imagine 500 years ago someone trying to discuss the behavior of a network stack, they simply wouldnt have the tools to do so accurately. That's what discussions of biological determinism read like wrt cognition now. We know very little about cognition, not nothing, but not anything wed need to discuss it appropriately.
Very well put.
Although more people than ever are taking estrogen and testosterone - either age related or because they are transitioning. I would imagine there could be some research done on how introducing those things results in changes compared to a control group of folks who are similar and don’t take them.
I mean I know so little that I don’t even know how much I don’t know. There is just a lot of reluctance to even ask questions for fear of being called sexist, and I am a fan of scientific curiosity.
There are a lot of uncontrolled factors in that and generally it's found that the variance is far too high.
Culture, diet, activity, hobbies, social group, age, life history… all are things that have substantially more effect on behavior than gonads do.
genetic categories, what could be thought of as race, are not consistent with phenotype either. a phenotypic definition of races might have a dozen or couple dozen, the statistical groupings of genomic variations are in the hundreds and not closely linked with any cultural observation.
Yeah, this is why the term "scientific racism" grinds my gears so much, including when people balk at the phrase "race is a social construct". If these people actually cared about the science, the notion of "scientific racism" would last about as long as it takes for it to enter their head. They cherry pick studies and sources to confirm their pre-existing prejudices.
Yeah. there are real researchers appropriately investigating these topics, but they tend to in my experience mask it in as much jargon as they can so it cannot be misunderstood.