Skip to main content

Nicholas Wade's Insistence (as a NY Times science writer) that Races Exist

In "Australian Aborigine Hair Tells a Story of Human Migration" (published on September 22), Nicholas Wade of the NY Times once again treats his personal judgment that races are biological phenomena as if this understanding of race is an established scientific fact, even though the overwhelming judgment of anthropologists is that human races are solely social constructions.  Wade writes, for example, that Australian "Aborigines are without any genetic mixture from other races."  This phrasing assumes, and conveys to the reader, that there are distinct human races as a matter of genetic (rather than social) fact.  Wade thus abandons his role of journalist by inserting his personal commitment to race and racial distinctions into his reporting. This is a violation of journalistic principles that the Times should not permit.

In the same story, Wade provides a striking illustration of his biological understanding of human races: "Europeans and Asians," he writes, "gained the paler skin necessary for living in northern latitudes."  African-American readers of the Times who live, say, in New York City may be surprised to learn from Wade that they lack "the paler skin necessary" to live where they live.  But indeed, Wade's stubborn belief in the biological realness of race leads him to just such a foolish claim.
Labels:

Comments

  1. chipFebruary 14, 2013 at 4:19 PM

    ha Wade strikes again in an article 2/14/2013 about E Asians' hair in which he deploys the concept "race" totally unproblematically, but in a way that indicates he's a man with a mission... (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/15/science/studying-recent-human-evolution-at-the-genetic-level.html)The guy's pretty clearly full of sh*t and very selective in what he chooses to "report"... par for the course for the NY TImes unfortunately.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It Was Inevitable...An Entirely Predictable (Entirely Dishonest) Zionist Attack

Exactly as if it had been read by a hasbara bot, my Academe piece, " Not All Is Well That Ends Well ," which championed academic freedom, was swiftly greeted by a smear of "hypocrisy" on the misinformed and erroneous grounds that my support for the Palestinian BDS movement is inconsistent with support for academic freedom. Here is the attack , from--I am told--a "very famous" legal scholar, Steven Lubet  of Northwestern Law School. And here is my response , graciously published on the same website that published Lubet's attack piece. It is worth noting that Professor Lubet previously published a hit job in The Chicago Tribune against  Steven Salaita . We might think of someone like Lubet as the pseudo-intellectual arm of and cover for the Canary Mission.  And as I wrote to him in an email, the smears he and others of his ilk make against BDS and its advocates are responsible, in turn, for fostering the sort of democracy-crushing laws discussed in this...
1 comment
Read more

A Response to the Pitzer Administration's "Statement on Ukraine"

On Tuesday, March 15, Pitzer's president and vice-president for academic affairs co-signed a statement of support for, and solidarity with, Ukrainians .  That statement ended with this comment: " We stand with Ukrainians who are demonstrating tremendous bravery, resilience, unity, and courage as they defend their homeland."   What's tragic and disturbing is that this valuable statement against state oppression when Ukrainians are the victims entirely contradicts the administration's opposition to taking a stand against state oppression when Palestinians are the victims.   The recent "Statement on Ukraine" evidences jarring dissonence when read next to  this statement of March 14, 2019 , when the same Pitzer president issued an unprecedented veto of shared governance, in order to block the Pitzer community's taking a stand against Israeli state apartheid and ethnic cleansing.   What follows is my public response to the administration's recent ...
5 comments
Read more

Ashraf Ghani is an Anthropologist

Ashraf Ghani—the now deposed president of Afghanistan—holds a PhD in anthropology (Columbia '83).  In addition, prior to moving to the World Bank in 1991, he was a professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins.   There is evidence—from his academic publications in the 1980s and from what folks who “knew-him-when” say—that Ghani once thought and taught valuable anthropology grounded in both the lived experience of ordinary persons and democratic social theory.  And here it ’ s worth recalling that the Hopkins department of his time was rightly recognized as distinctly on the left and opposed to US neo-imperialism, having been founded and led by Sidney Mintz .  I myself found no such evidence of a democratic and anthropological consciousness the  one time I interacted with him, which was during his years at the World Bank.  The occasion was an annual meeting of the Society for Cultural Anthropology; Ghani was the keynote speaker, and I was serving, at the t...
Post a Comment
Read more