Race is a misleading construction

The argument

This argument answers the question of whether Jews are white by disputing the category rather than the placement: race is a social construct used to explain differences between populations, and it has no biological basis. The claim is made first about whiteness in particular. On this account whiteness gains and maintains power in public life because it has become a default culture. Despite that power, the argument holds, whiteness exists only in the public imagination, and there is no scientific evidence supporting the existence of such a concept. Genetic research is offered in support. It supports the view that race is a social construct with no biological meaning, and a scientific study found that racial categories are weak proxies for genetic diversity and need to be phased out. Being a weak proxy means the category conveys little about the genetics of the person assigned to it. The position is long-standing rather than recent. In 1950 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization issued a statement that race is a myth rather than a biological reality, emphasising that all human beings belong to the same species and that the word race is misleading. If the category has no biological content, then asking whether a particular population belongs inside it is asking a question with no factual answer. On that reasoning Jews, like any other population, should not be classified as white or under any racial heading at all — the argument answers no, because the classification itself is a misleading construction.

Premises

Counter-arguments

New analyses of the human genome have established that race has a biological basis. Biologists scanned various genomes for evidence of natural selection. They detected signals of many genes that have been favored by natural selection in the recent evolutionary past. According to the analyses, the difference between races seems to stem from relative allele frequency. Therefore, it is not true that race is only a social construct. The genetic analysis explains the emergence of high cognitive ability among Jews. The average verbal IQ of a Jew is 120, the highest score among all races. This implies that the genes affected by natural selection control not only the expected traits (such as skin color and nutritional metabolism) but also some aspects of brain function. Overall, race appears to be both a biological and a social construct. We can, therefore, use the word "race" to describe Jews.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The premise proves too much for the position it supports. If whiteness exists only as a social category, that does not make it inoperative — social classifications determine who is treated how — so establishing that race lacks biological grounding leaves entirely open whether Jews are, socially, counted as white. [Rejecting P2] What the genetic literature reports is that conventional racial categories are poor proxies for genetic variation, most of which lies within any such grouping. That is a finding about the categories' explanatory value, not a licence to draw conclusions about how a particular population should be classified. [Rejecting P3] The conclusion does not follow. If no population should be categorised by race at all, the answer to the question is that the terms do not apply — the third position in this debate — rather than that Jews are not white, which still uses the category the argument has just rejected.