Encyclopedia of Opinion

Question: Are Jews white?
Position1 of 3›: No, Jews are not white
Argument‹9 of 9: Race is a misleading construction

Whiteness does not exist outside of the public imagination. Race is a cultural context used to help explain subjective differences between populations. Increasingly, it is seen as an outdated method for understanding superficial differences.

The argument

Race is a social construct used to explain differences between populations, without any biological basis. “Whiteness” gains and maintains power in the public because it has become a “default” culture. Despite its power, “whiteness” exists only in the public imagination. There is no scientific evidence that supports the existence of such a concept. Genetic research supports the idea that race is a social construct without any biological meaning. A scientific study found that racial categories are weak proxies for genetic diversity and need to be phased out. In 1950, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) issued a statement that “race” is a myth, not a biological reality. It emphasized that all humans belong to the same species and that the word “race” is misleading. Therefore, Jews or any other population should not be categorized as “White” or under any “race.”

Premises

[P1]Race is a social construct with no biological basis, and whiteness exists only in the public imagination as a default culture. [P2] Genetic research shows racial categories are weak proxies for diversity that should be phased out, and UNESCO declared in 1950 that race is a myth, not a biological reality. [P3] Since all humans belong to the same species, no population should be categorised by race at all. [C] Therefore, because race is a misleading construction, Jews are not white.

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.

Proponents cited

David Reich
“It is true that race is a social construct.”
W. E. B. Du Bois
“What, then, is race? It is a vast family of human beings, generally of common blood and language, always of common history, traditions and impulses, who are both voluntarily and involuntarily striving together for the accomplishment of certain more or less vividly conceived ideals of life.”
Michael Yudell
“It (race) is a concept we think is too crude to provide useful information, it's a concept that has social meaning that interferes in the scientific understanding of human genetic diversity.”
Toni Morrison
“There is no such things as race. Racism is a construct; a social construct. And it has benefits. Money can be made off of it. People who don’t like themselves can feel better because of it. It can describe certain kinds of behavior that are wrong or misleading. So [racism] has a social function. But race can only be defined as a human being.”