STEVEN B. writes:

I’d like to run something by you if I may.

I’ve been thinking heavily about interracial marriage. I found myself not opposed to it because I couldn’t find what I considered an objective reason to preserve one’s race (in my case, the white race). But then I thought, “What ‘objective reason’ is there to protect one’s family?” All of mankind agrees that one’s family is to be protected, but yet I couldn’t think of a ‘rational’ reason for it.

This got me thinking that perhaps we overemphasize the “rational” or “conscious” mind. There seems to be a level of understanding in man that is not at the “rational” level. To this level of understanding I appealed, as I suppose most of mankind does, and knew straight away that one’s family is to be protected. I then thought, “Well, isn’t a man’s race merely his extended family?” For this reason, and from the sense I had that a man should preserve what is his (in this case, the white race), I concluded that one should not marry those of other races.

I’m curious of what you think of this line of thought.

Laura writes:

Jim Kalb speaks of race in The Tyranny of Liberalism as an “historic community.” A race is a group of people who have spent many ages together, developing understandings, habits, customs, tendencies and a distinctive psychology. These things cannot be fully rationalized. They operate partly on an intuitive level.

Given that each race has a distinctive identity, which is not by any means the whole of human identity and shouldn’t be exaggerated to seem as if it is, interracial marriage poses a choice to offspring. They must choose one or the other culture.

Any culture that wants to preserve itself thus tends to discourage interracial marriage.

The fundamental basis for this discouragement is not, or should not be, the denial that love and loyalty can exist between men and women of different races. Quite the contrary, the very fact that love and loyalty can exist and are meaningful between people of different races is the reason why interracial marriage has been actively discouraged in the past.

In short, there are reasons that exist both on the rational and intuitive planes to preserve one’s family and one’s race.

— Comments —

Jeff W. writes:

In Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address, he described the intuitive, emotional ties that keep a nation together as “bonds of affection” and “mystic chords of memory.”

Here are the two concluding paragraphs of that address:

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to “preserve, protect, and defend it.”

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Mrs. C. writes:

I believe that in a patriarchal culture interracial marriage would be less of an issue. Like Ruth of the Bible, a woman knowingly marrying outside her culture would in essence be saying “Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” Someone unwillingly to do this wouldn’t be likely to marry outside her culture or race. It’s my view that values and culture trump race in choosing a spouse. If all three match (race, values, and culture) that would be ideal but otherwise, if I were an unmarried man, I would sacrifice race to preserve values and culture.

One side who has issue with this concept is the feminist matriarch [in an interracial marriage] who insists on her culture in the home. She cooks the food she is accustomed to, celebrates the holidays of her own ancestors. The children don’t really choose, they succumb. A husband in such a home will have a hard time relating to his own offspring and may eventually bow out of the whole marriage all together. Another group exacerbating the current cultural-racial mashup are those who were never passed on a culture of worth so they are more than willing to adopt any culture, even if it’s Islam or minority gang culture. They purposely reproduce with unstable, unreliable sperm donors as a ticket into some other world they suppose will offer them and their children roots and identity.

Stan writes:

Your race is not your extended family, your extended family is your extended family.

Otherwise, why stop at race? You’d be on much firmer scientific ground to say that the entire human race is your extended family, since the biological distinction between men and other animals is ever so much more defined and less arbitrary than any artificial classification of human races.

And speaking of actual extended families, would you involve yourself in the marital decisions of distant cousins whom you’ve never met? Surely not. Well, there’s even less reason to be intolerant of interracial marriages.

Laura writes:

I agree, race is not the same thing as extended family.

However, extended families are typically of the same race and to say race is not the same category as extended family is not to say it is meaningless as a group distinction.

And speaking of actual extended families, would you involve yourself in the marital decisions of distant cousins whom you’ve never met? Surely not. Well, there’s even less reason to be intolerant of interracial marriages.

Generally speaking, the issue of interracial marriage is dealt with within families. It is usually family members who express concern — or, as is more often the case today, repress their concern — when someone marries out of their race.

Jane S. writes:

When I used to go places with my husband, who was of another race, people constantly assumed we were not together. We would step up to the ticket window at the movies and they’d sell him a ticket. We’d go through the grocery checkout together, and the cashier would wonder why I was pushing ahead of this guy in line. People would look surprised when they realized we were husband and wife.

You can’t say they were looking down on us for being an interracial couple. They weren’t. We did not show up on their radar as a couple at all. We got this reaction from people of all races, not just whites. This all took place in San Francisco, that giant salad bar of diversity.

Every time TTH posts a discussion about interracial marriage, there are people who freak out, like the woman who called it “hateful malarkey.” But people register marriage as something that naturally takes place between people of the same race/ethnicity. That’s the way it is and I don’t expect it will change. People are connected at a deep level with others from the same gene pool, whether or not they realize it, and it seems that it is an essential ingredient in a marriage.

Joe A. writes:

It’s Salter’s “ethnic genetic interest” theory at work.  If two people marry outside their clan/tribe/race the children are half and half mother and father.  Marry within your tribe and … those kids are suddenly 100 percent mom and dad.

Why do you think New England was so “liberal” with their welfare programs?  Because for the first 300 years a New Englander was kin to every other New Englander.  Charity really did begin at home.  Welfare for a complete stranger?  Taking food from the mouth of your own children.  Kinship makes all the difference in the world.

B.E. writes:

Stan opines:

“You’d be on much firmer scientific ground to say that the entire human race is your extended family, since the biological distinction between men and other animals is ever so much more defined and less arbitrary than any artificial classification of human races.”

Actually, the notion that race is “arbitrary” or “artificial” is a new, leftist concept, unsupported by not only our ordinary experience, but also by science.

In addition to the blindingly obvious differences between different races, there are other, more subtle ones. Susceptibility to certain genetic diseases is one. Tay-Sachs is confined almost entirely to Ashkenazi Jews; sickle cell anemia to blacks; cystic fibrosis to whites. The list goes on.

There are significant physiological differences as well. West African blacks have a relatively higher percentage of fast-twitch muscle, which is part of what makes them superior athletes in sports where that is an advantage, such as football and basketball. Low body fat on blacks also means that they are less buoyant than other races, which accounts for the small (non-existent?) percentage of black competitive swimmers and the relatively large number of young black men who inadvertently drown. Such physiological differences can be enumerated almost without end.

Psychological differences between the races are also real, and significant. The Human Bio-Diveristy crowd can tell you all you wanted to know about that and then some, but in a nutshell, on average, Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQs, followed by East Asians, then whites, then Hispanics, then blacks. At the bottom are certain sub-Saharan groups and the Australian Aborigines. Some of the genetic differences that account for high Ashkenazi IQ also account for their genetic diseases, and for reasons yet unknown, East Asians show a marked bifurcation in IQ, in which their mathematical ability is significantly superior to their verbal ability; in contrast, ability in both areas for other groups is roughly equal.

So please do not repeat leftist lies about race, lies that have been told to whites as part of the program to drive us to extinction.

Stan writes:

I’m not sure what the reader B.E. is aiming to prove.  He took from my comment what still seems to me an unanswerable statement (that the division of the human species into races is arbitrary compared with the biological distinction between human beings and other animals) and rephrased it into something else, of which I can make no sense: “that the notion of race is arbitrary or artificial.”  Then he argued that there are inherited differences between human groups, which I haven’t denied.  Let me elaborate a little bit.  The arbitrary character of racial divisions is demonstrated by the fact that there has never been a consensus on what the races are and how many there are; and biology itself supplies no objective test or obvious principle by which to judge whether a given classifying scheme is true or false.  For example, I had no idea that B.E. regarded the Hispanics as a race, rather than a group defined by geography and language, or that he regarded Ashkenazi Jews as a separate race, rather than as a part of the white race, before I read to where he mentions those groups.  Nor was this uncertainty due to any lack of information on my part: it is the product of the vagueness and arbitrariness inherent in the subject.  That’s why, when the original poster wrote that his race was his extended family, I pointed out that it was arbitrary for him to stop at his “race,” however defined, at least from a purely biological point of view.

Laura writes:

You are contradicting yourself.

You say you haven’t contended that racial categories are arbitrary and then proceed to say that they are (“the arbitrary character of racial divisions is demonstrated by the fact …”)

B.E. rightly responded to your initial suggestion that racial categories are arbitrary. Your statement, “the division of the human species into races is arbitrary compared with the biological distinction between human beings and other animals” implies that there are no proven biological distinctions between the races, when there are many scientifically verified distinctions in physiology and psychology. There is indeed a consensus on what the races are, as we see it in operation in daily life all the time. There is also a consensus that the races involve various genetic combinations and subcategories of peoples.

Andy writes:

You write: “I agree, race is not the same thing as extended family.”

By saying this you undermine your entire point.  The reason races (and by extension coherent cultures since many human behavioral traits are heritable) exist is because of genetic isolation and genetic drift within groups due to restricted intermarriage.  A race or nation is really a vast extended cousinage of many distantly related people sharing similar traits.  Even in America, where many different people’s have come together and are still forming a new nation, it is hardly coincidence that in my little town of 4500, that I have a coincidental genetically relatively close cousin relationship with several other families in town with most recent common ancestors in the time frame of the last 200-700 years.  In fact, within the basic framework of Europe, most people in the Celto-Germanic Northwest Europe above the Alps share a vast amount of common ancestry from as recent as AD 800-1200, and similarly Germano-Slavic northeast Europe above the Carpathians, and in the three isolates of southern Europe – Iberia, Italy, and the Balkans.  Think of these races or nations as “Francia” (the lands of Charlemange + Britain and Scandanavia), “Rome” (the lands of Byzantium under Justinian and later the Ottomans), and “Russia” (the lands of the Slavs).

It is clear from history that all people’s have developed their own special culture that is adapted to their climate, land, and inherent personality, and is shaped also in part by their outward appearance and the reaction of other’s to it, and that the outward form of this is their religion, speech, dress, architecture, art, and economy.  Moreover the Bible clearly marks these traits as divinely caused and preserved: “And he has made, out of one, every family of man: to live upon the face of the entire earth, determining the appointed seasons and the limits of their habitation, so as to seek God, if perhaps they may consider him or find him, though he is not far from each one of us.” (Acts 17.26-27).  This is why when people move or are taken away from their native place, they fail in their new habitation unless it is very similar to home.  Thus most human migrations are east-west, and not north-south, and the only north-south ones that succeed are from the temperate regions of the north to those in the south, as with the British in New Zealand or the Cape Province.  This also explains the disastrous results of blacks moving to northern cities in the US, and similarly the complete failure of Europeans to colonize the Carribean and instead see those lands taken over by their slaves, or why the Normans thrived in England and France and failed in Sicily and Lebanon.

Your poster Stan asks: “And speaking of actual extended families, would you involve yourself in the marital decisions of distant cousins whom you’ve never met? Surely not. Well, there’s even less reason to be intolerant of interracial marriages.”

On the contrary, aside from being members of humanity and a particular family, we are also members or an intervening intermediary group – the nation (ethnon), which is also normally coterminous with our country or state.  The very word implies a common descent or nativity.  Our interest in maintaining a national identity through restricted intermarriage should be obvious.  The nation that does not do this is either transformed, absorbed, or trodden underfoot by its more powerful neighbors or migrants it has taken in.  The fate of the natives of North America in meeting European diseases, armor, and genes should be instructive and obvious as to what happens to a nation unable to maintain its power and identity via group coherence.

 Laura writes:

When I wrote, “race is not the same thing as extended family,” I meant race is not the same thing as extended family in the colloquial sense of that term. Yes, race is a form of extended family in the sense you mention of people genetically and historically related, as I said. But then the entire human race is an extended family too. I prefer to think of a race as not an extended family but as, well, a race, an entirely separate category of inter-relatedness on the spectrum of human relations. And I agree there is reasonable self-interest involved in preserving one’s own race.

Stan writes:

It looks like I have not succeeded in making my position clear.  My basic contention is that any division of the human species into races is arbitrary.

For example, reader Andy shows that Europe can be broadly divided into three races: the northern, the eastern, and the southern.  According to the logic of his comment, these three races are to be equated with three separate “nations” that each have an interest in maintaining their national identity by restricting intermarriage.  If this is true, wouldn’t it pose a problem for solidarity of the white race as advocated by some others?  When people speak of “the races” it would be most helpful if they would list every time the groups that they mean, to prevent confusion.

On the other hand, I have never denied that there are inherited differences, physical and perhaps psychological, between human groups, however one might define the groups.  This is what B.E. argues — and I agree with him!  In other words, I have no problem with the concept of “human biodiversity,” even if I think its explanatory power is greatly exaggerated in certain quarters.

Laura writes:

The three major races of mankind are Africans, Caucasians and Asians, with many subcategories and mixtures of these.

I don’t follow your point about groups having inherited differences and yet the concept of race being arbitrary. Again, you have contradicted yourself. You said:

I’m not sure what the reader B.E. is aiming to prove.  He took from my comment what still seems to me an unanswerable statement (that the division of the human species into races is arbitrary compared with the biological distinction between human beings and other animals) and rephrased it into something else, of which I can make no sense: “that the notion of race is arbitrary or artificial.”

And then you later said,

My basic contention is that any division of the human species into races is arbitrary.

Are you deliberately doing this?

Returning to the issue of marriage, prohibitions across ethnic lines are also an indication of a strong sense of community and kinship.

B.E. writes:

Stan does have one valid point: I should have said “Mestizo” instead of “Hispanic.” However, the notion that the Ashkenazi are white was not something that anyone would have recognized a century ago, and while we may take them as such now, their genes tell a different story.

Contrary to Stan’s assertion otherwise, there actually are numerous “objective test[s] or obvious principle[s]” by which to judge the race of an individual or group. Perhaps most famous is the work of population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, especially his book “Genes, Peoples, and Languages.” Although Cavalli-Sforza has to deny that there’s any such thing as race in order to avoid a professional lynching, his work shows that race is real. Interestingly enough, Cavalli-Sforza’s work divides people into more or less the same groupings that physical anthropologist Carleton Coon demonstrated in his 1962 magnum opus “The Origin of Races.” Psychometricians have also found significant differences amongst the races, using a tool that makes reliable predictions on life outcomes: the IQ test (see “The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life” by Herrnstein & Murray). Three different approaches yielding the same results―that’s a hat trick. The science doesn’t get much better than that.

Having said all that, there is a certain difficulty in both biology and linguistics that leaves the more formula-minded at a loss: the lack of clear boundaries and unambiguous results. In math and chemistry, if you know one side of an equation, you can figure out what is on the other. Logic provides a clarity and inescapability that can be comforting. Living beings and languages are not so clear-cut, though. There are areas of ambiguity, individual cases, or even groups, that can be placed in one category or another, or don’t categorize with anything else, or are somewhere between one category and another. Predicting outcomes in both biology and linguistics is notoriously difficult for individual cases; the best we can hope for is to make predictive statements about what is expected or what normally happens. Without adequate training and experience, it is easy to try to apply the either/or formulaic approach to a topic to which it is ill-suited.

Oct. 8, 2013

Stan writes:

I have not contradicted myself.  Please read the two statements again.  What I have said is that I can make no sense of the statement that “the notion of race” is “arbitrary,” which is true.  In contrast to this, my own position is that any classification or division of mankind into races is arbitrary.  I regret that my making a point of this difference in wording has caused confusion, but I can’t allow my positions to be restated for me in language that I don’t find completely intelligible.

Laura says that there are three “major” races, which are divided into “many” subcategories.  But these subcategories can be introduced ad infinitum unless there is some natural stopping point.  Moreover, since there are no hard boundaries in nature, the is no natural determination as to how the categories should be defined.  This is what I meant when I wrote that there is no “objective test” that could demonstrate whether a particular system of classification is true or false.  B.E. in his last comment admits that there are no “clear boundaries” between races.  (What would it mean for there to be “unclear” boundaries?)  If so, then it would seem that all we are left with is the obvious fact that the human species exhibits genetic diversity.  That’s it.  No harm in interracial marriage, no imperative to preserve one’s race, are clearly implied in this state of affairs.

P.S. I find highly doubtful B.E.’s assertion that Ashkenazi Jews were formerly universally seen as non-white.  That he has some rationale for considering them so I don’t doubt.

Laura writes:

Fine, so you are saying the notion of race does have some grounding in reality but it is a chimera. Similarly, you might believe that the notion of the Loch Ness Monster is not arbitrary, but the actual belief that it exists is arbitrary and there is no proof of its existence. The divisions that have been recognized for millennia are simply figments of the imagination.

Laura says that there are three “major” races, which are divided into “many” subcategories.  But these subcategories can be introduced ad infinitum unless there is some natural stopping point.

Well, no, they can’t be introduced ad infinitum because a race as it is consistently understood comprises a sizable group of people of similar genetic background that functions as a community over the course of many generations. One could bring more precision to this definition. But that is beyond the scope of this discussion and the point is, these are indeed objective standards and however you may work within these common parameters, you would not face infinite subgroups, anymore than a botanist faces infinite plant species.

B.E. writes:

Stan brought up the division of Europe into three races, northern, eastern, and southern, then posits  the non-existent “problem” this poses for those who claim that whites are one race.

Let’s use family as an analogy.

Mr. and & Mrs. Smith have two sons and a daughter. Smith Jr. stays in his hometown, marries his high school sweetheart, and starts a family. The next Smith boy goes off to school in Collegetown, settles there, marries his college sweetheart, and starts a family. The daughter marries a local boy named Jones and starts a family.

So, are there four families here, or one?

It’s a trick question. This is not an either/or situation.

On the one hand, there are four families: the Smith Sr. family; the Smith Jr. family, the Smith Collegetown family, and the Jones family. Then again, they are all part of the Smith extended family, so there is one family. This same sort of thinking needs to be applied to races and their divisions.

I realize that cladistics is a difficult topic for some, but it’s not that hard when it comes to people.  There are what we might call “macro” races, such as Asian, black, and white, and then there are major divisions within, such as Scandinavian, Celtic, and Gallic, and then there are further subdivisions within those groupings. For example, Japanese friends tell me they can tell if someone is from Eastern or Western Japan, and everyone can spot an Okinawan.

The boundary between, say, Scots and Irish might be fine, and sometimes blurred, but that doesn’t mean that no such boundary exists. It’s just that rather than being a stark line of demarcation, it is more of a continuum, but still with recognizable archetypes. The same holds to the distinctions between higher-level groupings. The “problem” with race is not that the divisions are “arbitrary,” but that most people have been so poorly educated by the modern indoctrination system that they cannot comprehend simple things that our ancestors understood without anyone ever formally teaching it to them.

Oct. 9, 2013

B.E. writes:

Stan asserts that “any classification or division of mankind into races is arbitrary.” However, he fails to support this assertion by any sort of data; he also fails to counter the arguments put forward by experts in physical anthropology, population genetics, medicine,* and psychometrics. As I pointed out before, the different disciplines with their different approaches reached the same conclusions. Stan’s assertion is without merit.

Stan wonders, “What would it mean for there to be “unclear” boundaries?” An example from linguistics may help.

Between Paris and Rome one can draw a meandering line through various cities, towns, and villages. As one moves from Paris towards Rome, the denizens of each town can understand the speech in neighboring towns, whether those neighbors be on the Paris side of their town or the side towards Rome. Eventually one arrives at Rome, without ever having encountered a sharp division where the residents of neighboring towns cannot understand each other. Yet the Romans do not speak French, and the Parisians do not speak Italian. There is no sharp boundary where French ends and Italian begins. This, then, is an unclear boundary. Everyone agrees that French and Italian are different languages, yet at their shared boundary, the distinction is not clear.

The same is true, roughly, for the differences between, for example, the Welsh, the English, and the Scots. It also holds for many other ethno-national divisions within a larger race, divisions which ordinary people can, and do, recognize, and not just from factors like speech or dress. It also holds for divisions within an ethno-national group, as I pointed out with the Japanese example (in addition to Eastern and Western Japan, I am told they also recognize the distinctive physical characteristics of those from Northeastern Japan, the island of Shikoku, and the island of Kyushu).

Stan claims there is no objective test for race. This is false. When doing, for example, paternity testing, the testers want to know the presumed race of both the father and the mother, and look for genetic markers distinct to those races. Physical anthropologists look for certain proportions and characteristic morphologies. Much of Cavalli-Sforza’s work is based on blood types and other blood-based markers. IQ tests, along with other psychological tests, have shown certain characteristics to be more prevalent in one race versus another. Perhaps there is no one single test―other than what we intuitively take in at a glance―but a battery of tests can establish, beyond doubt, the race of an individual, and often his position within that race.

Finally, I thought it was common knowledge that around the turn of the last century, not only Jews, but also Slavs, Italians, and Hungarians were not considered white. While I am wary of Wikipedia, this section of this article has some relevant information; it also has some anti-white polemic typical of modern discourse (as it were) on race.

*In addition to the prevalence or rarity of certain genetic diseases in a given race, some medications are recognized as more effective for members of one race than another, and so physicians prescribe accordingly.