Saletan's Race Debate

William Saletan in Slate has bravely grappled with the racial achievement gap.  Although everyone is morally equal despite their race, dramatic differences in NAEP test scores, SAT, GRE and other tests persist between the races.  According to Saletan:

Research is constantly finding new gene-trait correlations and group differences. If your faith in equality depends on an ethnically or racially even distribution of all ability-influencing genes, you're in trouble ... People of your race may be on average faster, smarter, or more volatile than people of my race.

If this is true, it will be hard to argue that differences in achievement outcomes between the races are due to discrimination, since they're actually caused by genetic group differences.

Yet race is a poor proxy for genetic differences.  It's too blunt an instrument. In the age of Obama, when a half-white man can proudly call himself black, Saletan asks whether race is still a meaningful concept:

Why categorize and measure students by race? Aren't there better ways to organize the data? … Does that category really help? And what message does it send to kids when headlines assert a persistent "racial gap"?

Then he answers his own question: “We're prone to tribalism”.  We like to think of ourselves as part of a group.  We identify with our race, because it's like our own extended family.

But self-identifying with race also has consequences.  It invites stereotypes.  According to Larry Elder,

[blacks are only 13 percent of the population, yet] account for 37.2 percent of all those arrested for violent crimes, 54.4 percent of all robbery arrestees, and are the known offenders in 51.3 percent of all murders

It's a short leap for someone reading that volatility may be genetic to erroneously conclude that all blacks are genetically more volatile, which accounts for their higher crime rate.  And that's a big problem.  Humans have an innate tendency toward prejudice.

So, like Saletan, I wish tests and surveys would stop tracking race.  I wish society would drop the whole idea of race. Being more “volatile” is not a defining black characteristic.  It’s probably caused by a set of genes that both blacks and whites share, perhaps in different frequencies on average.  We should understand volatility and intelligence in terms of underlying genes, not race.

But tribalism is also part of human nature.  Society will not easily forgo its racial distinctions.  Perhaps we’ve reached the limit of where our innate categories of understanding will bend to reason, until we alter our nature itself.  But genetic enhancement is still decades away.  So the immediate future will be about expediency – full of its distasteful Missouri Compromises – not moral truth.

Interestingly, Saletan reaches the same conclusion that I do:

the convergence of meritocracy with genetics is leading us inexorably toward eugenics.

I don't like the term eugenics, with its implication of government-sponsored tyranny.  But I do believe in personal reproductive choice, including genetic enhancement of one's children. This won't happen without a fight, however, as society's genetic elites (perhaps with good intentions) attempt to limit access to genetic testing, ban reproductive choice, and ultimately maintain their genetic advantage.  Fewer than 30% of adults has a college degree, because the genes for traits like persistence, tenacity, and ability to defer gratification are rare today.

Comments

[cariaso]

I was with you right up until that last paragraph. You assume elites have it due to a genetic advantage. I'm sure the Hapsburgs would agree, but I suspect the statement is largely without merit.
http://spittoon.23andme.com/2009/04/17/the-end-of-a-dynasty-how-inbreeding-doomed-the-house-of-habsburg/
More often I suspect a single talented or ruthless individual established a family fortune, which persisted far longer then their successful genetic combination. If it were otherwise siblings would need to be far more alike to each other and their parents than seems to be the case.

As for the 30% college degree, we're handing out more college degrees than ever before
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d05/tables/dt05_179.asp
And since that is marching steadily upward, IF it reflected genetics it would suggest increasing genetic availability. I strongly suspect it reflects social pressure, and willingness to load up on debt for social status instead of learning a trade.