Thank you for a thoughtful, interesting post. Hope you make it to Idaho soon!
However, I don't agree with your stance on "minor" speeding violations. If there is no fine, how do you get people to comply with the speed limit? Speeding is irrefutably linked to higher incidents of traffic accidents and deaths.
You were going 9 miles over what you *thought* the speed limit was, so you were knowingly above the limit. In my opinion, the officer should have pointed out that the speed limit dropped to 25 mph there and let you go with a warning, but it's not outrageous that he gave you a speeding ticket. (I had no idea about having to provide your SSN and find that to be odious!)
The officer in the second incident was nice, yet still unusual from many other police encounters I’ve experienced. The officer asked me to get out of the vehicle and wait in his police unit. I politely declined that request as it’s highly unusual for stops in Georgia for a person to be asked out of the vehicle. The officer explained that it’s for his safety. I explained that my safety is of greater concern than his in this situation.
1. Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell, Jason Riley, 2021, 290pp
2. The Quest for Cosmic Justice, Thomas Sowell, 2002, 214pp
3. A Personal Odyssey, Thomas Sowell, 2002, 308pp
4. Creating Equal: My Fight Against Race Preferences (rev. edn), Ward Connerly, 2007, 298pp
5. Lessons from My Uncle James: Beyond Skin Color to the Content of Our Character, Ward Connerly, 2008, 93pp
6. Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country, Shelby Steele, 2015, 198pp
7. White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, Shelby Steele, 2007, 181pp
8. The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America, Shelby Steele, 1991, 175pp
9. The Adversity of Diversity, Carol M. Swain & Mike Towle, 2023, 174pp
10. Black Eye for America, Carol M. Swain & Christopher J. Schorr, 2021, 153pp
11. From Rage to Responsibility: Black Conservative Jesse Lee Peterson and America Today, Jesse Lee Peterson w/ Brad Stetson, 2019, 132pp
12. The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America, Coleman Hughes, 2024, 235pp
13. A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education, Gail Heriot & Maimon Schwarzschild, editors, 2021, 321pp [essays by 10 authors]
14. Diversity: The Invention of a Concept, Peter Wood, 2003, 351pp
15. School of Woke: How Critical Race Theory Infiltrated American Schools and Why We Must Reclaim Them, Kenny Xu, 2023, 238pp
16. Red, White, and Black: Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers,
Robert L. Woodson Sr., editor, 2021, 213pp [essays by 20 black authors]
17. Getting Under the Skin of "Diversity": Searching for the Color-Blind Ideal, Larry Purdy, 2008, 255pp
18. The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society, Dinesh D’Souza, 1995, 724pp
19. Beyond the Color Line: New Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America, Abigail Thernstrom & Stephan Thernstrom, editors, 2002, 438pp [essays by 25 authors]
20. The Diversity Delusion, Heather Mac Donald, 2020, 288pp
21. Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America, David E. Bernstein, 2023, 186pp
What great road trips. Wish I’d done the same with my Sino-Bostonian son back in the day.
Also kudos for emphasizing that “the insertion of the concept of race into a wide range of things, from marriage licenses to medical treatment ... is regressive and deleterious.” Californians actually got to vote on that in 2003, in the form of their Racial Privacy Initiative! (See later).
I have a constructive suggestion, however, concerning Adrian’s attempting to push “the concept that there is one race – the human race.” That is a very unscientific notion to which the average guy or gal in the street will only roll their eyeballs or silently think, “Yeah, right...”. However well intended, as an unscientific notion it is thus a very counterproductive argument for getting widespread popular support for getting government out of the racial categorization business.
Anyone with a high school education anywhere in the world may not know the scientific terminology of physical anthropology or human population genetics. But they have a gut level understanding that, in scientific contexts, terms such as “race” and “races” simply acknowledge the fact that over tens of thousands of years populations living in geographic isolation from each other came to differ slightly from each other genetically in both visible and invisible features. Those differences began declining, on average a few thousands of years ago, courtesy of 1) the invention of ships and domestication of camels and horses, 2) the universal promiscuity of sailors, soldiers, merchants and explorers, and 3) the universal gentility and wisdom of womankind in accepting, even preferring, newly arrived, economically more powerful, albeit funny-looking, and at least occasionally tender alpha males.
That history is at all reflected in how politicians, sociologists, racists, and acolytes of the DEI cult have bastardized the scientific understanding of “race.”
Stuart, thanks for your deeply considered commentary. Allow me to start by saying that I have spent the past two decades studying and practicing finance. One thing that many people do when analyzing data is conflate. This happens sometimes when nomenclature is not defined. It also happens from just innocent ignorance. It can also occur when someone is unwilling to break free of long held paradigms.
Race in the western context is the collectivization of human populations on the hinge of phenotype. Despite “science” clearly outlining genetic similarities between the populations of Kenya and the populations of Jamaica, the western concept of race ignores these genetic and scientific differences and creates this amalgamation of “blackness” base not on genetics and science, rather on phenotypic traits like skin shade, eye shape, nose shape, lip shape, and hair texture. It’s hard to argue that putting people into groups based on nose shape is some how scientific.
I have seven siblings. We have extremely similar physical characteristics that also mimics our cousins. These phenotypic traits are simply because our parents have them. Not everyone who has dark brown skin, has the same genetic similarities. The same is true for those who have ivory shades of skin. The people of France and the people of China have similar skin shades, yet no one places them into the same so called racial category. The Italian and the Irish are both classified as “white” despite the variation in genetic makeup. There is no gene called “black and white.”
The center of my thesis on the topic of race is based on the two little boys who look just like me. My mother in law had the most beautiful blue eyes. This means that my sons have a recessive blue eye gene. If my grandchildren have blonde hair and blue eyes, I won’t be surprised, because I took a biology class in high school. My children’s grandmother was classified as “white,” yet they share in her biology, genetics, and the “science” of her humanity, and yet they are not politically classified as “white.” That’s because race in the western context is not a scientific metric, it’s a political classification.
If we examine this even further, we can see that race has become more of an ideological classification. That’s why people like Clarence Thomas are said to not be “black” because they don’t share in the prescribed ideology of the so called “black” class. When a girl with sparkling red hair, green eyes, and freckles on her face, begins to talk with a slang, and dances with gyrating hips, she is said to be “acting black.” Race in the western world is nothing more than a classification system that seeks political and economic advantage. “Black power and white power” are both philosophies that seek these very controls.
When I started our scholarship fund a few years ago, I asked high school students to outline the parameters of “black and white.” Here’s your chance to do the same. Science is quantifiable. What traits must a person have to fit into one of the racial categories? What blood test can I take to determine whether I am “black or white?”
Adrian, Your initial point about nomenclature is very on target. What you call the “western concept” of race is NOT the scientific one held in common by most modern, non-ideological geneticists and physical anthropologists around the world. And most of these, I’m sure, would agree with you that for no good governmental purposes is it necessary or appropriate to create “race boxes” and require people to be assigned to them – or even to a couple of them. Few nations require that.
It is more appropriate to call those “race boxes” as defining a mostly ideological, non-scientific concept of race. THAT concept may be esteemed by a motley mix of particular politicians, sociologists, cultural anthropologists, journalists, and outright racists. But don’t broadbrush all of us in the West by labeling it as the “western” one! Perhaps the ideological race concepts have been, for some persons and situations, “nothing more than a classification system that seeks political and economic advantage.” But you lose important allies if you attribute those motives to modern biologists and anthropologists and their attempts at racial taxonomies and distinctions for the world of 5000 years ago.
My background may lend some credibility to the opinions above. I’m a biologist, trained long ago by top biologists at Amherst College and Cornell University. My major area of expertise is ecology, but I had much coursework in genetics and evolutionary biology and once even TA’d for a physical anthropology course. All followed by decades of reading on these topics.
With your other comments, you contradict nothing I’ve said nor any of the premises of California’s Racial Privacy Initiative of two decades ago. You seem to be fully in sync with that. But that is not to say that “race is just a social construct,” as it is so fashionable to say in some quarters. In classical zoological systematics, the term “subspecies” is synonymous with the scientific sense of “race.” In the Grand Canyon region there is a species of ground squirrel, in which populations on one side of the Colorado River consistently have slightly different markings than populations on the other side. Those two populations are often treated as different subspecies, as the different markings suggest that they have been genetically isolated from each other for an appreciable period of time but are still presumably capable of interbreeding with each other. There is no implication that there any large differences of any import between the subspecies. As the flows of the Colorado River are declining as a consequence of water diversions for cities and agriculture, soon the boy squirrels and girl squirrels from both sides maybe ‘mixing it up’ with tubing parties and evening liaisons on sun-warned sandbars. As usual there probably will be some “northside supremacists” who will pine for the loss of their wonderful distinctive markings. C’est la vie.
Stuart, I’d love to sit down with you over a cup of coffee. Your intellect is refreshing, and encouraging. I use the pretext, “western concept” when describing race, because as you cited, much of the world does not view what we in America call race the same. Many of the Dominican Republic do not identify as “black,” even though this is how they are classified in America. Just because a person is studied in a field of faulty science, doesn’t make that faulty science more than pseudoscience. Notice how you never address the parameters of the supposed races. It’s akin to a doctor prescribing medicine to “fat” people without first defining fat. Some who consider themselves ideological allies in this space are in fact miles apart. We agree that the government’s use of what we in America calls race is unnecessary. This seems incongruous with your basis that race is scientifically determined. If your position is true, then all of the laws which sought to segregate the so called races would be justified. Even in your explanation you revert to the likes of Carl Linneaus who compares humans to squirrels. I argue that humans are extraordinarily unique and not akin to plants and rodents. Race is a sand castle upon which much of our so called “science” is built. Thank goodness much of this is being undone. The elimination of race based VBAC (vaginal birth after calculation) can help save lives of mothers. Stop pretending like sickle cell is not heavily concentrated in the Mediterranean, can lead to medical explorations outside of so called “blackness.”
I view the western concept of race dangerously reductive and regressive. Asia is a continent where 60% of the world’s population lives. It’s silly to offer Asian as a subcategory. White is a phenotype that disregards a person’s heritage or even their genetics.
You can offer up parameters to the racial classes to help strengthen your position. I’m eager to consider them and dismantle my entire thesis. Simply tell me what are the parameters of “whiteness,” and what are the parameters of “blackness?”
Adrian, in a strictly scientific context all terms like “race” or “races” imply is the fact that there was historically some genetic differentiation occurred of human populations living in isolation from each other. That is a simple fact. How to label those historic populations, how finely to classify them, and what to do about fuzzy boundaries will depend on one’s purposes and the detailed knowledge available. But acknowledging the genetic differentiation of the human species in no rational way can help justify racial segregation as you claim. I can’t respond to your request for “parameters” of “blackness” and “whiteness” because those are both nonsense notions.
One positive suggestion is for you purchase and read two, eminently readable books that are in sync with each other though written half a century apart – “Genetic Diversity and Human Equality” (Theodosius Dobshansky, 1973, 127 pp) and “Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race and Class” (Charles Murray, 2020, 508 pp). The latter even has a 17 page chapter on what I’ve been focusing on: “Genetic Distinctiveness of Ancestral Populations.” These books may lead you to some Eureka moments!
Stuart, no one debates that isolated populations of people share in genetic similarities. I made this connection with my own personal family. My twin brother has a more similar genetic makeup to me than some stranger in Kansas who simply has dark brown skin.
You seem to be missing the point and making the point at the same time. Race in the western context is basically a binary of “white” and “non-white.” There is no scientific basis for this. You seem to agree while wanting to hold onto this pseudoscience simultaneously. I also agree that genetic similarities exist between populations of people. I argue that this has absolutely nothing to do with phenotypes. Race in America has everything to do with phenotype. The two are incongruous. If whatever you want to call “race” in America has some sort of genetic component, why then is there no genetic testing done prior to assigning the supposed races?
I actually wrote to Charles Murray after reading “Facing Reality.” I pointed out the same error that you are using in statistical analysis. Murray seeks to highlight a standard deviation among the mean IQ of the supposed races. He can’t seem to wrap his mind around the billions of people who don’t fit into any of his drafted categories. What about the so called “mixed race” people on the planet? Well… since race is without parameters, either there are 8 billion different races or only one. I’m open to either interpretation.
As others have commented, thank you for a thoughtful and sensitive essay. 44 miles per hour in a 25 mile per hour speed zone? Yeah, you were in the wrong and graciousness is called for. I have received speeding citations and, in every instance, I was in the wrong. No great moral or philosophical lessons to be learned. My favorite close encounter with the California State Patrol was being rescued in the middle of a blizzard on Mammoth Mountain. From that point on , I have been favorably disposed to highway patrolmen. It is so easy to only see race and not the individual in these kinds of encounters. I can't read the minds of others, so I do not presume bad faith. And if a state highway policeman could read my mind, they would read color indifference.
The more questions we ask about traffic stops, the closer we get to the truth.
Hey, Adrian! Yours is one of - if not the - most thoughtful and thorough reactions to a traffic stop that I have ever read! Your congregation is blessed to have your leadership. Your family is blessed to have your devotion.
Your conclusion is clear: no matter the motivation of the officers (at both stops; kudos to the second for posing with a grin), the situations were wrong. It is enormously counterproductive to assume cultural bias. Counterproductive and eminently harmful to everyone. Yet you left enough room in your analysis to conceive that this may indeed be the case. I hope not!
You're right on all your points. I pray that this nation learns from your insight.
"Through P.U.L.L Lyles seeks to educate, empower, and encourage people to take a broader view of equality." This is something that definitely is needed. Thank you for your work.
It's no real consolation, but I (white) have experienced this crap many times, but particularly when I was a teenager, had long hair, drove a beater (a lot of those). I believe nothing creates more anger at and contempt for the police than traffic enforcement. Thats isn't why we hire them and they shouldn't be involved. On a funnier note, the area I lived in in rural Southern Maryland had three true speed traps, but everyone who actually lived there ( a very racially mixed group) knew where they were and the cops knew they knew. The point was to extract cash from the "foreigners" driving through. Still very unfair, but it kept relations good between the people and the cops!
The following is from an invitation my wife and I are attempting to have approved (unsuccessfully so far) for sending out to the highly multiracial staff (ca. 400 persons) of our retirement community in Chapel Hill NC. Stay tuned for updates
**********
Esteemed Cedars staff members:
Stuart and Irene Hurlbert have chosen Black History Month to show appreciation to the staff of Cedars of Chapel Hill for the fine service and many kindnesses Stuart and Irene have received since they joined the Cedars community a year ago. Celebrated dining room host and man-about-town Hunnell Lopez has offered to help them do this.
Respectively a biology professor and a reference librarian, Stuart and Irene unfortunately are still in teaching mode. Thus they are impelled to show their appreciation via “reading assignments.”! They offer their apologies! Some of you might prefer pizza or ice cream. For many English is not your first language. But knowing something of this literature can enrich your life.
Making your selection. Each Cedars staff member is invited peruse the list of 21 books listed overleaf, to select one of interest to them, and to let Hunnell (lopezhunnell1951@gmail.com) know their choice. Each title is linked to its webpage at Amazon that provides information about the book. Do this in the next week if you can, and the book should be in your hands within a month.
This offer also is intended to especially honor three of the authors: Thomas, Sowell, Ward Connerly and Shelby Steele for their path-breaking championing of the deracialization of society. Over a dinner in the early 2000s they came up with the idea of prohibiting government from racially categorizing people or demanding individuals do it themselves by checking one of several ‘race boxes.’ This has been a divisive, absurd, and unscientific activity of the U.S. government dating from the days of slavery. It ignores that Americans of different races have been intermarrying for so long that most Americans are bi- or multiracial to one degree or another. Yet some people think these racial categories were invented by the civil rights movement!
An action plan was hatched. Professors Sowell and Steele encouraged businessman, strategist and University of California regent Ward Connerly to execute. In March 2001 Connerly announced the California Racial Privacy [Ballot] Initiative (RPI), his supporters in the American Civil Rights Coalition gathered the necessary signatures, and lively public debates were held. Its key proposition read: The State shall not classify any individual by race, ethnicity, color, or national origin in the operation of public education, public contracting, or public employment.
In early September 2003 a scientific, California-wide poll of voters found the RPI to be supported by 58% of Hispanics, 55% of Blacks, 55% of Whites and 51% of Asians who had an opinion on it. With about $5,000,000 in funding, opponents of the RPI then got into high gear and saturated TV networks with misleading ads. On October 7, 2003 the RPI was put to the voters. Unhappily, it got only 36% of the vote. Connerly recounted this effort at the end of his 2007 book (#4).
This issue remains very much alive. The inappropriateness of the ‘race boxes’ can be understood even by primary school students. The manifold downstream effects of racial categorization abound as themes in all the books offered. Two recent ones, Coleman Hughes (2024, #12) and David Bernstein (2023, #21), do especially good jobs of summarizing all the anti-categorization arguments put forward during the RPI campaign. It is a puzzle, however, that neither mentions either Ward Connerly or the RPI !
[None of the original links got retained, but simply google any specific item of interest, and you can find it. In a following post, is the list of books presented to staffers.]
If you would a full copy of this invitatiion ("Books for Cedars Staff, In Appreciation, February 2025") with all its many links operational, send your request to hurlbert@sdsu.edu .
I may be biased by living so close to Chicago, but IMO speeding tickets are primarily about revenue generation. Here in Chicago they’re very big on Speed Cameras for “safety.”
Yep. In many places It's about revenue. With the cameras, in addition to revenue, it's a power/control thing. Red light cameras are awful. We had those for awhile. Drivers terrified of receiving a ticket would hit the brakes and slow to 10 in fear of a light change. Really screwed up traffic. Thankfully, we've never had the speeding cameras. Safety? I don't know. More like the elites making a money grab, plus as a matter of principle more regulation is always better. Good luck in Chicago. Visits in recent years have been a little disappointing. It was vibrant and exciting when i visited my grandparents there in the 60's.
It's unfortunate that on a family outing the officer couldn't simply be more friendly even if he had some justification for writing the ticket. And though his reason for asking you to roll down the windows had some logic behind it (I guess), I doubt you looked much like a threat. The officer ought to have just skipped that part.
The race field also bridges into the sex field on forms. The big challenge for transgender people is how this field is filled.
From my perspective there is no need to collect race or sex or have sex on government documents. Race needs to be eliminated from the census. It’s a holder from the first census.
What would be useful is culture versus race on the census.
Try driving through Texas with California license plates. The Texas Rangers love to harass Californians without concern for race, ethnicity or religious affiliation. It's not "right" but it's not unique either.
I assume you meant to say Texas highway patrol officers. If you were harassed by the Texas Rangers, you've gotten the attention of an elite group of 172 officers who deal with major violent crimes, public corruption cases, and other high priority matters. I've never met one. However, I've met a few highway patrolmen over the years. I didn't need CA plates to get their attention - which I earned - and I never felt harassed, despite a ticket or two. I hope you've recovered sufficiently to get back to CA. :)
Thank you for a thoughtful, interesting post. Hope you make it to Idaho soon!
However, I don't agree with your stance on "minor" speeding violations. If there is no fine, how do you get people to comply with the speed limit? Speeding is irrefutably linked to higher incidents of traffic accidents and deaths.
You were going 9 miles over what you *thought* the speed limit was, so you were knowingly above the limit. In my opinion, the officer should have pointed out that the speed limit dropped to 25 mph there and let you go with a warning, but it's not outrageous that he gave you a speeding ticket. (I had no idea about having to provide your SSN and find that to be odious!)
What happened during the 2nd stop?
The officer in the second incident was nice, yet still unusual from many other police encounters I’ve experienced. The officer asked me to get out of the vehicle and wait in his police unit. I politely declined that request as it’s highly unusual for stops in Georgia for a person to be asked out of the vehicle. The officer explained that it’s for his safety. I explained that my safety is of greater concern than his in this situation.
Great article. Interestingly in Hawaii, your drivers license # is you social security #
Massachusetts used to do that but changed a few decades ago - I'm surprised that HI still has that!
THE BOOKS
1. Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell, Jason Riley, 2021, 290pp
2. The Quest for Cosmic Justice, Thomas Sowell, 2002, 214pp
3. A Personal Odyssey, Thomas Sowell, 2002, 308pp
4. Creating Equal: My Fight Against Race Preferences (rev. edn), Ward Connerly, 2007, 298pp
5. Lessons from My Uncle James: Beyond Skin Color to the Content of Our Character, Ward Connerly, 2008, 93pp
6. Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country, Shelby Steele, 2015, 198pp
7. White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, Shelby Steele, 2007, 181pp
8. The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America, Shelby Steele, 1991, 175pp
9. The Adversity of Diversity, Carol M. Swain & Mike Towle, 2023, 174pp
10. Black Eye for America, Carol M. Swain & Christopher J. Schorr, 2021, 153pp
11. From Rage to Responsibility: Black Conservative Jesse Lee Peterson and America Today, Jesse Lee Peterson w/ Brad Stetson, 2019, 132pp
12. The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America, Coleman Hughes, 2024, 235pp
13. A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education, Gail Heriot & Maimon Schwarzschild, editors, 2021, 321pp [essays by 10 authors]
14. Diversity: The Invention of a Concept, Peter Wood, 2003, 351pp
15. School of Woke: How Critical Race Theory Infiltrated American Schools and Why We Must Reclaim Them, Kenny Xu, 2023, 238pp
16. Red, White, and Black: Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers,
Robert L. Woodson Sr., editor, 2021, 213pp [essays by 20 black authors]
17. Getting Under the Skin of "Diversity": Searching for the Color-Blind Ideal, Larry Purdy, 2008, 255pp
18. The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society, Dinesh D’Souza, 1995, 724pp
19. Beyond the Color Line: New Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America, Abigail Thernstrom & Stephan Thernstrom, editors, 2002, 438pp [essays by 25 authors]
20. The Diversity Delusion, Heather Mac Donald, 2020, 288pp
21. Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America, David E. Bernstein, 2023, 186pp
Great list, thank you! "Woke Racism", John McWhorter's book (he's progressive), is also worth a read.
What great road trips. Wish I’d done the same with my Sino-Bostonian son back in the day.
Also kudos for emphasizing that “the insertion of the concept of race into a wide range of things, from marriage licenses to medical treatment ... is regressive and deleterious.” Californians actually got to vote on that in 2003, in the form of their Racial Privacy Initiative! (See later).
I have a constructive suggestion, however, concerning Adrian’s attempting to push “the concept that there is one race – the human race.” That is a very unscientific notion to which the average guy or gal in the street will only roll their eyeballs or silently think, “Yeah, right...”. However well intended, as an unscientific notion it is thus a very counterproductive argument for getting widespread popular support for getting government out of the racial categorization business.
Anyone with a high school education anywhere in the world may not know the scientific terminology of physical anthropology or human population genetics. But they have a gut level understanding that, in scientific contexts, terms such as “race” and “races” simply acknowledge the fact that over tens of thousands of years populations living in geographic isolation from each other came to differ slightly from each other genetically in both visible and invisible features. Those differences began declining, on average a few thousands of years ago, courtesy of 1) the invention of ships and domestication of camels and horses, 2) the universal promiscuity of sailors, soldiers, merchants and explorers, and 3) the universal gentility and wisdom of womankind in accepting, even preferring, newly arrived, economically more powerful, albeit funny-looking, and at least occasionally tender alpha males.
That history is at all reflected in how politicians, sociologists, racists, and acolytes of the DEI cult have bastardized the scientific understanding of “race.”
MORE TO FOLLOW....
Stuart, thanks for your deeply considered commentary. Allow me to start by saying that I have spent the past two decades studying and practicing finance. One thing that many people do when analyzing data is conflate. This happens sometimes when nomenclature is not defined. It also happens from just innocent ignorance. It can also occur when someone is unwilling to break free of long held paradigms.
Race in the western context is the collectivization of human populations on the hinge of phenotype. Despite “science” clearly outlining genetic similarities between the populations of Kenya and the populations of Jamaica, the western concept of race ignores these genetic and scientific differences and creates this amalgamation of “blackness” base not on genetics and science, rather on phenotypic traits like skin shade, eye shape, nose shape, lip shape, and hair texture. It’s hard to argue that putting people into groups based on nose shape is some how scientific.
I have seven siblings. We have extremely similar physical characteristics that also mimics our cousins. These phenotypic traits are simply because our parents have them. Not everyone who has dark brown skin, has the same genetic similarities. The same is true for those who have ivory shades of skin. The people of France and the people of China have similar skin shades, yet no one places them into the same so called racial category. The Italian and the Irish are both classified as “white” despite the variation in genetic makeup. There is no gene called “black and white.”
The center of my thesis on the topic of race is based on the two little boys who look just like me. My mother in law had the most beautiful blue eyes. This means that my sons have a recessive blue eye gene. If my grandchildren have blonde hair and blue eyes, I won’t be surprised, because I took a biology class in high school. My children’s grandmother was classified as “white,” yet they share in her biology, genetics, and the “science” of her humanity, and yet they are not politically classified as “white.” That’s because race in the western context is not a scientific metric, it’s a political classification.
If we examine this even further, we can see that race has become more of an ideological classification. That’s why people like Clarence Thomas are said to not be “black” because they don’t share in the prescribed ideology of the so called “black” class. When a girl with sparkling red hair, green eyes, and freckles on her face, begins to talk with a slang, and dances with gyrating hips, she is said to be “acting black.” Race in the western world is nothing more than a classification system that seeks political and economic advantage. “Black power and white power” are both philosophies that seek these very controls.
When I started our scholarship fund a few years ago, I asked high school students to outline the parameters of “black and white.” Here’s your chance to do the same. Science is quantifiable. What traits must a person have to fit into one of the racial categories? What blood test can I take to determine whether I am “black or white?”
Adrian, Your initial point about nomenclature is very on target. What you call the “western concept” of race is NOT the scientific one held in common by most modern, non-ideological geneticists and physical anthropologists around the world. And most of these, I’m sure, would agree with you that for no good governmental purposes is it necessary or appropriate to create “race boxes” and require people to be assigned to them – or even to a couple of them. Few nations require that.
It is more appropriate to call those “race boxes” as defining a mostly ideological, non-scientific concept of race. THAT concept may be esteemed by a motley mix of particular politicians, sociologists, cultural anthropologists, journalists, and outright racists. But don’t broadbrush all of us in the West by labeling it as the “western” one! Perhaps the ideological race concepts have been, for some persons and situations, “nothing more than a classification system that seeks political and economic advantage.” But you lose important allies if you attribute those motives to modern biologists and anthropologists and their attempts at racial taxonomies and distinctions for the world of 5000 years ago.
My background may lend some credibility to the opinions above. I’m a biologist, trained long ago by top biologists at Amherst College and Cornell University. My major area of expertise is ecology, but I had much coursework in genetics and evolutionary biology and once even TA’d for a physical anthropology course. All followed by decades of reading on these topics.
With your other comments, you contradict nothing I’ve said nor any of the premises of California’s Racial Privacy Initiative of two decades ago. You seem to be fully in sync with that. But that is not to say that “race is just a social construct,” as it is so fashionable to say in some quarters. In classical zoological systematics, the term “subspecies” is synonymous with the scientific sense of “race.” In the Grand Canyon region there is a species of ground squirrel, in which populations on one side of the Colorado River consistently have slightly different markings than populations on the other side. Those two populations are often treated as different subspecies, as the different markings suggest that they have been genetically isolated from each other for an appreciable period of time but are still presumably capable of interbreeding with each other. There is no implication that there any large differences of any import between the subspecies. As the flows of the Colorado River are declining as a consequence of water diversions for cities and agriculture, soon the boy squirrels and girl squirrels from both sides maybe ‘mixing it up’ with tubing parties and evening liaisons on sun-warned sandbars. As usual there probably will be some “northside supremacists” who will pine for the loss of their wonderful distinctive markings. C’est la vie.
Stuart, I’d love to sit down with you over a cup of coffee. Your intellect is refreshing, and encouraging. I use the pretext, “western concept” when describing race, because as you cited, much of the world does not view what we in America call race the same. Many of the Dominican Republic do not identify as “black,” even though this is how they are classified in America. Just because a person is studied in a field of faulty science, doesn’t make that faulty science more than pseudoscience. Notice how you never address the parameters of the supposed races. It’s akin to a doctor prescribing medicine to “fat” people without first defining fat. Some who consider themselves ideological allies in this space are in fact miles apart. We agree that the government’s use of what we in America calls race is unnecessary. This seems incongruous with your basis that race is scientifically determined. If your position is true, then all of the laws which sought to segregate the so called races would be justified. Even in your explanation you revert to the likes of Carl Linneaus who compares humans to squirrels. I argue that humans are extraordinarily unique and not akin to plants and rodents. Race is a sand castle upon which much of our so called “science” is built. Thank goodness much of this is being undone. The elimination of race based VBAC (vaginal birth after calculation) can help save lives of mothers. Stop pretending like sickle cell is not heavily concentrated in the Mediterranean, can lead to medical explorations outside of so called “blackness.”
I view the western concept of race dangerously reductive and regressive. Asia is a continent where 60% of the world’s population lives. It’s silly to offer Asian as a subcategory. White is a phenotype that disregards a person’s heritage or even their genetics.
You can offer up parameters to the racial classes to help strengthen your position. I’m eager to consider them and dismantle my entire thesis. Simply tell me what are the parameters of “whiteness,” and what are the parameters of “blackness?”
Adrian, in a strictly scientific context all terms like “race” or “races” imply is the fact that there was historically some genetic differentiation occurred of human populations living in isolation from each other. That is a simple fact. How to label those historic populations, how finely to classify them, and what to do about fuzzy boundaries will depend on one’s purposes and the detailed knowledge available. But acknowledging the genetic differentiation of the human species in no rational way can help justify racial segregation as you claim. I can’t respond to your request for “parameters” of “blackness” and “whiteness” because those are both nonsense notions.
One positive suggestion is for you purchase and read two, eminently readable books that are in sync with each other though written half a century apart – “Genetic Diversity and Human Equality” (Theodosius Dobshansky, 1973, 127 pp) and “Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race and Class” (Charles Murray, 2020, 508 pp). The latter even has a 17 page chapter on what I’ve been focusing on: “Genetic Distinctiveness of Ancestral Populations.” These books may lead you to some Eureka moments!
Stuart, no one debates that isolated populations of people share in genetic similarities. I made this connection with my own personal family. My twin brother has a more similar genetic makeup to me than some stranger in Kansas who simply has dark brown skin.
You seem to be missing the point and making the point at the same time. Race in the western context is basically a binary of “white” and “non-white.” There is no scientific basis for this. You seem to agree while wanting to hold onto this pseudoscience simultaneously. I also agree that genetic similarities exist between populations of people. I argue that this has absolutely nothing to do with phenotypes. Race in America has everything to do with phenotype. The two are incongruous. If whatever you want to call “race” in America has some sort of genetic component, why then is there no genetic testing done prior to assigning the supposed races?
I actually wrote to Charles Murray after reading “Facing Reality.” I pointed out the same error that you are using in statistical analysis. Murray seeks to highlight a standard deviation among the mean IQ of the supposed races. He can’t seem to wrap his mind around the billions of people who don’t fit into any of his drafted categories. What about the so called “mixed race” people on the planet? Well… since race is without parameters, either there are 8 billion different races or only one. I’m open to either interpretation.
My last sentence should have begun, "That history is NOT as all ....."
".....at all...." Damn twitch fingers, but I'm pretty old.
As others have commented, thank you for a thoughtful and sensitive essay. 44 miles per hour in a 25 mile per hour speed zone? Yeah, you were in the wrong and graciousness is called for. I have received speeding citations and, in every instance, I was in the wrong. No great moral or philosophical lessons to be learned. My favorite close encounter with the California State Patrol was being rescued in the middle of a blizzard on Mammoth Mountain. From that point on , I have been favorably disposed to highway patrolmen. It is so easy to only see race and not the individual in these kinds of encounters. I can't read the minds of others, so I do not presume bad faith. And if a state highway policeman could read my mind, they would read color indifference.
The more questions we ask about traffic stops, the closer we get to the truth.
Hey, Adrian! Yours is one of - if not the - most thoughtful and thorough reactions to a traffic stop that I have ever read! Your congregation is blessed to have your leadership. Your family is blessed to have your devotion.
Your conclusion is clear: no matter the motivation of the officers (at both stops; kudos to the second for posing with a grin), the situations were wrong. It is enormously counterproductive to assume cultural bias. Counterproductive and eminently harmful to everyone. Yet you left enough room in your analysis to conceive that this may indeed be the case. I hope not!
You're right on all your points. I pray that this nation learns from your insight.
Thanks for a stimulating read.
"Through P.U.L.L Lyles seeks to educate, empower, and encourage people to take a broader view of equality." This is something that definitely is needed. Thank you for your work.
It's no real consolation, but I (white) have experienced this crap many times, but particularly when I was a teenager, had long hair, drove a beater (a lot of those). I believe nothing creates more anger at and contempt for the police than traffic enforcement. Thats isn't why we hire them and they shouldn't be involved. On a funnier note, the area I lived in in rural Southern Maryland had three true speed traps, but everyone who actually lived there ( a very racially mixed group) knew where they were and the cops knew they knew. The point was to extract cash from the "foreigners" driving through. Still very unfair, but it kept relations good between the people and the cops!
The following is from an invitation my wife and I are attempting to have approved (unsuccessfully so far) for sending out to the highly multiracial staff (ca. 400 persons) of our retirement community in Chapel Hill NC. Stay tuned for updates
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Esteemed Cedars staff members:
Stuart and Irene Hurlbert have chosen Black History Month to show appreciation to the staff of Cedars of Chapel Hill for the fine service and many kindnesses Stuart and Irene have received since they joined the Cedars community a year ago. Celebrated dining room host and man-about-town Hunnell Lopez has offered to help them do this.
Respectively a biology professor and a reference librarian, Stuart and Irene unfortunately are still in teaching mode. Thus they are impelled to show their appreciation via “reading assignments.”! They offer their apologies! Some of you might prefer pizza or ice cream. For many English is not your first language. But knowing something of this literature can enrich your life.
Making your selection. Each Cedars staff member is invited peruse the list of 21 books listed overleaf, to select one of interest to them, and to let Hunnell (lopezhunnell1951@gmail.com) know their choice. Each title is linked to its webpage at Amazon that provides information about the book. Do this in the next week if you can, and the book should be in your hands within a month.
This offer also is intended to especially honor three of the authors: Thomas, Sowell, Ward Connerly and Shelby Steele for their path-breaking championing of the deracialization of society. Over a dinner in the early 2000s they came up with the idea of prohibiting government from racially categorizing people or demanding individuals do it themselves by checking one of several ‘race boxes.’ This has been a divisive, absurd, and unscientific activity of the U.S. government dating from the days of slavery. It ignores that Americans of different races have been intermarrying for so long that most Americans are bi- or multiracial to one degree or another. Yet some people think these racial categories were invented by the civil rights movement!
An action plan was hatched. Professors Sowell and Steele encouraged businessman, strategist and University of California regent Ward Connerly to execute. In March 2001 Connerly announced the California Racial Privacy [Ballot] Initiative (RPI), his supporters in the American Civil Rights Coalition gathered the necessary signatures, and lively public debates were held. Its key proposition read: The State shall not classify any individual by race, ethnicity, color, or national origin in the operation of public education, public contracting, or public employment.
In early September 2003 a scientific, California-wide poll of voters found the RPI to be supported by 58% of Hispanics, 55% of Blacks, 55% of Whites and 51% of Asians who had an opinion on it. With about $5,000,000 in funding, opponents of the RPI then got into high gear and saturated TV networks with misleading ads. On October 7, 2003 the RPI was put to the voters. Unhappily, it got only 36% of the vote. Connerly recounted this effort at the end of his 2007 book (#4).
This issue remains very much alive. The inappropriateness of the ‘race boxes’ can be understood even by primary school students. The manifold downstream effects of racial categorization abound as themes in all the books offered. Two recent ones, Coleman Hughes (2024, #12) and David Bernstein (2023, #21), do especially good jobs of summarizing all the anti-categorization arguments put forward during the RPI campaign. It is a puzzle, however, that neither mentions either Ward Connerly or the RPI !
[None of the original links got retained, but simply google any specific item of interest, and you can find it. In a following post, is the list of books presented to staffers.]
If you would a full copy of this invitatiion ("Books for Cedars Staff, In Appreciation, February 2025") with all its many links operational, send your request to hurlbert@sdsu.edu .
Very nicely stated and reasoned!
I may be biased by living so close to Chicago, but IMO speeding tickets are primarily about revenue generation. Here in Chicago they’re very big on Speed Cameras for “safety.”
Yep. In many places It's about revenue. With the cameras, in addition to revenue, it's a power/control thing. Red light cameras are awful. We had those for awhile. Drivers terrified of receiving a ticket would hit the brakes and slow to 10 in fear of a light change. Really screwed up traffic. Thankfully, we've never had the speeding cameras. Safety? I don't know. More like the elites making a money grab, plus as a matter of principle more regulation is always better. Good luck in Chicago. Visits in recent years have been a little disappointing. It was vibrant and exciting when i visited my grandparents there in the 60's.
It's unfortunate that on a family outing the officer couldn't simply be more friendly even if he had some justification for writing the ticket. And though his reason for asking you to roll down the windows had some logic behind it (I guess), I doubt you looked much like a threat. The officer ought to have just skipped that part.
This was such an interesting way to approach policing and race. Thank you!
The race field also bridges into the sex field on forms. The big challenge for transgender people is how this field is filled.
From my perspective there is no need to collect race or sex or have sex on government documents. Race needs to be eliminated from the census. It’s a holder from the first census.
What would be useful is culture versus race on the census.
Try driving through Texas with California license plates. The Texas Rangers love to harass Californians without concern for race, ethnicity or religious affiliation. It's not "right" but it's not unique either.
I assume you meant to say Texas highway patrol officers. If you were harassed by the Texas Rangers, you've gotten the attention of an elite group of 172 officers who deal with major violent crimes, public corruption cases, and other high priority matters. I've never met one. However, I've met a few highway patrolmen over the years. I didn't need CA plates to get their attention - which I earned - and I never felt harassed, despite a ticket or two. I hope you've recovered sufficiently to get back to CA. :)