Robert Locke on Race

Saturday, 23 November 2002

A few days ago, while I was busy following hyperlinks like an epidemiologist in search of Patient Zero, I came across this very old article by Robert Locke. In it Locke says that the second dumbest idea of the twentieth century is that "race is a social construct". We won't bother with the idea Locke considers the dumbest, because his concern in the article is to demolish this second dumbest of twentieth century ideas. The article is an extended attack on the views of Dr Joseph L. Graves, a genetecist at the University of Arizona. Locke states his position early:

Human classifications of race are indeed social constructs. ... But this doesn’t mean that the racial differences themselves, as opposed to the language used to talk about them, are social constructs.

He goes on to identify a number of metaphysical faults in Graves work, which are mostly errors of expression - such as Graves' statement that there is more genetic variation within races than between races. Clearly, this an example of muddle-headed leftist thinking which Locke refutes thus:

The next step in Graves’s genetic argument is that there can’t be races because genetic variation between races (again, which don’t exist) is far less than genetic variation within races. ... True again, but it doesn’t prove a thing. The genetic differences among accountants are far larger than the genetic difference (presumably zero) between accountants and architects, but this doesn’t mean that one can’t meaningfully categorize people into accountants and architects.

This is a pretty good example of Locke's consistent application of the debating technique known as the argument pedis transfixus or shooting yourself in the foot. Locke produces another brilliant example of this style of argument in his fisking of his E-Mail correspondence with Dr Graves:

Graves: If we were to apportion humans on the basis of our genetic variability, we would identify several sub-Saharan African races, and one other (all people living outside of Africa.)

Locke: Fine. But as I said, classification according to race isn't the same as classification by genetic variability.

In other words, if science won't support the racial classifications I want, to hell with science.

Of course it would be unfair to suggest that Locke is implicitly conceding that race is a social construct after all. It may be a purely personal construct, which is an entirely different thing: and possibly one he would do better to keep to himself.