Mistaking the race for the runner

Steven Levitt's most recent post on his Freakonomics blog makes the mistake many are still prone to in this day and age: misunderstand a fluid conception as a fixed one.

Throughout this post Levitt uncritically accepts race as a marked, set category that implies very real differences. He uses data (unclear from where) on mixed-race children to try and draw conclusions about the relation between race, behavior and intelligence. Implicit here are the same misunderstandings that fueled eugenics and Social Darwinism. The reductionist reasoning in this study attempts to divide extremely gray areas of culture into black and white with improper tools (in this case, economics).

Let's get this out there. Race is a social construction. Biologists (and any other scientists working with genes) have known this for almost as long as anthropologists. The amount of genetic variation between what we classically define as "races" is between 6-10%. This small amount of variation is a notoriously poor predictor of biological (and even more so, behavioral) outcomes. Culture (nurture, if you so please) has a lot more to do with how people think and act than the shade of one's skin. I am not saying that social differences do not exist between what we typically defines as races. It is an indisputable fact that such variation exists, but we need to remove the implicit bias from empirical study that such differences are a result of biology and not environment.

Perhaps Mr. Levitt missed the memo. 2008 is post-racial.