Discriminations

Pointing to a new article criticizing the argument that “race is just a social construct,” Robert VerBruggen noted on phi beta cons yesterday that “[a]cademics like to say race is a social construct because they think this belief undermines racism.” If something is not genetic, innate, then in their view it is reformable. (The ubiquity of that view in academia makes all the more remarkable the belief of the president, provost, and an august faculty committee at MIT that it is not possible to have “a fully meritocratic process” because “our society presents innate biases to which all can be susceptible on some level,” a view endorsed by an MIT report on “diversity” that I discussed here at length yesterday.)

I have shied away from discussing genetics, intelligence, etc., because, among other reasons, I am not well enough informed on the issues and literature to have anything worthwhile to say. (“That hasn’t prevented you from discussing many other issues about which you could say the same thing,” I can almost hear some readers muttering. Didn’t your mothers teach you that it’s not nice to mutter?) But at one point, a good while ago when I worked on EEOC. v. Sears, Roebuck, and Co. (which I discussed in gory detail in the last three quarters of this post), I thought about the nature v. nurture controversy quite a lot. And since one thing I don’t shy away from is reprising old posts, especially very old ones, I’m going to repeat, or substantially repeat, some observations I last offered in Nature, Nurture, Whatever, back in 2005. (One of the rewards of writing a blog for a long time is that many readers don’t stay on board for the whole journey, and most of those who do won’t remember the scenery from five or six years ago.)

The nature v. nurture controversy, I wrote then, is

one of the longest-running (and still going strong) debates between liberals and conservatives.... This is too simple, but typically, or perhaps stereotypically, conservatives believe (or are said to believe) that a great deal of an individual’s identity is natural, inherited, genetic. Liberals, by contrast, generally believe that social influences are more significant than biological ones.

The political implications of this classic division are clear: conservatives often think it is futile, or worse, to try to undo what Mother Nature has done, while liberals, believing as they do that “society” has produced what they regard as unfair conditions, believe that “society” can improve those conditions through various kinds of reform. Nowhere is this division clearer than in differences over sex roles. Indeed, liberals minimize the salience, or even fact, of “sex,” which is biological, in favor of “gender,” which is “socially constructed.” (Ironically, this division is frequently reversed regarding homosexuality, with liberals tending to believe it is genetic, like race, and conservatives arguing that more often it reflects a choice of lifestyles.)

I lived and breathed the Sears case for so long — around five years of many more 80 hour and longer weeks than I like to remember — that for a long time that’s all I could talk about, much to the annoyance and boredom of many of my friends, not a few of whom are now former friends in large part because of my perceived character defect of agreeing to work with lawyers defending a corporation, a big corporation at that, accused of sex discrimination.

One of the things I would say in those days — in part (but not entirely) tongue in cheek, for shock value — is that the conventional wisdom was all wrong: the fact that some practice or behavior was “socially constructed” and not programmed into our DNA often made it harder, not easier, to change. Sex, after, all, can be changed with a sex change operation; “sex roles,” on the other hand, are far more resistant and difficult to change.

This is the sort of observation, I think some wag has already suggested, that could lead Harry Reid to propose federal subsidies for skin-lightening and dialect-removal surgery for blacks.