Talk:Racialism

Moynihan quote
This is regarding this revert.

Hello. Instead of telling readers that something is controversial, the article should summarize reliable sources to explain why this brief statement is significant to this topic. The sentence Moynihan's statements in context or taken out of context, remain highly controversial today. is unacceptable WP:EDITORIALIZING as well. Neither this source nor this source mentions the term "racialism". This source only mentions it as the title of the essay, but says nothing about the term. Again, the point of having sources is to summarize them, not to use them for tangential WP:SYNTH to imply significance.

As this has been contested, please follow WP:BRD and gain consensus before restoring a third time. Grayfell (talk) 19:08, 24 June 2020 (UTC)


 * Hello. Left a note on your talk page. First, the Moynihan Atlantic quote of this term was somehow not acceptable and deleted without an attempt at refinement.  My second edit attempt was summarily deleted as well without an attempt at refinement.  How would you allow a Moynihan's or any other source's use of the term be quoted here?  What is allowable significance in this context when the word is used so seldom in publications? When a term is rarely used or rarely used consistently, doesn't a non-significance or cherry pick assertion become a Catch22?


 * Dispute resolution states "When you find a passage in an article that is biased, inaccurate, or unsourced the best practice is to improve it if you can rather than deleting salvageable text. For example, if an article appears biased, add balancing material or make the wording more neutral." Kindly advise if any of this can be salvaged. Shoefly (talk) 01:12, 25 June 2020 (UTC)


 * To be blunt, I do not think it improved the article, so in that sense, I do not think it could be salvaged without further discussion. I notice that you have not addressed the above comment, so I don't know why you're asking for additional advice.
 * To go into more specific detail, your addition used WP:EDITORIALIZING language to tell readers that the comment was "controversial" in or out of context, but this is inappropriate.
 * Specifically, it is far, far too vague, despite implying importance. Why is it controversial? Who is controverting it? What sources are discussing context, and why is that relevant? If sources discuss these issues, use them. If they don't, please don't add them anyway (Citation overkill comes to mind). All sources are judged in context, but these cited sources do not actually discuss this term in any detail. Using sources which do not mention "racialism", or which do not provide any context about the term, misrepresents what these sources are saying. Obviously, this is a serious problem.
 * Pragmatically, it needs to be clear to readers why this one short mention from over fifty years ago is important to the term, and we have to be open to the possibility that it isn't important. The burden is on you to solve this problem based on sources, and the best practice is to look at independent sources first and summarize accordingly, not as an afterthought.
 * On my talk, you mentioned other quotes. The Du Bois quote is followed by context from reliable, independent sources. (The Appaih sentence is not properly referenced, but it is sourced). This may be undue, or it may even be inappropriate, but that will need to be discussed on its own merits. Grayfell (talk) 01:59, 25 June 2020 (UTC)


 * Ok, I accept your editorializing critique. If the Moynihan quote is too incendiary, insignificant or inappropriate, I'll leave it out.

In the current Wikipedia article, the term "racialism" variably is described as a "belief", "theory" and "philosophical stance". Would you allow a more diverse description of this 'ism" be reflected in the article's intro? Even though I agree with most of the content about race labels as a social construct, can a blog entry or YouTube clip be an acceptable Wikipedia reference? Race Is Real, but not in the way Many People Think

It may be precisely racialist belief that makes race labeling feel real. For example, isn't it a racialist belief that drives the US Census since 1790 to select or asks people to select one or more race labels? Race and Multiracial Americans in the U.S. Census Racialist belief and the resulting actions in the US have a history that could be better reflected in the article.

Can we find consensus that the article content, references and structure can be improved? Would you accept or tolerate the edits below?

In 1897, W. E. B. Du Bois expressed the difference between racialism and racism when he argued that races are real entities. He wrote: Du Bois believed that racial identities were "valuable properties of human individuals, and that racial solidarity can help realize such human goods as equality and self-actualization." He further stated that racism required advancing the argument that one race is superior to other races of human beings. thumb|upright|[[W. E. B. Du Bois]] In In My Father’s House (1992), Kwame Anthony Appiah summarized Du Bois's philosophical stance by writing that racialism is a value-neutral term and racism is a value-charged term.
 * == History ==

According to Oxford Dictionaries Online, racialism is "another term for racism". The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines racialism as "a theory that race determines human traits and capacities" and defines "racism" as "a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race".
 * == Definitions and differences ==

In 2012, the consensus among geneticists was that racialist beliefs are not supported by modern population genetics. Some U.S. medical studies have found partial genetic correlations of incidence of diseases and subsets of American population groups, but those subsets (i.e. African Americans, White Americans) are not genetically representative of everyone who is included in the American definitions of "black" or "white".

In discussing how race is used by scientists, Takezawa et al. summarized the finding of a 2014 interdisciplinary workshop on scientific ethics by saying:

In Racial Culture: A Critique (2005), Richard T. Ford claimed that although "there is no necessary correspondence between the ascribed identity of race and one's culture or personal sense of self" and "group difference is not intrinsic to members of social groups but rather contingent o[n] the social practices of group identification", the social practices of identity politics may coerce individuals into the "compulsory" enactment of "prewritten racial scripts".

Shoefly (talk) 16:11, 25 June 2020 (UTC)


 * I have adjusted formatting and collapsed this content, as it will make a mess of archives, among other issues. Am I correct that the only difference in this from the current article is the addition of a "History" subsection?
 * As for youtube and blogs, the short answer is "probably not". WP:UGC is almost never reliable, and WP:NEWSBLOGS might be usable, but again, context matters. Further, for the third time, sources need to discuss racialism. Opinion columns about "race" are not enough. We already have Race (human categorization), Racism, Scientific racism, Race and society, etc. Using flimsy sources which are not racialism to support a point about "race" is turning this into a WP:COATRACK.
 * So the answer to your loaded question is "no". I would not accept that. Grayfell (talk) 23:19, 25 June 2020 (UTC)

It sounds like we may possibly have consensus on an edit suggestion. Would you remove the YouTube and blog Race Is Real, but not in the way Many People Think as acceptable references or should I? Can we also agree that the  may be unacceptable as a primary source for the preceding sentence statement? Possibly replace the word "many" with "some" in this sentence? The Oxford Dictionary entry mentioned later should suffice then as a source, right?

Not allowing a "History" Section makes it difficult to trace the roots, the original use, and the ways the term has evolved or not evolved over time. If Wikipedia content or structure is only permitted under a definition that "racialism is racism", it may erase history. Tolerating diversity of implied meaning is what makes Wikipedia better than other encyclopedias I believe.

Shoefly (talk) 15:18, 26 June 2020 (UTC)


 * As I've tried to explain to you multiple times, all sources are judged in context. Please review WP:UGC. Youtube is a distributor of other people's media, most of which is unreliable. The Youtube clip you mention is "The Royal Institution - panel discussion - What Science Tells us about Race and Racism". if you think the Royal Institution is unreliable, you will have to explain why it's unreliable in this context. Further reading sections are not the same as references. Having a column from Psychology Today in the further reading section is trivial. Why remove it? Why would that help readers?
 * As for Christian Identity: The Aryan American Bloodline Religion, it was written by Chester L. Quarles, who was a respected professor of political science at the University of Mississippi, and was published by McFarland & Company. This is not a primary source, it is a WP:SECONDARY source. This is exactly what we want for encyclopedia articles, because encyclopedias are tertiary sources. Here, an academic in a published book with editorial oversight, is explaining how dictionaries define a term. The dictionaries are primary sources in this case.
 * I think the addition of a "history" subsection is premature. I do not understand your comment about implied meanings, nor is this an appropriate place to discuss it. Grayfell (talk) 19:52, 26 June 2020 (UTC)

Scientific Consensus.
The introduction should be changed to this:

Racialism is the belief that the human species is naturally divided into races, which are ostensibly distinct biological categories, a view rejected by current scientific consensus in the West, but widely accepted among Chinese anthropologists and with mixed acceptance among scholars in Eastern Europe. Many dictionaries define the term racialism as synonymous with racism.

The references are valid and it is a more balanced and accurate representation of world scholarly consensus on the subject — Preceding unsigned comment added by 186.81.100.53 (talk) 17:17, 11 July 2020 (UTC)


 * Thanks for bringing this to the talk page. The issue is with presenting a false balance in the lead (please see the policy WP:FALSEBALANCE). A robust discussion of the variation in views among scientists from different countries might belong in the main body of the article (indeed it might be an interesting discussion), so long as it is placed in the context of true scientific consensus. But reducing a robustly cited statement on scientific consensus to a "Western" opinion could easily create a false impression in the mind of the reader that current science supports the idea that race is a biologically meaningful way to categorize humans. Generalrelative (talk) 18:01, 11 July 2020 (UTC)


 * The point is that the current introduction does not in fact represent the current scientific consensus. It is merely the consensus among American Anthropologists. However, the sources I cited show this is far from being the world consensus among scholars. Indeed, in China the exact opposite view is the consensus view. You cannot say that racialism is rejected by current scientific consensus, period, because most anthropologist in the US reject it. Anymore than I can say that racialism is accepted by the current scientific consensus, period, because it is virtually unquestioned in China.


 * To give you an analogy, if all physicists in the US accept the Steady State model, and all physicists in China accept the Big Bang theory, and both theories have mixed acceptance in Eastern Europe, you cannot state that it is the scientific consensus that the Steady State model is true. Unless you can demonstrate that there are far more physicists in the US than in other places, and hence their view predominates in the world as a whole.


 * What we would need for the current introduction to be an accurate representation of the state of academia is a reference to a survey of experts, or the literature, worldwide, that demonstrated that most scholars worldwide reject this view.


 * I will also note that scholars in other fields in the West hold views that at least tacitly accept racialism. For example, a survey that was "emailed to experts who published articles on or after 2010 in journals on intelligence, cognitive abilities, and student achievement.", showed that "Around 90% of experts believed that genes had at least some influence on cross-national differences in cognitive ability." — Preceding unsigned comment added by 186.81.100.53 (talk) 22:02, 11 July 2020 (UTC)
 * In the paper you cite "Experts were surveyed about the importance of culture, genes, education (quantity and quality), wealth, health, geography, climate, politics, modernization, sampling error, test knowledge, discrimination, test bias, and migration." They were not surveyed about "race" as a factor, and, in fact, the word "race" appears in the paper only in respect to surveys done 30 years ago, in 1987 and 1988. "Genes" =/= "race", and "some genetic influence" does not mean that "race" plays any factor, since that was not investigated, nor does "cross-national" mean "cross-racial".  In other words, you have completely and totally misused this paper to make a point that the paper itself does not make. Beyond My Ken (talk) 03:48, 12 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Please read and thoroughly understand WP:SYNTH before you post again. Beyond My Ken (talk) 03:51, 12 July 2020 (UTC)
 * I am fully aware, I just added that as an aside to provide extra evidence for you to see that this is far from being a consensus. I did not suggest adding this reference to the article. The other references still stand though. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 186.81.100.53 (talk) 04:33, 12 July 2020 (UTC)
 * So you added an irrelevant reference to your argument in the hope that no one would look at it too closely and see that it was irrelevant. Beyond My Ken (talk) 04:49, 12 July 2020 (UTC)

No it is not irrelevant, it provides further evidence that it is not the case that the scientific consensus rejects racialism. This claim is not explicit in the source, it is merely implicit, which is why it cannot be a source in the article. However, the fact that it is implicit in the source that the scientific consensus does not reject racialism is further grounds for removing this inaccurate statement from the article. In any case, the other references still stand. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 186.81.100.53 (talk) 23:52, 12 July 2020 (UTC)

Merge with Race (human categorization)?
There doesn't seem to be any over-arching purpose to this article. The hatnote over at Race (human categorization) promises that this article will inform the reader about the belief that the human species is naturally divided into races, but that historical view is actually better described in the Race article itself (and in much more depth in the article Scientific racism). I'd suggest that anything here that is not yet said better in Race (human categorization) should be merged, and this article redirected there. Thoughts? Generalrelative (talk) 21:25, 12 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Support - I agree that this article does not serve any strong purpose as a stand-alone article. It's been in existence since 2003, but has managed to accumulate only a very small amount of information, and acts as a attraction for what outside the U.S. are referred to as "racialists", i.e. racists.  It would do just fine being merged into Race (human categorization). Beyond My Ken (talk) 00:17, 13 July 2020 (UTC)


 * Neutral pointers to this discussion have been placed on the talk pages of the WikiProjects listed above, and those listed on Talk:Race (human categorization). Beyond My Ken (talk) 00:25, 13 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Support - Having previously looked for sources, the only common thread is Race (human categorization). Grayfell (talk) 23:23, 13 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Support - We have Race (human categorization), Scientific racism, and also Historical race concepts and Racism. I think that's quite sufficient. --Rsk6400 (talk) 15:24, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

Looks like we have consensus to merge. I'll go ahead with it. Generalrelative (talk) 18:18, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

WP:R
Re this: WP:R: "Wikipedia follows the "principle of least astonishment"; after following a redirect, the reader's first question is likely to be: "Hang on ... I wanted to read about this. Why has the link taken me to that?" Make it clear to the reader that they have arrived in the right place. Normally, we try to make sure that all "inbound redirects" other than misspellings or other obvious close variants of the article title are mentioned in the first couple of paragraphs of the article or section to which the redirect goes. It will often be appropriate to bold the redirected term" [my emphasis]. Scientific racism (4th paragraph) actually defines "racialism"; Race (human categorization) does not even mention the term. Redirecting "Racialism" to an article that does not even mention the term violates the principle of least astonishment. --Omnipaedista (talk) 6 August 2020‎ (UTC)
 * Thanks, Omnipaedista. I see the merits of this argument. However when linking directly to Scientific racism, the first words the reader encounters are After 1945 By 1954, 58 years after the Plessy v. Ferguson upholding of racial segregation in the United States, American popular and scholarly opinions of scientific racism and its sociologic practice had evolved.[132] In 1960 the journal Mankind Quarterly started ... This also seems to violate the "principle of least astonishment" in my view, since the reader is thrown into an ongoing narrative without being provided proper context. In the merge discussion I initiated above, I favored redirecting to Race (human categorization) on the assumption that many readers would be looking for the belief that the human species is naturally divided into races, which is introduced and then debunked quite well in the first couple sections of that article. Scientific racism, on the other hand, is geared toward describing the history of the pseudoscientific belief that empirical evidence exists to support or justify racism (racial discrimination), racial inferiority, or racial superiority. It seems to me that some but not all readers searching for "racialism" will have that sense in mind, and that on balance the information presented in Race (human categorization) will be more germane to the majority of readers. Further, those who are interested in Scientific racism instead can easily follow the Wikilink in the fourth paragraph of the lead. Finally, we can always find a way to introduce the term "racialism" into the lead to Race (human categorization) –– or Scientific racism for that matter –– though I'm not 100% convinced that the term is important enough to merit that kind of attention. Generalrelative (talk) 18:11, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks to both of you. There is also Race theory which currently redirects to Race (human categorization). Since the belief in the existence of biological races in humans has been reduced to pseudo-science during the last decades, I think both Race theory and Racialism are pretty much the same as Scientific racism and should be redirected there and be mentioned in the lede there (in a wording showing that it is not so important, something like "after 1945, it has sometimes been called racialism"). --Rsk6400 (talk) 05:39, 8 August 2020 (UTC)

Which target? Racism or Race (human categorization)
Following the merge discussion above, the content of this article was merged (and then more or less deleted) from Race (human categorization). That article no longer even mentions the term "racialism". That's fine and seems appropriate. However the term "racialism" is most often defined as a synonym for "racism", and the Racism article has actual content discussing it. Any objection to switching the target? Mobi Ditch (talk) 08:47, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

I guess this is much the same point as made by, above. Mobi Ditch (talk) 08:49, 31 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Yeah, it's not 100% clear whether Race (human categorization), Scientific racism or Racism is the best target here. My original rationale for Race (human categorization) had to do with the hatnote that used to exist there directing readers to Racialism for "the belief that the human species is naturally divided into races. In my view that belief is best described –– and debunked –– in the Race (human categorization) article itself. The issue, I think, is that racialism is today often used as a euphemism for racism, but that it also retains an ostensibly neutral definition, as given by e.g. Merriam-Webster: "a theory that race determines human traits and capacities". Note that according to this definition no hierarchy among races is explicitly posited. I'd argue that it's precisely this lack of explicit hierarchy that makes racialism work as a euphemism (rather than a simple synonym) for racism: the ostensible neutrality provides cover for racists to hide behind. In my view it's best to keep the target as Race (human categorization), since at least there readers can learn something about why racialism is a bogus view of human differences. But again, I agree that there are arguments to be made for the other targets and I'm very willing to respect consensus if other editors think differently. Generalrelative (talk) 15:39, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
 * If you think that this is the right target then I think you need to add actual content about the term "racialism"1. Otherwise, it should link to an article which does so. Mobi Ditch (talk) 20:43, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
 * If that's a priority for you go ahead and add it yourself. But on the other hand I just noticed that Rsk6400 did a helpful update to the Scientific racism lead, with an important assist from NightHeron, which introduces the term in an intuitive way. I'd be open to retargeting there –– to the lead this time rather than to the "After 1945" section as before. It's not a perfect solution to the issue I raised above but it's perhaps the best one available. Generalrelative (talk) 02:03, 1 September 2020 (UTC)
 * I'd prefer a redirect to Scientific racism, but there are also good reasons for Racism, among them Oxford Dictionary of English (2010) which explains racialism simply as "another term for racism". So, either target would be OK for me. --Rsk6400 (talk) 08:04, 1 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Scientific racism is also fine with me. It's just that the current article, Race (human categorization), has no mention of the concept so instead of the merger proposed above it became a de facto deletion. Mobi Ditch (talk) 00:19, 2 September 2020 (UTC)