So many apologists here seem to think that you can just list facts, context-free, in some sort of objective manner. The way facts are presented are almost invariably enabling some sort of value judgement.
For example, if you were to do a study on prison population in the US, you could end up presenting two facts :
> blacks are dis-proportionally present in the prison population
> poor people are dis-proportionally present in the prison population
These are both facts, but the one you choose to present gives a soundbite to somebody. Just because you are so magnificent as to not fall into the correlation=causality trap doesn't mean that you're not enabling racism.
By even presenting the first fact, you are implying that it is a fact worth mentioning to begin with. If you also found out that people who wear hats on Sunday are disproportionately present, would you mention it? presenting the fact shows that you believe the link between the two needs to be investigated in the first place.
We could also go into the whole "black/white is not a race" debate too, but the notion of race (as it is defined in common culture) has no place in many studies. Shared ancestry can be relevant in other studies too, but one of the defining characteristics of racist attitudes is how genetics/ancestry define you so much that it is OK to discriminate based on those factors alone. Enabling that sort of thinking (for very little scientific gain) is rarely worth it.
You are right in saying that "blacks are dis-proportionally present in the prison population" does not prove that, if all factors were equal, people who happen to have darker skin are somehow predisposed to end up in prison. That statement on its own doesn't tell us much and endlessly repeating it is prone to lead to racist beliefs among many people.
However, research that shows a group of people with a common ancestry share a genetic trait that is known to make them more or less susceptible to a certain disease or more or less responsive to certain treatments IS showing a causal link. It is most certainly worth mentioning because it will lead to better medical treatment. This is not an uninformed judgement call based on a naive interpretation of complex social issues. This isn't social science. This is natural science.
I'm hopeful that this research will be done with as little mention of "race" as possible. Race is a social construct, this research is related to shared ancestry. It should be "we'll do a genetic test, and if you have this genetic marker, we'll do X, otherwise, we'll do Y." So many people in the US are of mixed ancestry that it is unlikely that any social definition of race is going to be useful for making medical decisions without a genetic test.
> The way facts are presented are almost invariably enabling some sort of value judgement.
Yes, but then the problem is not with the facts themselves, but the way they have been used, and I took the grandparent statement to be talking about the facts themselves.
you can't just present facts (even an excel spreadsheet of raw data will show what you tested against), so there is always at least some form of choosing mechanism.
> you can't just present facts (even an excel spreadsheet of raw data will show what you tested against)
A 'fact' is something that is fairly well established. Of course we can never know anything with absolute certainty. Given that notion of 'fact', are you saying there are no facts in, say, physics, or chemistry, or biology? And on top of that, are you saying they can't simply be presented?
So many apologists here seem to think that you can just list facts, context-free, in some sort of objective manner. The way facts are presented are almost invariably enabling some sort of value judgement.
For example, if you were to do a study on prison population in the US, you could end up presenting two facts :
> blacks are dis-proportionally present in the prison population
> poor people are dis-proportionally present in the prison population
These are both facts, but the one you choose to present gives a soundbite to somebody. Just because you are so magnificent as to not fall into the correlation=causality trap doesn't mean that you're not enabling racism.
By even presenting the first fact, you are implying that it is a fact worth mentioning to begin with. If you also found out that people who wear hats on Sunday are disproportionately present, would you mention it? presenting the fact shows that you believe the link between the two needs to be investigated in the first place.
We could also go into the whole "black/white is not a race" debate too, but the notion of race (as it is defined in common culture) has no place in many studies. Shared ancestry can be relevant in other studies too, but one of the defining characteristics of racist attitudes is how genetics/ancestry define you so much that it is OK to discriminate based on those factors alone. Enabling that sort of thinking (for very little scientific gain) is rarely worth it.