Race or no ... race

Interesting bit of information taken from the GUARDIAN science site.

Are there genetic differences between "races"?

Mark Pagel, evolutionary biologist at Reading University. His research includes work on language and cultural evolution.

"Flawed as the old ideas about race are, modern genomic studies reveal a surprising, compelling and different picture of human genetic diversity. We are on average about 99.5% similar to each other genetically. This is a new figure, down from the previous estimate of 99.9%. To put what may seem like minuscule differences in perspective, we are somewhere around 98.5% similar, maybe more, to chimpanzees, our nearest evolutionary relatives.

"The new figure for us, then, is significant. It derives from among other things, many small genetic differences that have emerged from studies that compare human populations ... Like it or not, there may be many genetic differences among human populations - including differences that may even correspond to old categories of "race" - that are real differences in the sense of making one group better than another at responding to some particular environmental problem.

"This in no way says one group is in general "superior" to another ... But it warns us that we must be prepared to discuss genetic differences among human populations.

L'Oreal - the ugly face of the French beauty conglomerate

The French beauty product company L'Oreal was fined a day or two ago in a French court for racist hiring practices at one of its subsidiaries (Garnier France). The background is that the company, when hiring faces for an advertising campaign targetting the French market, made clear to their head hunting outfit that it expected no less than only white faces to represent 'beauty' in its campaign. The court issued a fine of between 30,000 and 300,000 Euros (my sources couldn't find as consensus on the last digit), and, more significantly perhaps, a 3 months suspended jail sentence for a staff member of the head hunting agency.

It goes without saying that L'Oreal categorically reject the racism charge. It rejected it so much so that it has reportedly (in a different development) decided to continue selling skin bleaching agents to dark(er) skinned Philippina and Philippino. The company promises that its product 'White Perfect' will produce a 'glow within'. I can imagine that people reading this will glow with anger about such health hazards (and so add a slightly reddish blemish to their skin colour variations).

QED, L'Oreal definitely is not a racist organisation. Quite to the contrary, by aiming to make us all look pink with its 'White Perfect' product it shows that really it is a great equalising force. I am just being sarcastic, of course.

There is something terribly sad about Indian and Mexican soap operas' lead characters being usually white or nearly white, while the roles of cleamers, criminals and so on and so forth remain reserved for the darker actors. The same is true of 'White Perfect'.

I guess the only sensible answer to such an issue is to outlaw the sale of 'White Perfect' and similar products and to prescribe ethnicity specific representativeness in things like soap operas. End of story. We have been waiting for voluntarily sensible behaviours, and they just didn't happen. The French court was right to punish those involved. The country must have learned something from the race riots it recently endured.

Irresponsible governments - accountability for acts and omissions

The South African Health Minister Manto Tshabalala - Msimang and Treatment Action Campaign's Zackie Achmat have frequently crossed swords in the past. He was asked by a local paper whether he could ever be friends with her. Achmat replied "no", and explained: "Almost a million people have died and for that I don't think that I could ever establish a friendship with her."

Forget the question of whether or not anyone would want to be friends with such an egotistical, petty character as the South African Minister for Health Prevention and the country's similarly deluded President. There's a more interesting issue, and that issue is this. Consequentialist ethicists (among others) have made much of rejecting the acts and omissions doctrine. They claim, essentially, that all other things being equal, you are as responsible for the consequences of your actions as you are for the consequences of your omissions to act when you could have acted. I think that this makes perfectly sense.

Here then is an interesting challenge: Remember a mass murderer like Slobodan Milosevich, the Christian slaughterer or anything not Christian/Serbian during the civil wars in former Yugoslawia? Many people died as a direct consequences of his actions (read: policies). Well, if we really believe that the acts and omissions doctrine doesn't make much sense, we surely need some international court of justice that holds governments responsible for policies that omit to act when they could have acted to prevent significant harm to their citizens. Thabo Mbeki, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang and the ANC government are responsible for up to 1 million of preventable deaths in Southern Africa due to their refusal to provide medication to these people when they could have.

I am still flabbergasted that nobody in South Africa seems keen on holding these liberation politics apparatchicks responsible for the preventable deaths of more than a million poor Black South Africans. Just imagine such genocidal policies had been enacted by a white government. The world would have been up in arms, and quite rightly so. Surely, holding a Black run government to lower standards of performance, competence etc is in itself racist, isn't it?

... or am I missing something?