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incredible lack of self-awareness from Pinker here

Paragraph 1: here are all the ways i parroted racist, right-wing critiques of my employer Paragraph 2: what’s with all these racist right-wing critiques of my employer that i parroted??

“I'll start with myself. During my decades at the university I've been an extraordinary bigot.”

amazingly fucked up that the NYT is uncritically publishing the claim, “Race has some biological reality.” that is, definitionally, racism. textbook.

'Race has some biological reality.' Is surely a statement of fact, consider our skin colours, features, hair type. They are biological differences we inherit but we are still all human & equal. It is not biological differences that divide some of us, it is fear of difference which creates prejudice.

Race is a social categorization based on appearance and imagined ancestry. It's not weird for a social categorization to draw on observable biological traits, and those may be correlated with hard to observe traits. But that's the social category using biology, not biology causing the category.

How is a difference not a reality? I've always regarded it to be like accents within the same country. We can sound very different but we are all the same. I just try to see and accept humanity in all its diversity...

The issue is that "race" involves a backwards theory of the difference. People see differences, attribute them to ancestry, and that's called race. The differences, including behavior and inequality, can be real or perceived, but there's no good evidence that most of them are causes by ancestry.

The idea of "race" causes people to explain stuff based on ancestry. That idea is more real than actual biological differences by ancestry. See?