Only deliberate sins matter!

Isn’t it, though? And yet here you are doing it.
Benjamin did not suggest that white people consciously try to make racism “look accidental.” White privilege as a concept is specifically understood to be unconscious. What he said was, WP makes it seem as though white self-centeredness and supremacy is accidental (and therefore not racist).

FYI, the idea that intent somehow mitigates or overrides outcome is a classic tenet of white privilege. Obviously, this is a belief (ahem, a learned belief!) not a conscious “tactic.” Not that it matters. Frankly, that distinction is irrelevant: there is no functional difference between a white person “accidentally abusing” zir white privilege and “doing so as a tactic.” Whether one represents modern humanity with only white faces because one consciously refuses to portray POC as fully-evolved humans (“tactic”) or because when one thinks of humans one thinks of people like oneself exclusively (“accident”)… either way, the outcome is the same: nonwhite people are erased. Which supports white supremacy.

But in the WP’d mindset, if the outcome in question is “just an accident,” then it is necessarily not racist. Apparently, only deliberate, obvious, old-school racism is capable of supporting white supremacy.

Lastly, not to get too personal, but… you’re doing it right now.
Failing to stay on topic, when the topic is white privilege? Supports white privilege.
I gotta tell ya, I’m really, really ticked here. Your comment: tries to turn the advanced-level convo about WP toward 101-level questions that aren’t even salient (Google is your buddy), strawmans the OP (he never “imputed” any such thing), randomly asserts a false white-privilege meme (ie: intent is the most important thing), and then closes with another derail attempt (are we to “falsify” something that was never said?).

And here you are supposedly— ostensibly— wondering about “intent.”
Think about it.

Facepalm doesn’t even begin to cover it.

I think I could forgive thinking it for a split second, or maybe even blurting it out before thinking it all the way through. But this person took the time to type that out and hit “Post” and still it never hit them that the average human is Asian?? As in, LITERALLY. The aliens would be so confused.

I just… unbelievable. It annoys me that a statement that dumb and privileged has to be up on the internet for the next foreseeable forever.

Additionally, there are a lot of people of color in evolutionary biology, and in human evolution and genetics. To claim that these are overwhelmingly “white” sciences is to downplay the numerous contributions of numerous scientists of color from around the world.

White gaze and white privilege absolutely exist in the sciences. At the same time, to claim that the majority of scientific research is assuming a white-supremacist teleological result a priori is pretty unfair and doesn’t represent the current state of the primary literature.

Benjamin.

When one makes a statement without delimiting it to one group, then one has to assume that everyone understands the context. Did I know that this was a US-centric context? Yes. Does it therefore make it alright that the author conduct the business in an implicitly US-centric context while decrying the White-centric context explicitly?

Sorry. Not in my book. Especially when all that was necessary was the use of the introductory clause of, “In the United States…”

Also, after thinking about it, there is nothing about saying NPR that excludes world reporting. In fact, NPR does a lot of world reporting. If the name of the broadcaster were Public Domestic Radio (or something similar), and all work was done solely in a domestic sense, then fine. However, that isn’t the case, either. (However, your use of the NPR = domestic radio argument is a red herring to my argumentation.)

The “discourse” the OP refers to is a Western discourse, and I would assume that most people reading this blog would know that. However, OP never claimed that the Western discourse of progressive evolution and white supremacy was the only discourse in the world.

Should there be more posts on this site about trends outside the US? Yes, I think there should.

But given the nature of this blog, there isn’t anything inherently wrong with presenting an American cultural artifact, and analyzing that artifact in the context of American culture.

I completely understand that NPR stands for National Public Radio. In fact, I am listening to NPR right now. However, the US-centric point-of-view robs the us of the ability of appreciating the greater context of the world at large, both as a social and political driver, but also as a foreign entity ourselves, when placed in the context of other countries.

Countries like China and South Korea are sending thousands of graduate students to leading universities in the United States. Many are working in different disciplines in science, engineering, mathematics, statistics, public health, etc. I would argue that East Asian nationals don’t carry with them a White bias — at least in the sense that the author is trying to perpetuate as a norm. These people are making advances in their disciplines, and many are then going back to their home countries to teach and do research there.

They will go back to teach in departments that are not based on concepts of “White = normal” but in departments in which the expected norm is “Chinese = normal” or “Korean = normal,” with all of the race-centrism that is associated with it. Again, the author makes no note of this.

What the author tries to do is parse the language (poorly) to say that this point was made, when above I point out that it wasn’t.

Of course, this whole point could have been avoided if the author had just written something like, “In the United States…” However, by not making this distinction, the point offers itself to be interpreted as universal. In other words, the fact that the author didn’t make this point doesn’t show me that the author understands the US-centrism analogue of the very point that the author is making.

As for technology, that’s also not as cut and dry as you make it out to be. H. neanderthalensis at least had some pretty complicated technology and symbolic representation to the extent that H. neanderthalensis has been implicated in the making of art.

And, as I said above, H. neanderthalensis couldn’t have been that different from H. sapiens, because there was gene flow going on between those two populations. Calling H. neanderthalensis “archaic” is kind of odd considering that much of modern humanity is at least partially neanderthal.

There’s no doubt that at some point the ability to handle technology, abstract language, and so on was acquired in human evolution. The question is when this acquisition occurred and how that relates to the history of gene flow in ancient human populations. Implying that human evolution climbs up through a ladderlike progression of H. habilis – H. erectus – H. neanderthalensis – H. sapiens is strictly incorrect. Not only were ancient human populations much more diverse than we have often given them credit for, but those diverse populations seem to have also mixed back in with the populations many of our ancestors are derived from.

Well, yeah, but its a perfectly good word for the accurate bit about them being “older” in time.

Also, older human ancestors lacked features of complexity that have come to exist in current ones (tool use, language, civilization building)

You can’t argue that humanity hasn’t increased in complexity over time, or even life in general. So there IS a kind of directionality, all other things being equal.

You say:

I’m saying this is one example of that discourse.

But that isn’t what you actually wrote. What you wrote was connecting one example to “a long history of discourse” without relating it at all to a condition outside that of the United States and/or Europe. I’m sorry, but there is a whole world outside of the White world, with its own perspectives of racial/national superiority; something that you failed to even acknowledge in your statements.

The complete and utter lack of acknowledgment of an existence outside that of the white/not-white dichotomy is what I was criticizing. Your statement (excuse) that it was in relation to “racial science and ethical justifications of colonialism, slavery, and genocide” and that this mean that they “are related to very particular histories” also smacks of cultural centrism.

Are you saying that the Japanese didn’t engage in what amounted to colonialism, slavery, and genocide in China and Korea before and during WW2? Are you saying that what the Han Chinese government is doing now with the Sinicization of the PRC doesn’t amount to colonialism and genocide? What about the actions taken against the Hmong peoples in Laos and Vietnam or the ethnic cleansing in Rwanda and the People’s Democratic Republic of the Congo? I’m sorry, but racial science has been used to justify colonialism, slavery and genocide outside of a White context. (Unless you classify that all racial science serves a White agenda is based on White supremacy principles, or some other non-falsifiable claim — which, to let you know, would thus make your premise next-to-useless in my book.)

By the way, you don’t really define what is “White.” Without actually having defined which races count as “White” in your schema (and I’m sure that you know that in the history of the US, Germans used to not be considered White, nor Greeks, Italians, Poles, Hungarians, or Russians), it makes it difficult to determine whether I should actually invest more time on this discussion. That is to say, if the focus of your argument is based on a normative definition of “White” based on your interpretation of race (one that others may well not share), then how can we possibly have a discussion on the topic of “US-centric cultural viewpoints”?