Daily Inspiration Quote by J. Philippe Rushton

“Arbitrary and subjective” is doing double duty here: it acknowledges the most damning critique of racial taxonomy while trying to pre-empt it. Rushton frames the opposition as people “objecting to the concept of race,” not people contesting the scientific validity of particular racial categories. That shift matters. It subtly recasts methodological criticism as ideological squeamishness, as if the problem is emotional resistance to the idea of grouping humans rather than the empirical mess of making those groups cohere.

The sentence is built to sound modest and procedural, but it’s a rhetorical beachhead. By conceding that taxonomic definitions can be arbitrary, Rushton smuggles in an implication: arbitrariness doesn’t necessarily invalidate the enterprise. Lots of scientific categories are “constructed,” he hints; why should race be uniquely off-limits? The subtext is a familiar move in contentious science: concede complexity, then insist the contested category remains usable, especially for the kinds of comparative claims Rushton became infamous for making.

Context sharpens the intent. Rushton worked in a period when “race science” was being rebranded in the language of behavioral genetics and population differences, while critics increasingly emphasized clines, overlap, and the social production of racial boundaries. His phrasing flattens that debate into a tidy binary - objectors versus classifiers - and sidesteps the key question: not whether lines are subjective, but what happens politically and ethically when we treat those lines as natural kinds. The sentence reads like a calm preface to a storm.