Even though 'Race' is A Social Construct, Racism Persists

Apparently you think you know more about genetics than geneticists and biologists. That's not a very convincing argument.

What is the definition of race then? All you have said is that it's people who look different. Genetically speaking, two people can look very different and have more similar DNA than two people who look very similar. For example: two black people can be more dissimilar in DNA than a white and a black person.

I feel like I'm repeating myself.

 

and that is the basis for different races.

According to some arbitrary threshold if not what is enough difference to categorize races? Just FYI we've been doing it longer than we've known about DNA.

so what is the official definition of race?

race was defined long before we even knew what genetics was. Therefore genetics determining Factor plays absolutely no role in defining race.

Okay it seems like you're jumping around in some strange cognitive hopscotch.

So I'm going to attempt to respond to this in a way that addresses what you are saying.

First the distance of race is not connected to racism. Race is observed characteristics not genetic but observed characteristics. Acknowledging that in no way implies that a person believes that one race is inferior or Superior. It is simply acknowledging different characteristics. I can recognize that only black people can have black babies and not think that that makes them inferior at the same time it is just an accident or a variety of their birth.

 

I'm sorry you can post all the scholarly pontification you want it does not negate something that has been observed for thousands of years.

I don't think you understand my position

okay for the third time anatomical and physical characteristics.

 

I already debunked that ridiculous point. You can still tell apart white people from albino blacks, but if you dye a brunette's hair blond you can't tell her apart from a blonde.

So race is a group of traits not one single trait.

You should read threads before answering.

 

Acknowledging that races exist has nothing to do with saying that certain races are superior to others. Everybody agrees that races exist in animals yet you don't see anyone say that black pandas are superior to brown pandas or something.

Also, race deniers have no moral high ground whatsoever. From Wikipedia, defnition of "ethnocide" :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnocide

Indigenous peoples have the collective and individual right not to be subjected to ethnocide and cultural genocide, including prevention of and redress for:
(a) Any action which has the aim or effect of depriving them of their integrity as distinct peoples, or of their cultural values or ethnic identities;
(b) Any action which has the aim or effect of dispossessing them of their lands, territories or resources;
(c) Any form of population transfer which has the aim or effect of violating or undermining any of their rights;
(d) Any form of assimilation or integration by other cultures or ways of life imposed on them by legislative, administrative or other measures;
(e) Any form of propaganda directed against them.

So denying separate people their identity and branding them as interchangeable is recognized as a component of a deliberate destruction process of the said peoples. This is what race denialism amounts to.

 

Its all in the mind, a persons gender and race are fluid. If a man is trapped in a womans body, he just declares he is a woman and the world has to honor her claim. So the solution to racism is simple, if a black woman thinks she is being discriminated against then she should believe she is a white man. Problem solved.

I don't understand why "progressives" are so worked up about racism when its so easy to solve. Unless it isn't so easy, and "progressive" ideas of gender and race are horse ****.

 

You didn't debunk anything and you completely missed the point. The point is that these differences, hair color, eye color, skin color are cosmetic. Holding biased views on a group of people with different color skin is as silly and arbitrary as believing all blondes are dumb. There is no scientific basis for it.

 

"cosmetic"? Lol. Not a scientific term.

Did you just say that differences in appearance have no genetic origin?

 

If one believes the scientists, every single one of us going back far enough had the same mother, Lucy. Then humans migrated out of Africa to fill the four corners of the world. That would make each living human being on this planet an African-something. Africa is the original homeland to all of us.

If one doesn't believe the scientists, goes by Adam and Eve, then each and everyone of us are the decedents of Adam and Eve and we all migrated out of the Garden of Eden.

Then due to the different environments, evolution etc. we took on different traits and out of one race became many. Although race is probably the wrong word since every single Tom, Dick and Harriet belong to the human race. Perhaps sub-spices or sub-races?

The fact today is the world has become so small that due to migration, tourism, wars, inter-racial marriage, and a host of other things from many races we are now migrating back to one. Can't come soon enough.

 

I never claimed it was a scientific term? And no, I said the genetic difference of skin color is as much a determining factor of intelligence and ability as genetic differences in hair color is, which is to say not at all.

 

I never said anything about differences in ability, nor does the existence of races depend on ideas of superiority in any way. You can stop strawmanning me anytime now.

 

I don't think that the problem is some abstract belief in the superiority or inferiority of tribes different to your own. You can believe that another tribe is more intelligent, beautiful, courageous, whatever ... the real question is, do you want a lot of them living near you, or even ruling you?

I've just seen a collection of vacation photos taken by a couple from the Czech Republic. They had visited Paris long ago, and came back for a second visit. What they saw, they didn't like, and no one posting on this forum would either, although some would feel compelled to deny it.

 

I don't have any problem with families from any part of the world moving in next to me. Why should I? And I don't want anyone ruling me. Seems like an odd sort of question. Not entirely sure of the intellectual leap you're making from living next to you to ruling you.

How could i say whether I'd like it or not when you didn't describe to us what they saw and what they didn't like about it.

 

I don't think so. I believe I share 97% to 99% of my DNA with a black person, but our DNA's are not EXACTLY the same. If they were identical, we'd look no different.

 

Except that sub-races and sub-species do not exist according to genetics.

 

That is not a race problem. It is a cultural and assimilation failure.

 

Perhaps races as we commonly call them really don't exist then. Black, white, brown, yellow humans are all the same race just like a black or brown or different color cats are of one species.

 

Bobby Ram: You say, "I don't have any problem with families from any part of the world moving in next to me. Why should I? And I don't want anyone ruling me. Seems like an odd sort of question. Not entirely sure of the intellectual leap you're making from living next to you to ruling you." Quite right. Probably most educated people would not 'officially' object to having a single family of any sort, provided they were law-abiding, living next door to them. This reflects the progress the human race is (very slowly) making. However, if you look around the world, you find that differing tribes very much object to each other's presence in 'their' country. The Hutus objected to the Tutsis so much that they slaughtered hundres of thousands of them. The Serbs and Croats went at each other in the 90s. Tamils, Sinhalese. Uighurs, Hans. etc etc etc etc etc.

And if you learned that a government program was going to move several tens of thousands of people from the South Side of Chicago into your neighborhood, assuming you know what life is like there, you would move.

But that would just be a rational decision. The fact is that most people want to be among 'their own', among people whose culture, values, worldview, they share. This is less true among the well-educated, which is probably a good description of most of the people posting here. A chemist or web-site designer or teacher has much less trouble, psychologically, in moving to Singapore or Tokyo to work, than an auto mechanic or cable TV installer, even though these places have much less crime and disorder than the US.

Camp Steveo: Yes, fair enough. The Muslim immigrants, and children of immigrants, and the young African men, who move to, or in the case of young Muslims, were born in, France, often do not assimilate to the country. And why should they? France is a country of atheists and Christian infidels, who colonized them and murdered their co-religionists or tribal members within living memory. If the immigrants were Norweigan or Dutch, their children would be French in all respects. The cultures are pretty close, and assimilation would happen automatically, just as the French immigrants to England, fleeing Roman Catholic persecution, blended in seamlessly to English society.

I think the 'race'/DNA issue is a huge intellectual trap. It's pointless: we see vicious tribal conflict in places where the DNA must be very very similar: lots of tribal warfare in Africa, and I'll bet the DNA of the Muslims and Hindus who kill each other regularly in the sub-continent is very close, as is the DNA of various Muslim tribes who kill each other all the time. Same for Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. It's just that sometimes DNA can color-code people, so it's easier to recognize an 'Other' -- but it's certainly not necessary for inter-human slaughter.

Americans above all peoples are singularly unprepared to understand this, given their particular history and official ideology. The same for intellectuals of all countries, who tend to wish that human tribal conflict didn't exist and then mistake the wish for the reality. (Although it's surprising, sometimes, how many intellectuals are actually unapologetic nationalists for their own tribe: in the early 90s I had dealings with an Armenian astrophysicist, and an Azerbaijani geneticist, just when war was breaking out between these two peoples. Both of them were 100% nationalist for their own side, which I admit somewhat shocked me. But it's how the world is ... but also hopefully how it is evolving away from.)

 

Actually, there is more genetic diversity between African tribes and Africa and the entire world.

"In humans, as in all species, genetic changes are the result of random mutations—tiny tweaks to DNA, the code of life. Mutations occur at a more or less constant rate, so the longer a group persists, handing down its genes generation after generation, the more tweaks these genes will accumulate. Meanwhile, the longer two groups are separated, the more distinctive tweaks they will acquire.

By analyzing the genes of present-day Africans, researchers have concluded that the Khoe-San, who now live in southern Africa, represent one of the oldest branches of the human family tree. The Pygmies of central Africa also have a very long history as a distinct group. What this means is that the deepest splits in the human family aren’t between what are usually thought of as different races—whites, say, or blacks or Asians or Native Americans. They’re between African populations such as the Khoe-San and the Pygmies, who spent tens of thousands of years separated from one another even before humans left Africa." natgeo

 

Quite right. Your tribe's DNA can be almost identical to that of another tribe, and yet you can have deep abiding hatred for them. The external signals (skin color, facial features) just make it easier to spot whom to kill.

The 'social construct' business is a diversion. When people use that phrase, they usually mean 'invalid'. They seem to think that the people they don't like ('racists') feel as they do because of an invalid assessment of the similarity, or otherwise, of the DNA of the groups they don't like. But racial classification long predates any knowledge of DNA: it's a generalization about tribes, the belief that tribes share external appearances tend to have patterns of behavior in common.

More importantly, 'social constructs' are very often based on reality, and are very useful to the individual. You can't understand the world today, without understanding tribal conflict (and by 'tribe' I don't mean only the tribes in the less civilized parts of the world, ie the conventional use of the word, but rather the primary-identifcation groups that most people have).

You can walk around Singapore late at night without any worries -- not so in the Black areas of American big cities. These different areas are populated by people of different 'socially-constructed' races. Everyone knows this, but some people are uncomfortable acknowledging it. However, as Marx said, ignorance never did anyone any good.

Knowing someone's race, or 'race', socially-constructed as it is, gives you a lot of information about them, albeit of a statistical sort. I can predict in advance that the winners of Nobel Prizes in Physics over the next decade will contain a high proportion of Jews, and a low proportion of sub-Saharan Africans, relative to their numbers in the world. Why this is true -- to what extent DNA has anything to do with it -- is a separate issue. (The co-discoverer of DNA thinks it has a lot to do with it, but what does he know?)

It's wrong, however, unnecessarily to apply a statistical truth to an individual, and it's wrong to engage in collective punishment of a group because of a statistical difference in its behavior compared to others. A civilized society should treat all of its citizens equally.

 

Just more politically correct propaganda from NatGeo.

Consider the fact that humans and primates share 96% of genes:

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/08/0831_050831_chimp_genes.html

I used NatGeo as a source so you couldn't dispute the reality.

Also note that humans and mice share 90% of genes.

Human DNA has a little more than 3 Billion base pairs.

NatGeo's differently twisted propaganda plays on the fact that the percentage difference is very small, however, it nonetheless exists.

As others have point out, any competent pathologist can examine a skeleton for less than 30 seconds and is able to discern not only the difference in sex, but also the difference in race.

These differences play out physiologically as well.

Now, we all know that the appendix is fed blood from the appendicular artery. And, we all know that Race is a social construct. Accordingly, we all know that society has constructed the appendicular artery to be attached to the iliac ramus artery.

Or to the ileocolic artery. Or to the anterior cecal artery, or the posterior cecal artery, or the ascending colic ramus artery, uh, you know, depending on the Race and Ethnic origin of the patient, um, which was, uh, you know, socially constructed.

 

All knowledge is socially constructed. The only question is, how close are our constructions to reality?

Newton's Laws of Motion were constructed by Newton, a product of his society. They were close to reality (for objects moving at speeds much less than that of light), but as we now know, were not perfect in their descriptions of reality. We now have constructed laws which are closer, if not perfect, descriptions of reality.

The concept of 'race' is used by everyone because it is a pretty good -- but not perfect -- fit to reality. The problem arises when our statistical generalizations run up against our ethical committments to fair play, and when people pursuing their material interests try to manipulate our thinking.

 

Here's more:

 

If you have to be a racial minority, in what country, or set of countries, is it best, or least worst, to be one?

Another way of asking this is: given the widespread, although historically recent, 'social construct' that no one should be discriminated against because of their race [or, as I think it's more helpful to call it, their tribal affiliation], in what country, or set of countries, is this social construct the most widely implanted in popular consciousness and the administration of the state?

Because the concept of treating people as equal before the law, regardless of race, also applies to sex, it's interesting to note that your answer to the above question will also tend name those countries where it is least negative to be female.

 

You have no idea what a social construct is. Let me try to help you out some. A social construct is a creation of society. Take religion for example. It's a socially constructed belief system and there exists many different forms of it throughout the world. Different societies have different religions. Some social groups have no religion, like atheists. Then we have physical constructs. This is reality. The physical existence. Gravity is a physical construct. It's not like religion in that it exists whether you believe in it or not. Knowledge stems from the observation of this physical universe. Now the institutions we study at to acquire this knowledge are social constructs, but not the knowledge itself.