I can't believe I'm starting a race thread...

[HeavilyArmed]

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But if thats the case, why call it race?

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Tradition.

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And that is very nearly the sole reason. Almost no other usefulness.

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I promise you damn near every American knows exactly what 'race' means. It's on every government form.

Obfuscate if you must but clarity and universal understanding has value.

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Then define it for me. It should be amazingly simple. Give me a definition that doesn't include as many exceptions and complications as it does clear definitions.

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Bring me a boatload of people and I'll sort them for you. A five year old is almost equally skilled. An Ivy League academic, not so much.

[bunny]

OK well I pretty much agree with you. (Funny how it sometimes takes hundreds of words to get to that.)

Perhaps you dont, but plenty of people DO say "There's no such thing as race" and I'm sure their motivation is to prevent bigotry. I agree with hmkpoker (I think it was) in that they are doing us a disservice. I think it is far better to say it IS a real trait rather than pretend there's nothing to talk about.

The book I eventually found to paraphrase in the above definition was one of the few that addressed human race. It listed a number of things (distribution of blood types was another which I remember) none of which were diagnostic but when taken together provided an objective, probabilistic way of assigning person X to race A, B or C.

[hmkpoker]

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But what does the child's identification say about their genome?

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That it contains unique, identifiable phenotypic characteristics.

Dismissing these obvious characteristics as "social constructs" denies that they exist.

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Like what phenotypes though? I think Rduke's point is that your list is going to be very, very short. Skin color and a few others, but thats it. The group of people that most human beings would agree to call black really do NOT share a laundry list of unique, identifiable phenotypes. And there are other classification systems that share far more.

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It doesn't have to be a laundry list. The mere fact that they possess common, unique, indentifiable phenotypes is evidence that there is something that constitutes race. It doesn't matter for the purposes of this discussion that there are more intra-racial differences than inter-racial differences; the point is that there are inter-racial differences.

Human DNA is some 90+% similar to that of an equine. We are far more alike than different. Therefore, the differences between humans and horses are a social construct.

[vhawk01]

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But if thats the case, why call it race?

[/ QUOTE ]

Tradition.

[/ QUOTE ]

And that is very nearly the sole reason. Almost no other usefulness.

[/ QUOTE ]

I promise you damn near every American knows exactly what 'race' means. It's on every government form.

Obfuscate if you must but clarity and universal understanding has value.

[/ QUOTE ]

Then define it for me. It should be amazingly simple. Give me a definition that doesn't include as many exceptions and complications as it does clear definitions.

[/ QUOTE ]

Bring me a boatload of people and I'll sort them for you. A five year old is almost equally skilled. An Ivy League academic, not so much.

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Yep I was pretty sure you wouldn't be able to come up with one. Weird, its almost like THAT WAS THE POINT OF THE THREAD!

[Phil153]

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Race is a social construct because it is an oversimplification of human genetic diversity.

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If we killed everyone that ever used the term "social construct" as a way of making a point, the world would be a better place.

As for race - here's my take. I'm sick of this nonsense so I'm going to make it clear for all of you.

Firstly. Race is a rule of thumb which is used to roughly classify people based on both ethnicity and cultural origin. It is a horribly imprecise term, and as such has little scientific meaning. The apologist cowards like Midge and Mr. "social construct" above try to hide behind that fact.

But - and here's the point that often gets lost with all this nonsense - ethnicity is a very real thing. By ethnicity I am referring to the isolated populations groups that existed for a good 10K-80K years of human development. And there appears to be very strong evidence that intelligence, innate behavior, and (less so) physical prowess vary significantly between ethnic groups. For example, if I took income/socioeconomic status matched pairs of a random East Asian with a random person of Sub Saharan African origin, the great majority of the time, the East Asian would come out ahead in terms of intelligence - often far ahead. You would find this result in any country.

Why does this matter? Because it can explain a great deal in terms of social outcomes. Because it helps us to understand why education and training programs for black people don't work as they should, and possibly develop better alternatives more suited to their innate qualities. Because it puts expensive, wasteful programs like affirmative action in their proper perspective. Americans are catapulting incompetent idiots into positions of powers for the sake of political correctness.

And the most important reason is: because it's the truth, and we ignore the truth at our peril.

Ethnicity is a real and very meaningful classification. If people wish to debate that, I'm all ears.

[vhawk01]

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But what does the child's identification say about their genome?

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That it contains unique, identifiable phenotypic characteristics.

Dismissing these obvious characteristics as "social constructs" denies that they exist.

[/ QUOTE ]
Like what phenotypes though? I think Rduke's point is that your list is going to be very, very short. Skin color and a few others, but thats it. The group of people that most human beings would agree to call black really do NOT share a laundry list of unique, identifiable phenotypes. And there are other classification systems that share far more.

[/ QUOTE ]

It doesn't have to be a laundry list. The mere fact that they possess common, unique, indentifiable phenotypes is evidence that there is something that constitutes race. It doesn't matter for the purposes of this discussion that there are more intra-racial differences than inter-racial differences; the point is that there are inter-racial differences.

Human DNA is some 90+% similar to that of an equine. We are far more alike than different. Therefore, the differences between humans and horses are a social construct.

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I think we may be saying the same thing, however, it DOES have to be more than one characteristic. If the only shared phenotypical difference was color, for instance, than race is simply defined as color. We are left with statements like "Black people tend to be black." "White people tend to be white." And of course these aren't even absolutes, since we have albino blacks, etc. There has to be AT LEAST one other characteristic that goes along with color. And in order for it to have any sort of practical use, there should be several. For example, we can say that black people tend to be black AND that black people tend to have a higher incidence of sickle-cell. This seems to work out pretty well, but only because the race 'black' and the ethnicity 'people of African descent' happen to coincide extremely well in this case. Nearly everyone that we would call 'black' has similar enough origins to share the high incidence of sickle-cell trait. Its a lucky coincidence, but sickle-cell isn't really a racial trait, its an ethnic one.

I am white, as is Jaroslav the Czech. But I have almost a 5x chance of being a carrier for cystic fibrosis. So our racial similarity (white skin) ends there. We do NOT have the lucky coincidence of sharing recent-enough ethnicity to confer other similarites.

[vhawk01]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Race is a social construct because it is an oversimplification of human genetic diversity.

[/ QUOTE ]

If we killed everyone that ever used the term "social construct" as a way of making a point, the world would be a better place.

As for race - here's my take. I'm sick of this nonsense so I'm going to make it clear for all of you.

Firstly. Race is a rule of thumb which is used to roughly classify people based on both ethnicity and cultural origin. It is a horribly imprecise term, and as such has little scientific meaning. The apologist cowards like Midge and Mr. "social construct" above try to hide behind that fact.

But - and here's the point that often gets lost with all this nonsense - ethnicity is a very real thing. By ethnicity I am referring to the isolated populations groups that existed for a good 10K-80K years of human development. And there appears to be very strong evidence that intelligence, innate behavior, and (less so) physical prowess vary significantly between ethnic groups. For example, if I took income/socioeconomic status matched pairs of a random East Asian with a random person of Sub Saharan African origin, the great majority of the time, the East Asian would come out ahead in terms of intelligence - often far ahead. You would find this result in any country.

Why does this matter? Because it can explain a great deal in terms of social outcomes. Because it helps us to understand why education and training programs for black people don't work as they should, and possibly develop better alternatives more suited to their innate qualities. Because it puts expensive, wasteful programs like affirmative action in their proper perspective. Americans are catapulting incompetent idiots into positions of powers for the sake of political correctness.

And the most important reason is: because it's the truth, and we ignore the truth at our peril.

Ethnicity is a real and very meaningful classification. If people wish to debate that, I'm all ears.

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Holy crap. When did this happen, Phil? I am fairly positive you used to sing a fairly different (although not completley incompatible) tune a while ago. This is a good post, and I pretty much agree with all of this.

[vhawk01]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
But what does the child's identification say about their genome?

[/ QUOTE ]

That it contains unique, identifiable phenotypic characteristics.

Dismissing these obvious characteristics as "social constructs" denies that they exist.

[/ QUOTE ]
Like what phenotypes though? I think Rduke's point is that your list is going to be very, very short. Skin color and a few others, but thats it. The group of people that most human beings would agree to call black really do NOT share a laundry list of unique, identifiable phenotypes. And there are other classification systems that share far more.

[/ QUOTE ]

It doesn't have to be a laundry list. The mere fact that they possess common, unique, indentifiable phenotypes is evidence that there is something that constitutes race. It doesn't matter for the purposes of this discussion that there are more intra-racial differences than inter-racial differences; the point is that there are inter-racial differences.

Human DNA is some 90+% similar to that of an equine. We are far more alike than different. Therefore, the differences between humans and horses are a social construct.

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Also, real quick, your equine analogy is very wrong. Saying that we are more alike than we are different is NOT the same as saying intragroup variation is higher than intergroup variation. There is definitely more intergroup variation between horses and humans than their is within the group of humans (or probably horses, although to be fair I don't know much about horses.) Humans have a very small amount of intragroup variability, due to bottlenecking.

[Phil153]

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Holy crap. When did this happen, Phil? I am fairly positive you used to sing a fairly different (although not completley incompatible) tune a while ago. This is a good post, and I pretty much agree with all of this.

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I've always stated that. It's the only defensible position. Intellectually dishonest people tried to paint is a skin color/racist debate, which it never was. Who seriously claims that blacks from far north Africa are the same as Sub Saharans? Or that Australian Aborigines are the same as Pacific Islanders?

[HeavilyArmed]

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This is a good post, and I pretty much agree with all of this.


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How can that be? I do too.

This leads to some weird inequality that I'm unqualified to put forward here.