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

[vhawk01]

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You say something that you know will elicit emotional response, and then dole out your canned retort, basically some random combination of 'college professor, liberal, race card, mindless and naive.'

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It's kinda like a freeway car wreck. I just can't help but look. SOme day I'll tire sparing with the indoctinated youth.

There's 'ignore' you know. What's your excuse?

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I loathe the ignore feature. Only one resident so far and no plans to add another. And you edited out the critical part of my post, which is that you rarely choose to address the posts which make actual, valid criticisms of your position and instead focus on the easy-to-combat ones. Don't worry, I bolded it for you this time so its easier to ignore.

[HeavilyArmed]

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And also, you tend to ignore the posts which actually challenge your points and instead choose to respond only to the weak-sister, easy-target posts as in the above example.

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I'm content at times to admit that there is nowhere to go. I quit instead of wasting any effort on immovable objects.

[vhawk01]

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I cringe any time I see the words "social construct."

Race exists. It is beyond ignorant to deny this. Take some human children from any country or culture in the world. It doesn't matter what society they are from, or whether they've even had any exposure to people of a different race. Show them, individually, a few slides of black people and tell them that these people are "black." Show them some slides of chinese people and tell them that these people are "asian." Show them some American wasps and tell them that these people are "white." Now show them various images of people and ask them to identify whether they are black, white or asian. Common sense should tell you that, even in the absence of an explanation of what race is, each answer will have an extremely significant percentage (I'd guess 90% or more) indicating what race the person is. Nesrly all the children will identify Jerry Seinfeld as white, Chris Rock as black, and Jet Li as asian, regardless of the context of the picture.

I know this test has been done before, and I'm not even going to bother looking for it because it is so painfully obvious. If children of different societies repeatedly show the ability to identify something with great agreement, then there must be something there.

Just because race isn't identified by a scientifically functional, discontinuous property (like species) does not mean that it does not exist. It's a readily identifiable phenotype that any five year old can understand. If civilization hadn't exploded when it did, the races would have speciated too. Are we to believe that inter-group phenotype differences do not exist until the arbitrary point when they can no longer produce fertile offspring?

Mainstream academia does a great disservice to society by making such idiotic claims like "race does not exist." Yes, racism is a problem. It has existed in every multi-cultural society in the history of the world. Is trying to pretend that race doesn't exist really the solution? I don't think so.

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If that is all race is, skin color (plus a very limited number of superficial features (and it is a limited number,for instance, those children might have a hard time picking out 'Japanese' or 'Korean (don't you just love these nested parentheticals?))) then your point is obvious to the point of not needing to be stated. But if thats the case, why call it race? Its just color. Ask those kids to identify this guy, and they will almost certainly all say white, but he isn't. His father would clearly be labeled black. Doesn't this demonstrate that these children are NOT adept at determining race, but are just adept at differentiating colors? We know they can do that already. And I would bet that almost none of those kids would even say he was a mix, or half-black, or anything. They'd just immediately say white, because all they are grouping is colors, NOT race.

[vhawk01]

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And also, you tend to ignore the posts which actually challenge your points and instead choose to respond only to the weak-sister, easy-target posts as in the above example.

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I'm content at times to admit that there is nowhere to go. I quit instead of wasting any effort on immovable objects.

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As a favor, or a gesture of good faith, please respond to my post about the lack of efficacy of racial profiling. I made a comparison to medical diagnostic tests. I think I've shown that I am far from immovable on this forum, but maybe you disagree.

[HeavilyArmed]

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But if thats the case, why call it race?

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Tradition.

[vhawk01]

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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.

[Rduke55]

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The enormous difference in the usefulness of the two classifications makes the tiny task of asking or determining ethnicity well, well worth it.

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I agree with that statement. (I'm not sure if you think I didn't)

[vhawk01]

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The enormous difference in the usefulness of the two classifications makes the tiny task of asking or determining ethnicity well, well worth it.

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I agree with that statement. (I'm not sure if you think I didn't)

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No, I assumed you did agree with it. I was just trying to give a justification for why I generally completely disregard race (at least if the issue is anything remotely important) and as an excuse if I happen to have the wrong specific definition of 'race' in mind.

[HeavilyArmed]

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I'm sorry, I interpreted your quote in roughly the following way, "I don't really care about the particulars of genetic classification--racial divisions based on skin color are useful because people with those skin colors behave in certain ways." If this isn't a fair paraphrase, please explain the subtleties I missed.

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You're not too far off. I'm more than content to use all the information at hand even if it fails the PC racist test. Do you have any doubt about the correlation of American blacks and violent crime? Causation is not the issue, personal safety is. Do you doubt white flight? Can all those whites be making the same wrong assumption, that avoiding urban American blacks makes for a safer life? It's statistically sound, PC poison. I'll stick with the obvious, you are welcome to the social constructs.

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The bolded part is obvious to the point of being absurd. White flight in no way supports your argument.

The problem I see with racial profiling is analogous to issues with medical screening tests. If the risk for a woman having breast cancer is 5%, and we have a diagnostic test that is 80% effective, a positive result means she is STILL unlikely to have cancer. So, the question is: Does your screening test (black or not, for example) have a higher sensitivity for crime than 80% or does your population (all black people) have a higher incidence of criminality than 5%? I think both of those are obvious no's. So, while it may be entirely valid that a positive result for 'being black' modifies the risk of criminality, it is still overwhelmingly unlikely they are a criminal.

For this reason, most medical societies would never recommend screening tests like the above (most of the screening tests we use either have better sensitivity or the prior risk is higher) or at the very least using them cautiously. The reason I would be opposed to racial profiling is not because of its statistical inaccuracy, necessarily (after all, it has some outcome as long as its done correctly) but the ACTIONS that are then taken from that. We just don't modify the risk enough to really justify ANY sort of action that could have negative consequences (like alienating an entire group of people, trampling on liberty, etc.)

Maybe I am in the minority here, but if this test conferred something like a 98% sensitivity, I would be in favor of it. The amount of discomfort would clearly be justified IMO by the amazing efficacy of the test. We could dramatically cut crime. But this is nowhere near the case.

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I didn't ignore this, I missed it.

While your points are reasonable I might quibble about the marginal increase in criminality WRT individual black male youth, it's shockingly high.

You're missing the big picture. If you reside in a situation where half the residents are black and on average commit 6 times the violent crime as the other (white) half, you are facing greater peril than in an all white neighborhood. Yes, there are bad white neighborhoods but it's not even close, all considered. Outside of the academic crowd these things don't even need to be discussed. It's common sense.

Is that racist? Yeah, prolly but it's entirely pragmatic and it's the reason for white flight (I'll ignore the schools issue unless you're looking for a 2nd worm can).

[Rduke55]

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Take some human children from any country or culture in the world. It doesn't matter what society they are from, or whether they've even had any exposure to people of a different race. Show them, individually, a few slides of black people and tell them that these people are "black." Show them some slides of chinese people and tell them that these people are "asian." Show them some American wasps and tell them that these people are "white." Now show them various images of people and ask them to identify whether they are black, white or asian. Common sense should tell you that, even in the absence of an explanation of what race is, each answer will have an extremely significant percentage (I'd guess 90% or more) indicating what race the person is. Nesrly all the children will identify Jerry Seinfeld as white, Chris Rock as black, and Jet Li as asian, regardless of the context of the picture.

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