It doesn't mean there weren't any in-group dynamics or discrimination though. Race simply wasn't the focus. People would discriminate based on things like religion instead.
Fortunately we don't have to stay at that level and can over come it to an extent, but claiming it wasn't a thing in medieval and other empires is factually incorrect.
What do we mean when we talk about human races anyway? I've been thinking about this for a few minutes now and I am stumped.
Agreed. But I feel ethnicity is "used" in a way like "race".
> Race is defined through genetics.
Sure? I thought genetically race had a very weak basis, and that it was basically some aspects of bodily looks and location of genetical/blood origination? The main reason we needed ethnicity as a term, because race was "simply not there in the genes" and thus "mostly about looks" which gave it very little use in proper science.
A lot of it remains when group emirates but keeps being close knit.
That is ethicity.
I find it hard to understand how some people still cling to 1960s "there is no such thing as race" arguments while in the real world you can send a swab of spit to 23andme or similar services and get a precise breakdown of your ethnic background down to the percentage.
No, you can't. You can get bullshit geneology which you shouldn't take seriously.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21687013
> But in a public guide, published by Sense About Science, Prof David Balding and Prof Mark Thomas of University College London warn that such histories are either so general as to be "personally meaningless or they are just speculation from thin evidence".
> The scientists say that genetic profiles cannot provide accurate information about an individual's ancestry.
> They say "the genetic ancestry business uses a phenomenon well-known in other areas such as horoscopes, where general information is interpreted as being more personal than it really is".
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/nov/04/home-dna-kit-f...
>Ancestry’s DNA expert Mike Mulligan (93% Irish – everyone’s email at Ancestry gives their ethnicity breakdown) admits that the ethnicity percentage is a “top line” estimate derived from just a very small part of our DNA, a couple of letters long in the 3bn letters that make up our DNA, and that there are a lot of “inferences” made from the data. Precision is still a problem for DNA kits. Mulligan says that the Irish, Scots and Welsh are “almost indistinguishable from a DNA point of view”. Meanwhile, when it comes to western Europe “it is the most traipsed-about part of the planet The amount of DNA that has been blurred together is incredible”. Remarkably, DNA testers can’t really tell the difference between German and French DNA.
https://gizmodo.com/how-dna-testing-botched-my-familys-herit...
> I suspected the error might lay not in my family narrative, but in the DNA test itself. So I decided to conduct an experiment. I mailed my own spit samples to AncestryDNA, as well as to 23andMe and National Geographic. For each test I got back, the story of my genetic heritage was different—in some cases, wildly so.
etc etc.
All I'm saying is, this has nothing to do with the results of a 23andme sequencing run, which would provide details about your ancestry. Race (in the US sense) correlates pretty weakly with ancestry, e.g. all the early humans for most of human history were black.
I do think that ancestry can provide valuable insights into one's self, however I'm still not sold on the necessity or reality of race. Ancestry is not written on a person's face.
Skin color, facial structure and other commonly held visual traits of "race" don't map strongly to genetic identifiers that could form some scientifically valid definition of "race." Two black people living in the same area, sharing the same cultural and ethnic identity, can differ more genetically than either with a white immigrant.
In other words, that "black" is a race, and "white" is a race, etc, is entirely a social construct, which should be non-controversial given that these categories were created and solidified, culturally and politically, long before genetic science was even a thing.
I'm pretty sure that's false. What is true is that africans exhibit a great amount of genetic diversity, i.e. two africans will typically be more genetically different than two europeans. But the genetic distance between either of those two africans and either of those two europeans will still be even greater.
> In other words, that "black" is a race, and "white" is a race, etc, is entirely a social construct, which should be non-controversial given that these categories were created and solidified, culturally and politically, long before genetic science was even a thing.
It's a social construct to the same extent as colors are a social construct, which were formulated long before the theories of electromagnetism was even a thing.
A thing being a social construct doesn't mean it doesn't describe an underlying reality. That applies to any category invented by mankind. For instance, considering plants and animals, or even living beings and inanimate objects, as belonging to different categories is also a social construct. Because, after all, they're all just an association of atoms.
I didn't say Africans and Europeans, I said black people and white people.
A black person from Africa and a black person from elsewhere are considered the same race because of their visual similarities, regardless of their background. That's the social construct.
>A thing being a social construct doesn't mean it doesn't describe an underlying reality
It can be inaccurate enough that it isn't useful, though.
Same thing
> A black person from Africa and a black person from elsewhere are considered the same race because of their visual similarities, regardless of their background. That's the social construct.
And also perhaps because they actually are from the same race? Do you consider all the current inhabitants of the USA to be native americans?
> It can be inaccurate enough that it isn't useful, though.
That's true, but racial categories are really accurate, especially in this age of cheap DNA testing. As for usefulness, I'd say it's pretty useful in the medical field, for instance certain drugs work in some races but not in others due to racial differences in body chemistry.
As for medicine, while the efficacy of drugs can be ethnicity dependent, race is such a weak proxy for it that it often leads to mistakes when doctors operate by habit. Nothing trumps actual genetic screening (as opposed to "which Anglo-centric category do you fit best based on how you look").
Do you know how well dating services currently work for less desired groups? OKCupid has stats on their engineering blog and its not pretty