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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

Race or culture isn't the issue but "identity politics" which mandates that one must see themselves and others not as the unique and wonderful individuals they are but as an impersonal member of a class to be treated according to the understood (or assumed) qualities of that class. Nothing is more destructive to cordial interpersonal relations than saying "Oh, you're an X and I will treat you as X-types ought to be treated" without regard to who the individual actually is.

It's not impossible to see, recognize, and appreciate races and cultures as long as the dignity of the individual is maintained.

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Race is a little bit the issue, because there's no biological basis for the idea that humans aren't just one single species.

A genuine observation and appreciation of "race" consists of understanding that humans do not have a single appropriate skin tone, mostly. I'm not sure what else there is for you, but it's not there for me.

Yes, humans are one single species, just like the dogs are one single species, and humans do not have a single appropriate skin tone, just like dogs do not have a single appropriate kind of fur, or single appropriate body proportions.

That doesn't change the fact that there are different dog breeds, or different human, well, let's not call them "races" or "breeds", but large vaguely-defined (because they form continuum) groups of distinctly different average appearances.

Edit: just to elaborate slightly, I suspect that if we would undertake a massive gene pool homogenization program (lots and lots of population migrations, cross-whatever marriages and child-bearings), we might in several hundred years arrive at a more or less uniformly skin-toned population in which case one, technically, could term that skin tone as "innately appropriate".

But I personally fail to see any allure in this: what's the point of averaging out the physical differences, they're mostly inconsequential anyway?

Gene pools are at least three-dimensional. Just because humans are diverse, does not imply that the gene pool is not well-mixed. And there's a rather famous anthropological observation that skin colors correlate with latitude, as well as well-understood mechanisms which control that correlation; there's a gentle tug-of-war between lowering the chance of rickets and lowering the chance of skin cancer.

Put another way, we already have had centuries of high-speed travel connecting the world and globalizing the population, and we do have region that produce "uniform" skin tones which look like the average of all of the local skin tones, but those regions also have lots of non-"uniform" skin tones. The people that you imagine are but one thin slice of a much thicker and richer gene pool.

Finally, please don't confuse the deliberate fancy breeding of dogs, pigeons, etc. with humans' natural free choice of how to use their sexuality. We frown on eugenics for humans for precisely the same reasons that dog breeders bemoan hip dysplasia.

What you're missing here is in reality, your life experience, outcomes and how you are treated in society can be very much a consequence of your "identity".

All groups are advocating for is equality of treatment from institutions and from society at large.

Is that too much to ask?

Once we get to that place there's nothing more marginalised groups would love to do then to stop being defined by race.

What you are missing is that "All Groups" are not simply asking for "equality of treatment from institutions and from society at large" in fact many groups are asking for equity not equality, there is a difference.

Sometimes this is referred to was "equality of outcome vs opportunity"

This a (frankly lazy) narrative often used to dismiss demands for equality.

You might be able to point to isolated incidents but to view group advocacy as a whole as malicious power grab is simply not true and a gross misrepresentation.

A better question is probably do you think certain groups are wrong in their perception that they are unfairly treated?

If yes then you are not acknowledging a vast amount of very clearly expressed life experience and if no why be against them advocating for themselves as a group?

In other words, a caste system developed from first principles.

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