Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

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Ugh. Look ignoring race is why people of color systematically get worse medical treatment. Look at Sickle Cell Anemia. It is widely documented that people of color whose ancestors were from Africa and sub Sahara are much susceptible to it. This has been studied extensively and all potential confounding factors have been ruled out. Is it racist to study this? Is it racist to use our understanding of genetic research to try to figure out how to treat this particular syndrome?

Race the social construct is a social construct. We are the same species. Period, the end. But differences in genetics and physiology do warrant study because this is how we can find treatments and preventative measures to a multitude of disease.

This is a lot like saying that research that shows that men are more susceptible to heart attacks then women is sexists because gender is a social construct. Gender is a complex topic that evolves with our evolving understanding of wha it means to be human on a philosophical level. But the X chromosome isn’t a social construct and has very direct very tangible effects. You can’t call it a social construct.

In short: when it comes to how we build a society, recognize differences and account for them to bring as much economic opportunity equality to everyone. When it comes to medicine, study everything including genetic differences in order to get the best understanding of the problem at hand. Getting offended doesn’t get us closer to for example a cure for COVID, does it?

This "race is a social construct" meme is something I have been trying to grapple recently.

I think the point is that races are based on a handful of cherry-picked phenotype differences. On the one hand, these characteristics are a decent proxy for human migrations in the past and might map to evolutionary events with clinical implications. On the other hand, another set of genetically conditioned characteristics would be similarly good at that. In an alternate universe, humans might have defined race based on hair color and height, and that would possibly match evolutionary history in another useful way.

The episode of Rick and Morty about Unity has a race war based on nipple shape.

But if you want a really interesting thought experiment consider what would happen if other species of humans than sapiens would have survived along us. Would the Declaration of Independence start with “we the people” or “we the sapiens”? Would the myth of Christ be that he died for sins of men or some specific subset of humans?

But really I don’t see much of a problem with race both being a social construct and a biological reality in the sense that we are talking about two related but separate phenomena. Socially, race is a construct. The idea that judging by your skin color or shape of skull we can tell how smart or virtuous you are is bogus. A lot of people have tried to justify science behind it and all of it has not been science. Scientifically we have a number of genetic differences that can be traced between different origins of our genetic trees. Some of these are inconsequential like some people having straight hair and others having curly hair. Others are more impactful like ability to metabolize lactose as adults. Or susceptibility to heart disease or certain cancers. The kicker is that it is easier to tell the public “if you are ethnicity X you might want to get your heart checked out 5 years before another ethnicity because statistically it’s more beneficial that way” than to say the same thing as “if you have genes A, B, and C”. When my doctor tells me that because I am Easter European my cholesterol is more likely to be elevated, I don’t take offense to that.

Having said all that, don’t use “blacks” or “whites” as a damn noun. That isn’t ok.

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