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Comment by badconvincer | Hacker News Reader

I would argue that Islam is not a race but it is almost entirely a non-white religion so there are some connotations there. Obviously the modern definition of white is socially constructed but it’s where we are currently.

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I've seen 'white' Roman Catholics from southern Italy that are far more swarthy than many Muslims from Iran or Lebanon. And I'd be hard pressed to visually distinguish an orthodox Greek from a muslim Turk... So yes, it's very much a socially constructed matter. Incidentally I believe Arabs, Persians, Turks, etc are often classified as caucasian (particularly on the US census I believe?) So these cultural definitions aren't even consistent within specific societal context. I've even seen some racists online say that Italians aren't white, because they aren't nordic.

They’re not. Arabs, Iranians etc. show up as Asian in the US though you’re free to pick whatever you want.

I suppose this is meant to be changed. I can't say I paid attention to what the 2020 census actually said, but on this matter Wikipedia says:

> White American, European American, or Middle Eastern American: those having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa. Following consultations with Middle East and North Africa (MENA) organizations, the Census Bureau announced in 2014 that it would establish a new MENA ethnic category for populations from the Middle East, North Africa and the Arab world.[18] However, this did not occur on the 2020 Census.

Ah yes the "Asian" monicker, the most generic and "racist" (in its own way) ethnical description in the English language

You're adding South Asians, SE Asians, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Mongols, etc all under the same umbrella

Seems to me that describing people based on their continent of origin, rather than their apparent 'race', is distinctly not racist. Though there is something to be said for the arbitrary nature in which Eurasia is split into 'two continents'.

Afro Eurasia is one single landmass.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afro-Eurasia

I think we’re on the same page, but I’d argue that a race is defined by how it’s used, if people decide to lump Muslims together into one category and generalize based on that, like is common in the West, then I’d say it’s probably a race.

(I don’t find the distinction to be very important outside of how it’s misused.)

What? An ideology is definitely not a race.

Racism is bad because you are judging people based on intrinsic characteristics they cannot change.

Being Muslim is... definitely not that.

The term "racism" has been used to describe prejudices against religious groups (not just what you or I would consider "intrinsic characteristics") for decades now: see the entry in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Fairly certain it's usually ethnic groups, not wider religious groups. Unfortunately I don't have a copy of the OED on hand.

That being said, luckily this still isn't racist, because there is no prejudice here. My problems with Islam are entirely rational.

Any sufficiently large group activity can become analogous to the family

Sharing a government of a country, a university president, an artistic director of a theatre, a religious leader or council of elders, a chief executive officer, the heads of a political party or mvmt, author of a media IP with a fandom, leader of a reinterpretation of an artistic work that has its own following

All of these things create little societies that are smaller than all of humanity. These all are modeled off of family dynamics and to minister over them requires the community toown their own language the languages which leads naturally to the Tower of Babel problem.

The Tower of Babel problem which is that translation of language/dialect/accent/jargon from one group to another is cognitively taxing and anticipation of that work makes us angry/despairing on an emotional level

If everyone understood that these groups were different expressions of the same format we could all work together and the laws could be much simpler in one respect and more complicated in others (eg banning discrimination on the basis of race/creed/ethnicity/nation of origin/gender/age could remove the inexhaustible list of possibal tribal categories but they'd need to add some kind of Code of Conduct like a programming language has to handle their conferences and email groups)

Take the racist bullshit somewhere else.

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