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Comment by secondaryacct | Hacker News Reader

I put Mix: Normando-French in the "Other" category when Im asked at the census in Hong Kong giggling at their expected confused looks. What the fuck is a race, I look a bit different from a guy in Marseille and a lot different from a guy in Beijing but it's all a gradient, why make it discreet and give names (they split between western and viet for instance in HK... but isnt Vietnam west of China too??), do they also have a guide book so we cull impurities ?

It s insane to use races as a concept for humans when clearly we fuck just as dutifully as stray cats in a gutter. Racism is to talk of races.

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Not defending that particular application, but it is probably important for humans to make categories of things to be able to draw lines between them and find useful rules of how to deal with things. People like to make up labels for all kinds of (ir)relevant stuff and try to "other" people who are different in some way or to some degree. "my side, your side" stuff.

The important thing is, that we are also able to look beyond our categories and do not draw wrong conclusions from them. Keeping an open mind.

Race and ethnicity are meaningless, arbitrary, and ultimately capricious categories we need to get rid of.

TA is a long-form treatise on why.

We have no category given by nature that's for sure. What s important is not to look beyond our category, it s waking up to the fact there is none.

It s very american, for some reason, anyway. They were so hung on not mixing up with the slaves they had to draw a line. But stop thinking you're white or black: you re very different from a Russian and a Portugues, or a Malian and a Senegalese. Focusing on skin color is stupid.

My daughter for instance is more franco-chinese than she's whito-yellow (and even that has so many variation that no two french and no two chinese think perfectly alike), it has no meaning, no more than hair color or eye color, at least.

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