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Comment by RonaldDump | Hacker News Reader

Why do people bring this up then, any time race is mentioned? It's such a trivial point to make, it doesn't add anything.

Ok, so "black" or "White" are not absolutely clear labels that we can use to describe every single person ever. No shit... Still, Morgan Freeman is black and Margot Robbie is White, and I'm White because both my parents are White, and if there's a serial killer roaming the streets then knowing if he's "black" or "White" is very useful information so I know what to be on the lookout for, etc.

It's like those insufferable people who can't wait to point out that "A tomato is actually a fruit!" any time it comes up in conversation. Ok, so what? "Race is a social construct!" Ok, so what?

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It's the contradiction that I'm describing in my post, I think.

Obviously black and white skin colours exist as do things like physical features.

The social construct is that people tie those to identity. Both within and without the group. But then it seems as if that is self-perpetuating.

People can have perfectly valid reasons to dislike culture, so if we tie culture to appearance, then people are going to make judgements and dislike people of certain appearances as a logical consequence of that, which sucks.

But if I understand the angle of "social constructioners" correctly, they're not disputing that what we might call 'ethnicities' or 'tribes' exist (ie. a group of people of common ancestry and with a distinct genotype), it's just that trying to lump the thousands of these into a few broad categories, like "black", is far too crude to be useful.

But ethnicities still exist. So would it not be valid to be "ethnicist" (ie. very specifically racist), like "Those Sami people are so x" or "Gosh those Bantu people are y"?

Ethnicities and tribes and inclusion therein are ambiguous, and it changes over time. Look at any society and its history. They're not homogeneous. All the historical countries and tribes were multiethnic.

One example is Rome. Every region or province, even Italia, consisted of different ethnic groups. At one point there was a diverse group in a small area called the Latins. The Romans were a single ethnic group in Latium who first took over and assimilated the other Latins who were distinct, then whole peninsula absorbing Etruscans and celts and Greeks in the south and others, absorbed people from all over Europe and north Africa and Asia minor...

But it's fashionable among young internet white supremacists to say these were all pasty white dudes.

The truth is it's an anachronism to compare racial categorizations from two different time periods where differences were not seen in the same way or with the same context. Afaik the Romans didn't really have a construct of race that was the same as our modern ones. And they assimilated and erased many distinctions over time.

What's that got to do with anything?

What's stopping me from identifying variation in the frequency of different traits between ethnic groups in the current day? It's not a virtue to pretend not to notice such things (or, indeed, to be truly incapable of the most basic pattern recognition).

I think the argument could then be made that if you identify traits common to closely related tribes (eg. indigenous East African) that are noticeably different from the frequency or magnitude of these traits in a different cluster of closely related tribes (eg. indigenous Scandinavian) then there should be no reason to pretend to ignore them.

People frequently seem to think that identifying these traits is a permanent thing or a fact of nature, rather than as you say, a statement about the current day (and I would add, an often inaccurate statement based on corner cases like those I've mentioned). To make it more than that is a mistaken notion. You can justify a lot of ugly racism that way. Many people do and have.

As an example, slavery in the US created an artificial category or label of black people out of many unrelated peoples, calling them inferior by nature and using that to justify unethical systems.

Ronald, your comment is flagged and I cannot reply. I think it is possible that you are the one working backwards, i.e. you want to consider your opinions on race to be a fact of nature and you get defensive when I point out that this is shaky ground to stand on, so you think I am trying to justify an ideology you are opposed to and attribute some kind of ill will to me. It is not controversial ideology to say for example that slavery was ethically questionable and not based on a good scientific understanding of the origins or nature of man. If you find yourself eager to defend slavery on racial grounds you may want to do some introspection, rather than point fingers at people who tell you this.

It's a fair point that some indigenous African bushmen, even today, spend time watching lions and pressuring them off of fresh kills in order to take home the leftovers, as they have done for centuries.

It's equally fair to observe that the offspring of those very same bushmen when transfered to a Scandinavian country may spend more time word processing or catching trains.

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