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But it was the foundation for sociopolitical racism, so if the concept of race guides your thinking about people's characteristics, especially their non-physical characteristics, you are at least somewhat in danger of racist thinking.
You sure about that?
https://www.nmdp.org/get-involved/join-the-registry/ethnicit...
> Finding the right donor for a patient isn’t simple. Donors and patients are matched largely based on genes called human leukocyte antigens (HLAs). These genes code for proteins—or markers—found on most of the cells in your body. When it comes to matching HLA types, a patient’s ethnic background is important in predicting the likelihood of finding a match. That’s because HLA is inherited. Some ethnic groups have more complex tissue types than others, which makes finding a close match more difficult.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
> there is a broad scientific agreement that essentialist and typological conceptions of race are untenable
Any educated person with access to the internet who never was even curious about this I'm suspicious of. If you don't arrive at it by the thought experiments a bored teenager might do, it takes like 5 minutes of reading, and then that's done.
Only scientific racists think this.
Any educated person knows that there's no one to one mapping between DNA and how the word "Asian" is used. There's a good predictive power for DNA and a high correlation. But that's how language works.
Between a "hill" and a "mountain", there's no concrete boundary. So even this is not essentialist. But no educated person would claim that hills and mountains don't exist as categories.
I think this is what you have done: you want to signal that you are against racism. So you end up using a strawman definition of race and then deny that race as a category itself doesn't exist.
Advice: don't create this strawman. Argue against the real thing: race is a category albeit a fuzzy one that humans use through language and this category has a biological basis.
> I think this is what you have done: you want to signal that you are against racism.
To whom? If you had any idea the spats I got into (let's say with "liberals", as a shorthand) because I heard and understood Body Count before they were even born, and same for MLK and Frederick Douglass. I don't do sides, and I'm not aware of any that would have me, so don't assume about me to get away of the scientific facts on race when it comes to humans.
And this isn't 1950s, so "not being racist" is not a flex to me. It's not something to be proud of, but rather grateful for. Like not sacrificing children to volcanos anymore or whatever doesn't make us better people, it makes us better off. We're lucky to have the opportunity to be less ignorant is all.
It doesn’t make you more moral to collapse the white and black race into one.
Advice: the above is essentially indistinguishable from the false scientific argumentation that white supremacists use to make their case. It has no meaningful basis in science.
Wow. You make things worse by calling people who think race is a fuzzy category white supremacists. This kinda thing is part of the problem. Please reconsider - its childish and everyone can see through this.
Are you being intentionally obtuse by pretending ethnicity and race can't be used interchangeably on a broad level? The entire point of requiring "diversity in bone marrow donation" is that you can't just take bone marrow from an ethnically caucasian ("white" in racial classification terms) and expect the transfer to be successful for an African American person ("black" in racial classification terms). Yes "white", "black" et al are imprecise terms but they broadly align with certain ethnic groups, and there ARE biological differences between ethnicities.
I think similarly about other "culture war" issues: there are always two sides that have at least one 2+2=5 article of faith, e.g. races being real and super important, or white old men being the source of all sin, or some religion or other, or biological sex being a spectrum. But there's always something, you always have to hand off your brain and reduce yourself below the level of a moderately intelligent and curious teenager. Otherwise, you're "the other", and what that is depends on the group, not you.
So how you instantly have an image of me in your head, simply because I "talked back" or whatever, is hilarious to me. You have no idea about me, and and couldn't guess in a million years how I actually am, but you know your enemy, so I'm probably that. And the most fun part is, I will get told I'm "fash" or MAGA with exactly the same ease. From my perspective, I know with 100% certainty y'all are talking about each other, because none of it even begins to describe me or my conduct, and is always the same dumb shit, very little variation or originality.
Races exist at the biological level. I'm surprised this is even contested. IDK what makes you think white person is different from a black person? Is it vibes? Even a kid knows that a white person has different DNA.
You are talking about sociopolitical race discrimination and suggesting it has absolute, immutable biological mappings. It does not. This actually is quite close to real racism.
Here’s an excerpt from BLM
> Additionally, Black Americans are among the top two racial groups who are most at risk of fatal encounters with police
https://blacklivesmatter.com/blm-day/
Stop trying to make normal people use academic definitions.
Will you suggest I'm sexist because I think male and female gender exists?
Race on the other hand, does not neatly cluster into discreet categories that any responsible person would define, draw boundaries around and count. Furthermore, race has not remained stable over recorded history. Populations mix, join and split. Which race were the Old Kingdom Egyptians? Our modern notions of Asian, Caucasian, etc. probably did not even exist during their era.
Categories are not fixed between cultures, even colours and numbers are hard to get right. So when you hear a word you can not be clear it is used in your broad meaning, or the narrow meaning.
This was actually my favourite way of nerd sniping back when I was young.
The semantics I am referring to are the suggestion that "white" and "black" exist as races on a genetic level.
The example I am introducing is to test the understanding behind that suggestion.
Self identified race/ethnicity correlates highly with ancestry. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1196372/
It is therefore correct to suggest that race does have a biological basis.
You should consider answering my question though.
race as a cultural / social concept does exist though, and that biology certainly correlates to an extent due to geography and how human society has traditionally functioned.
I.e, the cornish are a race, falling under celtic, which originate from Iberia, but is there a modern biological difference to their surrounding English people? Are they more biologically similar to the modern people inhabiting the Iberian peninsula or those in Kent? And even then, are they really all thatthat biologically different from the modern spanish anyways?
Proof? What do you think the people were asked in the survey? Normal people use race in the normal way. I think white people exist. I think black people exist. Everyone knows this - I don't need any academic to prove me wrong.
And I don't think it makes me racist when some one asks me "are there different human races" and I answer "yes".
White people were only white if they could show bloodlines reaching back generations. One jewish great-grandfather would make you intelligible for the Arian race. They would laugh at your notion of white vs black.
So while you might not be racist for thinking so, you're at best misinformed.
Duello, T. M., Rivedal, S., Wickland, C., & Weller, A. (2021). Race and genetics versus ‘race’ in genetics. Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health, 9(1), 232–245. https://doi.org/10.1093/emph/eoab018
Herd, P., Mills, M. C., & Dowd, J. B. (2021). Reconstructing Sociogenomics Research: Dismantling Biological Race and Genetic Essentialism Narratives. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 62(3), 419–435. https://doi.org/10.1177/00221465211018682
Hunt, L. M., & Megyesi, M. S. (2008). Genes, race and research ethics: who’s minding the store? Journal of Medical Ethics, 34(7), 495–500. https://doi.org/10.1136/jme.2007.021295
Lujan, H. L., & DiCarlo, S. E. (2024). Misunderstanding of race as biology has deep negative biological and social consequences. Experimental Physiology, 109(8), 1240–1243. https://doi.org/10.1113/ep091491
But we don't need to be specialists in population genetics to observe that human cultures interbreed. We can't reliably correlate visible biomarkers with genetic origin, especially in contemporary multicultural societies or any of the places where numerous land invasions over thousands of years have ensured continual group mixing. For example Indian subcontinent, Afghanistan, Mongolian steppe etc. My nephew is half 'Irish', half 'Indian'. But what does that mean exactly? His ancestry is likely to contain contributions from hundreds of subgroups and linguistic populations across South East India, as well as Ireland and the UK more broadly. Visibly he looks 'Indian', but what does that mean for a determinant of race?
These concepts were engineered in the colonial era. Only the names have changed. In college my friends and I picked up a cut price set of colonial era British encyclopedia. They had lots to say on racial groups, with detailed descriptions of the personality types, intelligence and appearance of groups like 'negroids' and 'hibernians'. Of course none of this was based on what we'd today term scientific reasoning or measurement - and yet the conclusions and stereotypes persist in our culture. Irrespective of powerful counterexamples demonstrating that culture and economics determine an enormous amount of educational and attainment potential. e.g.: Nigerian American economic success [1], the explosive boom and continual exceptional economic performance of Ireland [2], or the absurd difference in educational outcomes of countries which are ethnically homogenous but politically divided - e.g.: North and South Korea, Haiti and Dominican Republic etc.
Remember interindividual differences radically outpace intergroup differences. Which is not to suggest that highly homogenous ethnic groups (e.g.: askinazi jews, or certain West African populations) can't have significant differences in athletic ability. But such differences are on population levels much smaller than observable 'races' per say.
[1] https://medium.com/@joecarleton/why-nigerian-immigrants-are-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_Tiger
The idea that race affects EXACTLY things that appear on the surface and nothing else is laughable. You need mountains of layers of cognitive dissonance to believe this. For example: different races are susceptible to different diseases. Instead of hitting tackling racism properly, you are putting fingers in your ears and shouting that race itself doesn't exist. Do you really think you can beat racism like this?
Ref your studies: You are doing the Jimmy Neutron Sodium Chloride meme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScCErU2742g
who is suggesting this? what do you think the people in the survey are asked? They were asked if races exist and they definitely do. White people exist and Black people exist. Normal people won't read your research papers lmao. Colloquially, races do exist and normal people should think that races do exist.
On one extreme are people who believe that white people are inherently better than black people because of some genetic inheritance. This is obvious nonsense.
On the other extreme are the people like the one you are arguing with who claim that race does not exist because all humans are biologically identical. This is also nonsense as any black person in the US will tell you.
What you seem to be arguing is that ethnicity, and the genetic effects of ethnicity, are real. They are. Race as biological construct, with consequent societal effects is also not real. White people are not inherently more intelligent that Black people.
The other person is technically right, but is one of those people who seem to believe that biological differences do not matter in society, one of those "i don't see colour" types. Race as a social construct is very much real.
It's an extension of a much older, more insidious idea - blood purity. There are still people who would pretend to trace their own lineage back through every scholar, king, and prophet to Adam, while choosing to believe that everyone else is a mongrel line, inferior and subservient to them in some way.
Race is not pseudo science. Race is real. White people are meaningfully different from Black people. Its not bad to be different. It doesn't mean one is different from the other. You can't beat racism by claiming race itself is not real!
The point I am making is that “white” and “black” simply aren’t races on any biological basis. It’s nothing more than a social distinction.
The level of scientific ignorance on display here is weird.
There’s no sharp boundary between a hill and a mountain. There’s no sharp boundary between dark and white colours. There’s no sharp boundary between male and female either at the edge cases when you consider intersex. Language has its limitations and it’s obvious to most of us and we don’t have to play semantic juggling each time.
Does the way people use race as a word have biological basis? Absolutely yes. For example you take people who self identify as black and white and try to find whether their DNA can predict their self identified race. You would agree that it can predict to a good extent I hope.
On a side note: I think you have fallen into this popular rabbit hole where you expect sharp boundaries for commonly used words/categories. Such sharp boundaries never exist and every normal person from a child to an adult knows and works around this. This kind of rhetoric is popular with some extremist academic types to signal their in group presence. Tip: if you want to solve racism, don’t get into debates on esoteric definitions of race and pretend race itself doesn’t exist. Normal people aren’t convinced.
I am saying that it is clear from scientific consensus that biological, genetic race does not exist.
If it did, as I keep saying, “white” and “black” would not be biological races. That is actually not plausible. It’s scientific racism to claim it is.
You have said this
> Races don't exist on any biological level
And it is completely untrue. Sociological race does exist at a biological level. DNA of blacks and whites are different.
Just like wavelength emitted by black and white colours are different.
The survey asked whether race is real - of course race is. Just like colour is real.
White and black are not biological races but words used to describe real clusters of people, even if its lossy. In the entire conversation, you have made a complete strawman, as if people are talking about some made up definition of biological race you have come up with and then claim that "ha that made up definition is not real!"
>race has become a social reality that structures societies and how we experience the world. In this regard, race is real, as is racism, and both have real biological consequences
You said
> Races don't exist on any biological level
My suggestion: separate your moral claims and virtues from objective facts. I think you are spiralling into a maze of arguments that you yourself can't keep up with.
You have taken the phrase "real biological consequences", which is talking about the illness, healthcare, stress, poverty etc. impact of racism on centuries of people and used it to support your essential thesis that race itself can be detected on some biological level.
This is shameful.
> I think you are spiralling into a maze of arguments that you yourself can't keep up with.
And this is projection. Bye.
As the commenter above you already said, this is not a bad thing. People on _hacker_news should be able to understand that being able to define the ==/!= operators on something does not automatically mean that you can define < and >.
They can be told apart like this, absent skin colour?
In the US the term "race" always refers to the social construct. The german word "Rasse" did not undergo that same change in meaning. Even the most extreme right wing in Germany, the most openly racist people you can find would not dare to use that word in this manner in public. This is far more offensive than using the n-word.
So having germans agree to such statements especially so many is genuinely quite shocking.
Also I think given the context you know how people mean these words. But all I see is wild jumping on some words without much context all the time.
Mountains of layers of cognitive dissonance are needed to believe this. Race is absolutely biological. To think otherwise is fooling oneself. You are doing a disservice to combating racism by negating the existence of race itself. Do you really think racism will just go away by suggesting black people and white people are exactly the same internally? Get real man.
They just aren't.