In what ways are white people meaningfully different from black people?
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?