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Comment by speedgoose | Hacker News Reader

Races are just racist.

No racism is the (moral) judgement and using different assessments for different 'races'. You can call it ethnicities if you like, but it's not actually going to mean something different.

How do you define a race without being racist?

Depending on the trait you actually care about. If you care about bone geometry, you select some length of a bone, you want to measure. If you care about susceptibility for a certain sickness, you measure that.

It's not racist, because it doesn't say anything about the worth of the human or their rights. In fact, if you refuse to categorize and measure, because you consider this in itself to be evil, you can't actually cater to this specific person.

I guess that categorising humans based on the length of some bones isn’t racist yes.

But I’m afraid that in practice, races aren’t biologically defined.

You made a statement about the concept of races in general. Of course people can use races to be racist, yes. People can use sexes to be sexist too.

I think you may want to read a bit about it, Wikipedia’s article on human races is a good starting point.

I did skim it, when I made my first comment.

Then I don’t know what to say to you.

Do you just want to use "sets of haplogroups with similar phenotype" instead? I mean, you can argue all day that the existence of the orange color somehow means that there's no difference between yellow and red, but you're just going to look foolish.

I suggest not using racist junk but ethnicities instead.

Is that how people define who is black, asian, AIAN, hispanic, or white in the USA?

I believe that no, and that they are categorized by ticking choice in a form. This is instutionalized racism but people in the USA have it so internalized since childhood they can't seem to be able to understand it.

I didn't indicate, that I wouldn't consider this practice in the USA to be at least slightly racist.

But saying it never matters whether you are black or asian or whatever useful term is for the european-like mix in the USA, is actually going to disadvantage the very people this stance wants to protect, because it does ignore, that they are going to react differently to pathogens, food or medication.

If you care about that, use better scientific methods.

> because it does ignore, that they are going to react differently to pathogens, food or medication.

But claiming the US 5-races system is more significant as a categorization of people than other dimensions for health issues is definitely racist, and is propagating that systemic racism.

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