posted
Looks like an intriguing book. I need to read this one.
I believe I agree more with the author of the article that race is more than just social programming. However, many social constructs involved with race-identification yield division rather than diversity.
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posted
As far as I know there is no overriding standard from a physical standpoint that justifies race as a distinguishing characteristic. Doctors have known that for years, because the variance from the mean within any given standard is so great it makes the category irrelevant.
We can't even come to a consensus of what each race's characteristics are, other than skin color....and even that varies from locale to locale.
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posted
Yes, it exists primarily as a social construct. As Kwea pointed out, variance from any mean which separates human populations into distinct categories is as wide as the categories are from each other. This means that variation within "racial" groups is as wide as variation between them, meaning there are no discrete groups.
The most-oft cited defining characteristics of race (appearance) are the least important and are not uniform except in the public imagination, and then only as defined by the narrowest of categories, which are themselves stereotyped and often incorrectly assumed to define discrete groups. Examples are skin, eye, and hair color, size, shape of eyes and nose, size of hands and feet, etc. Most anthropological museums have a display demonstrating the smoothness of variation among "racial" groups which helps us to eliminate our preconceptions of racial segmentation. Race as defined by appearance only is a spectrum, with no discrete corners or center.
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posted
I don't like how the article states that being white is the same as being powerful, and being black is the same as being unsuccessful. I have not worked out exactly what it means to be either race, but I'm sure it isn't that.
quote:Being "white" in America is perhaps like being upper-class in Britain, except in America a wealthy, well-connected black person can become "white" and a disadvantaged white person could lead a life that's "black".
I strongly, strongly disagree that being poor and ignorant is what being black means. Good heavens - very much so. Also, that an English and German ethnic background is nothing more than code for power.
Also, there are large parts of the country where there aren't many black people, neither now, nor in history. If you follow her logic, then there were also no disadvantaged people. Her paradigm divides the world into white and black, and she's equating that to the haves and have nots. What Native Americans? Latinos? Asians? Heck, Polynesians? The rich ones are white and the poor ones are black?
I completely believe that "race" is a social construct. But it isn't THAT social construct.
Race deserves a look and class structure in America deserves a look, but they are not the exact same thing. I think her world is too narrow - if she thinks America is nothing but black and white, she has a very limited knowledge of America.
posted
I don't think she herself thinks that America is nothing but black and white, I think she thinks that a substantial part of America thinks that.
I think there is a nugget of truth to that, in 'Chinese in America' there are sections that refer to race relations and efforts to categorize the Chinese as one or the other. There is a parallel with the Irish as well ( ex)
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posted
If I were a liberal, I would be very careful about jumping all over a book that so powerfully confirmed my pre-existing beliefs. Evidence for ideas you already hold should be examined more carefully than evidence for things you don't believe, especially when your main reason for holding a belief is a sense of fairness.
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posted
I can't comment on the book, as I haven't read it, but it is hardly a new idea. As I mentioned, scientifically there is no true racial devision, as the variances within the group are so large as to make the category useless.
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quote:Originally posted by katharina: Race deserves a look and class structure in America deserves a look, but they are not the exact same thing. I think her world is too narrow - if she thinks America is nothing but black and white, she has a very limited knowledge of America.
Mmm. A fine line, I think, between describing the paradigm you observe as it is experienced by people, and the reality. Things is, the paradigm is *also* a part of reality because it means something to our culture. Being white *can* confer an assumed level of empowerment and especially, and I think this is even more key, social mobility. A black person who is upper class, according to American culture, comes from the lower classes, a white person who is upper class doesn't necessarily carry the same baggage. A previous station is difficult to assume, and easier to conceal, especially since the culture also expects black people to "be black" in the sense that it expects them to represent black culture. Whites aren't treated with those particular expectations or assumptions to anywhere near the same degree, owing often only to appearance and mannerisms.
So I think the argument can be overstated, but is unfortunately valid in a limited scope- not "reality" but certainly the description of an extant reality.
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But you have to limit the scope to only the situations where it is valid. You can anything valid under those circumstances.
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posted
I think its a clear overstatement to claim that race is ONLY a social construct, but also evident that much of what we associate with race is sociological rather the biological.
The division between the races is an obvious a social construct. At least its very obvious when you move outside the USA and discover that the lines are drawn very differently in other cultures.
I find it interesting that we still don't really acknowledge mixed racial backgrounds in the US.
Coincidentally, I read this article in the LA times yesterday. Its a really interesting story by a blue eyed blond haired white guy who discovered he is (almost certainly) the descendent of an African indentured servant.
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But you have to limit the scope to only the situations where it is valid. You can anything valid under those circumstances.
All observations of limited validity are only valid in situations where they are valid. Should we only ever speak in absolute truths? I don't know what you're arguing. The idea about racial expectations has some value in it- because it is not all defining and true in all aspects and applicable to every situation doesn't invalidate it where it is an effective lens. I think you're confusing sociological theory with something more scientific- a little too much KoM lately?
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quote:Originally posted by Kwea: I can't comment on the book, as I haven't read it, but it is hardly a new idea. As I mentioned, scientifically there is no true racial division, as the variances within the group are so large as to make the category useless.
An often-made comment which is rather more rarely backed up by data; worse, if anyone did back it up with data, there would be howls of outrage over doing research on such a subject.
You might also consider the following thought experiment: The difference between the 5th and 95th percentiles of height in men is about 20 cm; the same is true for women. That's much more variation within each group than the difference in median height between them, which is a mere 14 cm. (Stats from here.) Since the within-group variation is larger than the between-group variation, the division into groups is useless; we may therefore consider men and women to have the same height, on average.
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KoM, sex is not similar to race in a number of ways. While there is a sexual continuum that blurs the lines between feminine and masculine genders, there are two discrete groups in question with demonstrably unique biology. There *are* two different groups, so observations about their individual characteristics on average are more useful.
And anyway, you *shouldn't* consider men and women to have different heights as a defining characteristic anyway, because the variation is larger than the difference in the median. You can only assume that men are taller on average. Observations about race are not invalid, but their use in order to split races into groups with no other more compelling reasons is. The argument does not run to the idea that there are no racial characteristics, but rather that racial characteristics do not establish discrete races, especially since a large part of what defines racial "type" owes to environment, diet, social custom, language, etc, and not to any immutable qualities. The differences in the way people look and in how they behave is linked to our experience of their otherness. Race is othering- and the burden of evidence should not be on the side of those who deny the validity of race to prove that it does not exist.
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posted
I was commenting on the argument that in-group variation larger than between-group variation renders grouping irrelevant, not on sex differences per se; that's just a convenient example.
quote:And anyway, you *shouldn't* consider men and women to have different heights as a defining characteristic anyway, because the variation is larger than the difference in the median. You can only assume that men are taller on average.
Pardon me, what is the difference between the thing you say I should not do and the thing you say I can do? If men are taller than women on average, then the height difference is a characteristic of the two groups.
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posted
It is not a defining characteristic- it is not useful in telling you whether a given person is male or female with any reasonable certainty. A persons height does not bear on their belonging to either group.
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quote:It is not a defining characteristic- it is not useful in telling you whether a given person is male or female with any reasonable certainty.
Well, that's just not true. A person of median height for a woman is under the 5th percentile for a man; you would be quite justified in concluding that such a person is a woman, with confidence well over 90%.
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posted
Godamn it, you always do this. This has nothing to do with the topic, and you know it. Go pleasure yourself in private, I don't see why I have to help you.
No, better yet, declare victory because I'm frustrated with you.
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quote:It is not a defining characteristic- it is not useful in telling you whether a given person is male or female with any reasonable certainty.
Well, that's just not true. A person of median height for a woman is under the 5th percentile for a man; you would be quite justified in concluding that such a person is a woman, with confidence well over 90%.
Don't be obtuse KOM. No one determines gender based on height or upper body strength, even if there is a significant average difference between men and women. No one would conduct a study of gender by measuring peoples height and classifying all the people under 5'7" as female and all those over 5'7" as male, even if that would be 90% accurate.
There is a definitive genetic marker that we can use for determining who is male, the Y chromosome. We can use that to classify people and then make meaningful statements about which if any physical and mental characteristics are correlated with the groups.
But the same cannot be said about race. There is no genetic or physical marker that can be used to identify a persons race. The determination of who belongs to which class is a fully subject determination. That means that any study of race suffers from a selection bias and makes it impossible to determine whether differences found between two races reflect anything but the selection bias.
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quote: No one determines gender based on height or upper body strength, even if there is a significant average difference between men and women.
True, but as noted, I'm not trying to say anything about gender, but about statistical methods of classification. If an alien arrived on Earth tomorrow to study its primitive natives, it could certainly observe that there are two height-clusters of mature Earthlings, form the tentative conclusion that these two classes may be important in other ways, and see if they had any other differences. And this is true even though the within-class variance is larger than the between-class difference. Thus, the statement that variation within a class is larger than differences between averages just does not have any bearing on whether the classification is useful or not.
quote:Godamn it, you always do this. This has nothing to do with the topic, and you know it.
No, in fact I think it's relevant, for the reason outlined above.
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quote: No one determines gender based on height or upper body strength, even if there is a significant average difference between men and women.
True, but as noted, I'm not trying to say anything about gender, but about statistical methods of classification. If an alien arrived on Earth tomorrow to study its primitive natives, it could certainly observe that there are two height-clusters of mature Earthlings,
posted
The distribution shown in Fig 1 of your source clearly cannot be modelled by a single Gaussian; fit it to two Gaussians and the bimodality will emerge, even though it's not clear to the naked sensory device.
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posted
The blog Gene Expression typically has good discussions of the scientific concept of race (which is legitimate, and only slightly correlated with the social concept of race, which is a construction). Here's one recent blog post linking to a paper that discusses race in genetics for the non-scientist:article. If you don't want to open the pdf he links to in the article above, try this slightly older post: Race: the current consensus.
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posted
Yeah. While it isn't bimodal, anybody doing stats and seeing a curve like that would immediately hypothesize about the distribution being the sum of gaussians.
It would become even more clear if any dataset including both height and sex were thrown at standard dimensionality reduction algorithms.
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quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: I find it interesting that we still don't really acknowledge mixed racial backgrounds in the US.
The US Census taker visited the other day. When we got to the part about "race" I laughed and started listing all the blood mixed in me like Heinz 57. She said she could absolutely mark "other" and list all of those different heritages, if I liked.
So maybe it's changing. Posts: 5609 | Registered: Jan 2003
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posted
This is the kind of stupid question academics start asking when they have no other ideas. I'll bet his colleagues are embarrassed by this book, no matter what the author's answer to the question is.
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posted
As a general rule, the assertion "X is a social construct" does say more about the researcher making it than about X, but why is it a stupid thing to investigate?
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quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: I find it interesting that we still don't really acknowledge mixed racial backgrounds in the US.
The US Census taker visited the other day. When we got to the part about "race" I laughed and started listing all the blood mixed in me like Heinz 57. She said she could absolutely mark "other" and list all of those different heritages, if I liked.
So maybe it's changing.
Mixed race options came onto the US Census in 2000. However, while I think identifying as mixed race is trending up (in part because interracial marriages are also trending up), race is still much about boxes and the one-drop rule in the US. Obama may have had the choice to check both African-American and Caucasian on this year's census, but he chose to only mark African-American - largely, I believe, because that's what he's seen as.
Brazil is an interesting country to compare the US against, since it also is a large, diverse nation. Race there, I understand, is primarily based on what you look like - skin color being the main determinate - not your heritage.
posted
I'm going to go ahead and be non-pc and call BS on this.
The average person can look at a sampling of people of European heritage and a sampling of people of African heritage and get significantly better than chance results.
Someone more familiar with the differences can do much better.
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posted
If your average person were presented with a group of people, 1/3 of whom were of European heritage, 1/3 of African heritage and 1/3 who had one parent of European Heritage and one of African heritage and were asked to divide them into groups based on race, how many groups do you think that average person would make?
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posted
The argument that race is a social construct isn't a matter of "can you tell where in the world this person (or his ancestors) came from originally?" Obviously you can, to some degree of accuracy. The question is whether the concept of race has any biological/genetic/psychological underpinning that matters.
And the answer (depending on what you mean by "meaningful" & "matters") is somewhat to not really. Take, for example, South Asians from Northern India, Italians, and Danes. Most people in America would classify Italians and Danes as "white" and the Indians as either Asian or South Asian (or maybe just "brown"). However, all three groups' genetic clusterings are roughly equally distant from each other - there's as much differences between Italians and Danes as there is between Italians and North Indians, or North Indians and Danes. So why group the first two together, and leave out the third?
The point of the book linked to by the OP is that the racial categorization of "white", in particular, has been changed throughout the history of the US in line with immigration. First only WASPs were white, then Southern Europeans were added, then the Irish Catholics, and now, for the most part, light-skinned Jews. Many demographers believe that light-skinned Hispanics will be incorporated into the concept of "white" in the coming 30 or so years as Hispanic cultures fade among second- and third-generation immigrants from Latin America - especially since that incorporation is the only way "white" will remain a majority in the US.
That's not to say that all social concepts of race do not link up to meaningful genetic clusterings, however. For example, from one of the links I mentioned above:
quote:A group of researchers led by geneticist Neil Risch analyzed genetic data for 326 microsatellite markers on a sample of 3,636 subjects from the United States and Taiwan. The subjects identified themselves as belonging to one of the four racial groups (white, African American, East Asian and Hispanic). The genetic cluster analysis of the data produced four major clusters, whose correspondence with the four self reported races was near-perfect: the genetic cluster membership and self-identified race coincided in as many as 99.9% of the cases. Commenting on this result in an interview, Risch said that if the concept of race is regarded as genetically suspect because of this extremely low discordance rate of 0.1%, then any classificatory scheme should be rejected as well because ‘‘any category you come up with is going to be imperfect’
quote:Originally posted by fugu13: Yeah. While it isn't bimodal, anybody doing stats and seeing a curve like that would immediately hypothesize about the distribution being the sum of gaussians.
It would become even more clear if any dataset including both height and sex were thrown at standard dimensionality reduction algorithms.
It's not a fair proposition to include sex in the analysis since KOMs proposition was that an alien could deduce that there were two different kinds of people from the height data. The question of whether or not there is a statistically significant difference between two predefined classes is a very different question from whether those classes are readily identifiable from the height data in an unsupervised analysis.
While its evident that the curve isn't Gaussian, it is not nearly as evident that it is a composite of two different gaussian distributions. I've done a lot of data deconvolution of this nature and once you add in a little error, there won't be a single solution to this problem. Any method you use to identify two classes of humans based on height will be fraught with problems. You would be at least as likely to get Asians and non Asians, rich and poor as male and female unless you add in a parameter that is known a priori to be sex linked.
And this really is a pretty good example of the problem with identifying race biologically. If you can look at figure 1 in the pdf that Jhai linked to above it really illustrates the problem. The figure shows an x, y scatter plot. Some of the data is represented with triangles and some with squares. There is also a line on the graph and all the squares fall on one side of the line while all the triangles fall on the other side of the line. It doesn't take a degree in statistics to see that there is a clear significant difference between the squares and the triangles. Now here is the problem with this analysis. If you took away all the squares and triangles, the data just look like a shot gun blast. Without the prior knowledge of which points are squares and which are triangles, there is no clear place to draw the line and any line drawn through the center of the data would split the data equally well into two significantly different groups.
So now imagine that you give a data base of human genetics to aliens and ask them to divide people up into "races". If they were to do this based solely on the the genes without any prior knowledge of the racial classifications we've used or the physical characteristics we use to identify race, they would be looking at the scatter chart without the squares and triangles. From what I understand of the biological issue, you simply can not come up with the same racial groupings we have based solely genetic data. The same isn't true for gender. An alien race with nothing but a data base of human genetics would almost certainly immediately identify the two major gender groups.
The physical characteristics we use to identify racial groups are obviously heritable so it would be shocking if we couldn't find some combination of genes which showed a significant difference between racial groups. But that isn't the question at hand. If 6 centuries ago people had decided that ear size and shape were the defining "racial" characteristics, I'd be filling out census forms asking about my whether or not my earlobes were attached or detached and since ear size and shape are heritable characteristics, biologists would certainly be able to find some combination of genes that were significantly different between those racial groups.
I don't think anyone is arguing that skin color and facial features are social contructs. The argument is that dividing people up based on skin color and facial features is a purely social construct and that these socially accepted racial divisions are not the most obvious and natural division from a molecular biology stand point.
[ May 18, 2010, 03:03 PM: Message edited by: The Rabbit ]
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quote:Originally posted by MightyCow: I'm going to go ahead and be non-pc and call BS on this.
The average person can look at a sampling of people of European heritage and a sampling of people of African heritage and get significantly better than chance results.
Of what significance is this? I mean, do you think that heritage and ethnicity being clearly distinguishable or reliably recognizable proves the existence of race? Are you even sure that the aspects of race you are aware of are not more peripheral than you are presently aware of? For instance, are you sure you could judge ethnicity in ways that would be reliable if non-ethnicity related elements were all removed, or if other visual and aural clues were intentionally varied, such as dress, accent, facial expression, posture, diet, hairstyle, etc? Certainly you could tell what corner of the globe a person's ancestors come from... maybe.
These problems have become increasingly obvious to me living in Europe, particularly in central Europe, where literally every person who is "ethnically" Czech is in fact not of exclusively Slavic decent, since there never was nor ever has been a Czech ethnic group. These days I can tell with alarming accuracy who was born in a Czech speaking household and who was not by visual clues alone. Most Europeans are much better at this than I'll ever be, because they live in such close proximity to cultures with different languages and ethnic histories. I mean to say, I have seen black people and Asians on the street in this country and knew they spoke Czech natively, or knew that they didn't. Didn't know how I knew that- I still don't know exactly why I knew, but I did. On the flipside, I can't tell the difference between a Chinese Czech and a Vietnamese Czech, and I *never* had that problem in California, I could always tell. Go figure that out, because I haven't.
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quote:I mean, do you think that heritage and ethnicity being clearly distinguishable or reliably recognizable proves the existence of race?
Don't know about MC, but as for me... um, yes. Duh?
quote: From what I understand of the biological issue, you simply can not come up with the same racial groupings we have based solely genetic data.
Quite possibly, but what of it? Nowhere in this thread has anyone claimed that the specific race groupings used colloquially correspond to genetic clusters. The question is whether such clusters exist and are useful.
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posted
I've learned that when given a binary choice in any sort of psychological issue, the answer is nearly always "both".
I'd say that this is pretty obviously the case here. There are two loosely linked concepts of "race", one of which is largely genetic and one that is primarily a social construct. I'd argue that a lot of what we think of as race, especially historically, falls into the latter category, while many people seem to think that it falls into the former.
That seems like the most productive way to approach the issue, but one of the other things I've learned when studying psychology is that people are often really resistant to "both" answers and will fight quite strenuously - often against remarkable amounts of evidence - for it being only one of the choices.
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quote:I mean, do you think that heritage and ethnicity being clearly distinguishable or reliably recognizable proves the existence of race?
Don't know about MC, but as for me... um, yes. Duh?
So if the world population were divided between people with dark hair, and light hair, and one could tell one's heritage from hair color only, those would be a reliable determiner of race? The point is that racial cues, as we recognize them, aren't necessarily racial. In this gross example, one could dye his hair.
And KoM, please, take a step back from the portion you quoted. I can tell the difference between an Arab and a Caucasian. I can tell the difference between a Caucasian and a Persian. I cannot tell the difference between a Persian and an Arab, in many cases. Does that mean that the difference between Persian and Arab is non-racial? Because they *can* tell. So race is defined by whom, exactly, if all that is required is your fly-by-your-asscrack eyeball inspection.
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1.1. I know people are bad at following instructions but I hardly think that most people asked to dived people into two racial groups would do no dividing at all.
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posted
In my example the person was asked to divide the group by race, not to divide them into two racial groups. The number of groups was not specified.
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quote:Originally posted by dkw: In my example the person was asked to divide the group by race, not to divide them into two racial groups. The number of groups was not specified.
I still think 1.1 groups is a highly unlikely average.
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quote:Originally posted by dkw: In my example the person was asked to divide the group by race, not to divide them into two racial groups. The number of groups was not specified.
That's a problem with your example. The idea that there is such a thing as race demands that there are a limited number of races. That is why a reduction of that argument shows its absurdity.
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This example is anecdotal, but sadly it is still illustrative of something that is more prevalent than we may wish. It is not the first such example I have seen. Social programming (including social constructs of race) begins so early that its inculcation weaves into the fabric of all our perceptions.
Also, we must note a common human tendency to react irrationally (and often negatively) to differences.
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quote:And KoM, please, take a step back from the portion you quoted. I can tell the difference between an Arab and a Caucasian. I can tell the difference between a Caucasian and a Persian. I cannot tell the difference between a Persian and an Arab, in many cases. Does that mean that the difference between Persian and Arab is non-racial?
Ok, definition-of-terms time. By 'race' I mean "a group of humans genetically similar to each other, such that they form a 'cluster' in genome space". Please observe that one can measure similarity and clustered-ness mathematically; these are not subjective concepts. Now then, some genetic markers are visible to the naked eye, some to the trained eye, and some only to a full genome scan. The existence of the first category of differences is a proof-of-concept, it demonstrates that races exist; the existence of the other two kinds indicate that you need more than the naked eye for a full racial division of humanity, but not that no such division exists.
quote:That's a problem with your example. The idea that there is such a thing as race demands that there are a limited number of races. That is why a reduction of that argument shows its absurdity.
If I understand your argument, it is that, if the concept of race is to be meaningful, there must be a unique definition of what races exist. This does not follow; in my definition above, one can change what degree of clustered-ness is required, and change the number of races. This does not invalidate the usefulness (if any) of the concept. Depending on your purpose in defining races, the ideal degree-of-clusteredness number may vary, and thus you'll find that racial differences important for one purpose can be ignored for another. Consequently, the number of races may vary depending on what your purpose is, without invalidating the concept as a whole.
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quote:Originally posted by dkw: In my example the person was asked to divide the group by race, not to divide them into two racial groups. The number of groups was not specified.
That's a problem with your example. The idea that there is such a thing as race demands that there are a limited number of races. That is why a reduction of that argument shows its absurdity.
Well, yes. My example was a response to MC's claim that race is not a social construct because the "average person" can sort Europeans from Africans by sight.
Edit: And I have no idea how 1.1 is an answer to my question. How exactly do you divide a group into 1.1 groups?
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posted
Relating to the article from the OP, I forgot to include this quote from the article with the video linked in my last post. (Bold text inserted for emphasis.)
quote: ...CNN pilot study on children's attitudes on race and her answers actually reflect one of the major findings of the study, that white children have an overwhelming bias toward white, and that black children also have a bias toward white but not nearly as strong as the bias shown by the white children.
posted
Are people really going to take the Steven Colbert approach that, "I don't see race?"
We all know that there exist racial characteristics beyond pure social construct. To say otherwise is simply pretending to be illogically non-racist for the sake of political correctness.
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quote:Originally posted by dkw: In my example the person was asked to divide the group by race, not to divide them into two racial groups. The number of groups was not specified.
That's a problem with your example. The idea that there is such a thing as race demands that there are a limited number of races. That is why a reduction of that argument shows its absurdity.
Well, yes. My example was a response to MC's claim that race is not a social construct because the "average person" can sort Europeans from Africans by sight.
Sorry- I confused you with him. Yes, your example does that. Good work. Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: So if the world population were divided between people with dark hair, and light hair, and one could tell one's heritage from hair color only, those would be a reliable determiner of race? The point is that racial cues, as we recognize them, aren't necessarily racial. In this gross example, one could dye his hair.
Certainly, people can get plastic surgery to look less like their racial heritage (see Michael Jackson). If anything, this only emphasizes the fact that we can indeed make meaningful identifiers based on genetics, and that people are willing to undergo cost and hardship to modify these factors.
quote: And KoM, please, take a step back from the portion you quoted. I can tell the difference between an Arab and a Caucasian. I can tell the difference between a Caucasian and a Persian. I cannot tell the difference between a Persian and an Arab, in many cases. Does that mean that the difference between Persian and Arab is non-racial? Because they *can* tell. So race is defined by whom, exactly, if all that is required is your fly-by-your-asscrack eyeball inspection.
I can't tell the difference between any number of terriers - does that mean they're all the same dog? Does ignorance and inexperience determine reality?
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quote:Originally posted by MightyCow: Are people really going to take the Steven Colbert approach that, "I don't see race?"
We all know that there exist racial characteristics beyond pure social construct. To say otherwise is simply pretending to be illogically non-racist for the sake of political correctness.
You don't seem to be understanding Colbert, or for that matter the argument at hand. First, Colbert says that to make fun of duckspeak PC babble coming from people who clearly *do* have racial prejudices. That's the whole "my one _______ friend" thing. It makes fun of fake open-mindedness, not actual understanding of what race represents, and doesn't represent.
Second, anyone can, indeed, recognize "racial characteristics" as they are commonly known on sight. It is not very difficult. The argument is that these racial characteristics, though they are present, do not indicate the existence of discrete human races or "breeds." This is because, as has been noted time and again here and in other threads, variation within what society calls "race," and of all characteristics associated with "race" are as large within the supposed racial groups as between them. The claim is not that a person cannot look Chinese, the claim is that the fact that a person looks Chinese does not indicate anything of importance about that person other than their probable (though not certain) origin. The reason this is important to point out is that as flawed human beings, we tend to associate otherness with easily defined outward characteristics, most especially language, appearance, dress, and custom. This has led to the deaths of countless millions of people in the last little while, on the human time scale. That is why this is an important thing to keep in mind. A belief in or acceptance of the efficacy of racial myths and racial memory has led to genocide, eugenics, war, ethnic cleansing, religious conquest, slavery, parasitic colonization, political subjugation and disenfranchisement, needless economic and social disparity, and so on. It is a falsehood perpetrated by many, at the cost of many more.
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quote:Originally posted by MightyCow: I can't tell the difference between any number of terriers - does that mean they're all the same dog?
Actually yes, there is only one species of Canis lupus familiaris. Their breed characteristics though are the result of deliberate human breeding over many centuries. Not an example well suited to the debate, since humans have not undergone a similarly controlled process of selective breeding.
quote: Does ignorance and inexperience determine reality?
Please, you want it both ways here. You want to say that the things you can see are valid and useful divisions, but that the things that cannot be seen are still there, just hidden from view behind a veil of ignorance and inexperience. Which is it? Either these things are obvious to everyone, or they aren't. You can hand wave away the fact that you can't tell the differences between every "race" on Earth either and say it's just because you don't have the time to learn what they are, but you ignore the possibility that you can't know them all because there are no divisions. There are no clear lines.
Imagine a beach, fading from wet, to damp, to dry, to dusty. That's what we are. That's *all* we are. We are not handfuls of each type. We are the beach. And imagine how silly it is for you to take up a handful of each type and talk about how different they are. Sure, one is wet, the other is dry. That's not significant, it's all sand. Move a handful of the dry stuff to the water, and it's wet. A handful of the wet stuff to the dry sand, and it dries. It's all mutable. It's all the same thing.
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