creating a new system from race, appearance and cultural terms

[tantric]

apostateabe - you are expected to contribute!

a few months ago while i was upset about being banned for racism from an RPG forum whilst discussing the politics of the pygmy genocide in rwanda, i had an idea about creating a new system for describing people by their genes, appearances and cultural affiliations. i got bogged down and lost interest, but it was resquested that i post what i remember here so that interested folks might help me hash it out.

i started with three roots, -gens, -pheno and -cult, for genetics, appearance and cultural. i only really worked with -gens. i started with the Y-dna haplotypes as seen in this ridiculously useful map: World_Map_of_Y-DNA_Haplogroups. the immediate problem with this is that a person with a bantu mother and an irish father is completely different than a person with a bantu father and an irish mother. mostly i ignored this, but kept the group names. i tried to shorten them to one or two syllables: weseuro-, easeuro-, scand-, finn-, balkan-, etc. now this obviously doesn't work with y-haplotypes, but the basic criterion for being, say weseurogens is having 51%+ weseuro markers. i added some infixes for mixed genes - -et- means half and half, so weseuroetbantugens means half weseuro, half bantu. -min- describes a minor addition. my 2% subsaharan african DNA makes me weseurominbantugens. demi- means plurality when there is not 51%+ so a demieaseurogens is more easeuro than anything else. you might be demiweseurominbantuminnadeengens - say from trinidad (nadeen is nadene). in addition to the fifty or so groups, there is also cosmogens, meaning completely mixed or unknown. it's really not that awful, IMHO.

the -cult and -pheno groups are trickier. for one, i can't decide on -pheno or -phene. these ideas are more culturally defined, so perhaps -pheno terms are unique per -cult group? and what constitutes a -cult? anglocult for the anglosphere? do the usa, canada, australia, new zealand and the uk share a culture? let's run with that and add and -sub- infix, so we have anglosubcandcult for canadians. how about inuitsubcandcults for inuit canadians and inuitsubscandcult for greenlanders? i don't like 'sub' though. and we get 'cosmo' here, too - i might be cosmosubnamericult for cosmpolitan/north american.

-pheno is even trickier. on first thought, one might suggest things like celtpheno for red hair, green/blue eyes, pale skin and freckles. i think it might be better to go purely descriptive, since the other terms hold geographic data. i like this chart for skin color, but it's unwieldy to translate into language. we could reduce it with this map and use only eight terms. hair type can be reduced to straight, wavy, curly or kinky. hair colors are black, brown, chestnut, red, auburn and gray/white.....but this is getting useless, don't you think?

 

[Keith&Co.]

apostateabe - you are expected to contribute!

a few months ago while i was upset about being banned for racism from an RPG forum whilst discussing the politics of the pygmy genocide in rwanda, i had an idea about creating a new system for describing people by their genes, appearances and cultural affiliations. i got bogged down and lost interest, but it was resquested that i post what i remember here so that interested folks might help me hash it out.

Before beating out the details of the new system, exactly what is your goal in creating it in the first place?
What is the problem we face that this will correct?
Will it be workable, useful, useful enough to be adopted in the place of the old system? OR will it just be something the PC police can use to beat over the heads of the uninitiated?

 

[ApostateAbe]

The Y-DNA (paternal-line DNA) and mtDNA (maternal-line DNA) are useful to geneticists for tracking and relating ancestries, which provides an advantage over the usage of biological race categories. But, the disadvantage is that such identifications depend on only a few genes, whereas races are large sets of genes in combination. If you look at the Y-DNA map you linked to, you may notice that, right in the middle of Africa, you have a population of Y-DNA that is typical of western Europe, and you have two more such isolated spots in west Asia. That is the disadvantage of using such a narrow range of gene identifiers. Closeness of relationships among native peoples really is a function of geographic distance, but a narrow range of DNA does not accurately reflect it.

Given that thought, if you were to switch to a more comprehensive set of genes to identify populations, then "-gens" may be redundant with "-pheno." Phenotypes may be the best way to identify genotypes, and it may be a good thing that your roots are reduced to two.

It may be a good idea to restrict the classification system to either populations or individuals, but not both. If you are describing populations, then you would be assigning terms to their averages or their majority members, but that would have the problem of where to draw the divisions (different phenotype geographies have different boundaries), the subjectivity of how many divisions you should have, and the spectra of the boundaries. If you are describing individuals, then it may be easier, as each individual has only one clear set of phenotypes.

The problems of classifying biological populations are well expressed in an article co-authored by EO Wilson in 1953, titled "The Subspecies Concept and Its Taxonomic Application." It is a paper written to criticize Ernst Mayr's proposal of classifying biological races as subspecies. He believed that races are spectral and would be misleading if forced into discrete boxes. The objections would be roughly what you need to consider with your classifications of populations.

 

[tantric]

apostateabe - you are expected to contribute!

a few months ago while i was upset about being banned for racism from an RPG forum whilst discussing the politics of the pygmy genocide in rwanda, i had an idea about creating a new system for describing people by their genes, appearances and cultural affiliations. i got bogged down and lost interest, but it was resquested that i post what i remember here so that interested folks might help me hash it out.

Before beating out the details of the new system, exactly what is your goal in creating it in the first place?
What is the problem we face that this will correct?
Will it be workable, useful, useful enough to be adopted in the place of the old system? OR will it just be something the PC police can use to beat over the heads of the uninitiated?

this is something i wrote a while back, but it explains my dissatisfaction with the current system:


The system of racial classification, which most people see as some kind of natural law, seems to be a sociopolitical construct designed to chart how alien a given person is to the cultural standard, using a mixed metric of skin color, native language and ethnic origin, while consistently refusing to define those units. For instance, while 'black' and 'white' are considered natural classes, nowhere is there to be found a display showing the various existing human skin colorations and the correct term for each.In fact, the language itself lacks terms for those shades, despite have tens of thousands of other color terms. It seems that when a 'black' person has a skin tone lighter than many 'white' people, the term 'black' shifts to mean an ethnicity. In other cases, persons with any skin tone may be assigned to the 'Hispanic' or 'Latino' race based on their native language. This leaves persons from countries in 'Latin America' who speak English, Portuguese or other languages in racial limbo - or perhaps not, as the category was clearly added to exclude persons from the Americas outside of the USA and Canada from being 'white'. In some situations, the word 'Caucasian' is used, but rather than referring to natives of the Caucus Mountains, it appears to be a synonym for 'white' based on a theory discredited a century ago. Likewise, 'Mongoloid' is a nice term that can mean 'of East Asian extraction' or 'congenitally retarted'. The terms 'Black', 'African-American' and 'Negro' superficially refer to persons who are ethnically sub-Saharan African, while 'white' likewise pretends to mean 'of European extraction'. However, when a White and a Black produce offspring, all are Black, rather than Gray or Half-Black as one might expect. This can be repeated ad infinitum with the same results: if you take the F1 Black offspring, crossed with a new White, you still get only Black, despite the actual skin tones of the children, which by now are well within the range present in Southern Europe. This pattern applies only to Black - the F1 of a WhitexAsian cross are 'half asian' or 'mixed'. The only possible analysis of this is that 'White' means 'pure' and 'Black' means 'polluted'. The system of hyphenated names to refer to ethnicity seems to be an alternative, but upon inspection shows glaring inconsistency. A 'Japanese-American' is a person with a Japanese cultural heritage who is either born in or a resident of America, but 'African-American' isn't reducible, but a fixed term to refer to persons with cosmopolitan American cultural roots and dark skin, and significantly does not refer to a person with African cultural heritage in the USA. Or maybe it means both. Logically, an Afrikaner or Egyptian immigrant to the USA is also an African-American? Notable for its absence is the term European-American, which should be the proper term for 'white' but isn't used at all. This could go on for hours.

 

[Keith&Co.]

In fact, the language itself lacks terms for those shades, despite have tens of thousands of other color terms. I

Mulatto? Quadroon? Therre are such terms, though they've fallen out of favor.
They've fallen from favor because mostly such distinctions aren't seen as terribly important.
I'm not seeing any great benefit to society from better specificity in exactly how person X differs from me?

 

[tantric]

In fact, the language itself lacks terms for those shades, despite have tens of thousands of other color terms. I

Mulatto? Quadroon? Therre are such terms, though they've fallen out of favor.
They've fallen from favor because mostly such distinctions aren't seen as terribly important.
I'm not seeing any great benefit to society from better specificity in exactly how person X differs from me?

the biggest benefit is causing people to think about what 'race' means. with this system, it's just gone. there are benefits to deconstruction - pretend like you're having this conversation with a weseurogens anglosubnamericult person (wap), preferable over the phone or chat:

you: what color are you?
wap: me, i'm white.
you: if i had your skin color matched to paint and painted a wall with it, what color would the wall be?
wap: [fluster]
you: okay, fine, milk is white, are you milk colored?
wap: no, you know what i meant, you.....
you: if a white man and a black woman have a baby, what race is the child?
wap: black or...mulatto?
you: what race is president obama? how about his mother?
wap: he's black, his mother is white...
you: if the presidents father had been asian and his mother white, would he be asian?
wap: he'd be half-asian, i guess
you: but not half black?
wap: no, well, maybe...
you: so if instead a black man and a white woman had a baby, it would be black, too?
wap: yeah, what the hell?
you: so a white woman can have a black baby, but a black woman can't have a white baby?
wap: well, she can have in vitro...
you: you're dodging - what does 'black' and 'white' mean in terms of race, really?
wap: i'm sure you're going to tell me.
you: white is purity, black is pollution - that's what those words really mean, every time you say them. now, what color are you?

i'm hoping that when you get people away from all the toxic crap in the current system, or at least let them see another system for comparison, they'll realize how pointless it all is.

 

[ApostateAbe]

I am bringing a conversation of another thread into this one.

I remember now! It seemed like a long time ago, like six months to a year. Was it really only a month and a half ago? What is happening to my memory?? The objective reality of races is fundamentally messy, and there really is no way to make it simple. Identifications by ancestral geography--the traditional racial scheme--really does seem to be the best way to go about it. Racial phenotypes correlate with each other, unified by ancestral geography, as it follows largely from the mating patterns of populations (more likely to mate with someone nearby than with someone far away), which isn't to claim that the patterns are perfect. It is in line with the theory of evolution generally.

no, it's not. what area has a homogeneous racial makeup? at what point in time? what do you call people? let's assume the person has a skin similiar to beach sand or the loams of the great plains (because all people are really dirt colored). is he a Euro-american (or what land his ancestors colonized most recently)? that's phenotype - culture. the problem here is that (other than EUROPE IS NOT A CONTINENT) it doesn't work for shit for 'asian'. 'asian' isn't a phenotype or genotype, it a broad and irrational grouping. you'd think, geographically, that there'd be Asia and the European, Arabian and Indian subcontinents. ....


and anyway, grr - your system has to be artificial if it doesn't use the one drop rule, and i'm assuming you don't? what are american blacks, with the collage DNA?

Identification by ancestral geography has problems, no doubt, among them being that some populations, such as black Americans and Latinos, have not just one major geographic ancestry 10,000 years ago but TWO major geographic ancestries. The implicit understanding is already common that some single races are a mix of two, and that is OK. There are many other problems besides that problem, I realize. But, there are good reasons I prefer to identify races by their geography, not just existing convention. Firstly, the racial phenotypes really do correlate with each other. Black Africans with dark skin not only tend to have dark skin but also tend to have flared nostrils and curly hair. Each of those phenotypes are easily recognized as adaptations to a sun-rich environment, and the phenotypes beneath the skin, such as the ones we have discussed--higher bone density, smaller lung size, high muscle mass, and low body fat--are hardly less relevant. They did not come about by "accident," or, if they did, then it is hardly relevant that they did. "Accident" is a value judgment of significance, but value judgments have no bearing on nature. These phenotypes came about largely through natural selection, where the environment of the geography plays a key part. Maybe some of the differences came about through genetic drift or bottlenecks, and it would still be a matter of geography.

Secondly, I also emphasize that geography is key to the general evolutionary patterns, and, if you try to separate geography from the patterns, then it would be like trying to make sense of the solar system by assuming the Earth is the center of it. You can do it, but it would necessarily be messier. This image comes from Alan Templeton's "Human Races: A Genetic and Evolutionary Perspective," 1998. His intent was to criticize the concept of races, but he still recognized the significance of the relationship between genetic differences and geographic differences.

This is a chart that illustrates four different processes of speciation, from Dana Krempels of the University of Miami's Department of Biology. In the first row, you have single populations with no racial divisions. In the second row, you have geographic isolation, except for the fourth process that applies little to historical human patterns but may be only now just beginning: the high-IQ within each population are mating with the high-IQ, and the low-IQ with the low-IQ. In the third row, you have genetic variations along the given geographic boundaries. In the fourth row (presently irrelevant for humans), you have races that fully split into different species due to their genetic divergence.

This is perhaps the best way to model human races. It is a cluster analysis of hundreds of genetic markers at the same time, by Rosenberg et al, "Clines, Clusters, and the Effect of Study Design on the Inference of Human Population Structure," 2005. Notice the geographic correspondence. If the Melanesian cluster landed between the French cluster and the Italian cluster, that would be odd!

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

If I look at my parents generation and then look at the generation coming up after mine, I see a LOT more mixed race people. A lot more. How many more generations of interbreeding between races do we need before race is no longer a poignant concept?

 

[ApostateAbe]

If I look at my parents generation and then look at the generation coming up after mine, I see a LOT more mixed race people. A lot more. How many more generations of interbreeding between races do we need before race is no longer a poignant concept?

I have wondered about this. Maybe, if people were equally likely to mate and reproduce with a member of any race, then it will be a melting pot where everyone within a single nation becomes a single race, and many races would no longer exist within that nation, though races would still exist in the global context (it is vastly unlikely that an average American would be just as likely to mate and reproduce with someone in Madagascar as someone in America). But, any differential mating pattern would be enough to maintain the existence of races. Interracial reproduction is still the minority, 2% on the low end and 17% on the high end (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interracial_marriage_in_the_United_States#Census_Bureau_statistics), so races will continue to exist.

 

[tantric]

re: africa - no, just no. really? 'all africans'? if you can't tell a nilotic from a bantu from a twa, that's your problem, but i promise, they don't look alike. what are the SA coloureds?

 

[Crazy Eddie]

apostateabe - you are expected to contribute!

a few months ago while i was upset about being banned for racism from an RPG forum whilst discussing the politics of the pygmy genocide in rwanda, i had an idea about creating a new system for describing people by their genes, appearances and cultural affiliations. i got bogged down and lost interest, but it was resquested that i post what i remember here so that interested folks might help me hash it out.

Yeah... screw that.

Step 1: Admit to ourselves the sad truth that there is no such thing as "the white race." That "whiteness" is an umbrella that was originally concocted purely to exclude black people from full citizenship in what was originally a binary racial makeup of pre-Civil War America. The entire concept of "whiteness" is now thoroughly obsolete and actually incredibly demeaning to self-identified "white" people who no longer get to enjoy the benefits of white supremacy and whose racial identity is reduced to "Not being black."

Step 2: Encourage people to claim a cultural self-identity that fits their family/traditional circumstances most appropriately: you may be Irish, Polish, Scottish, Welsh, Dutch, Black Texan, White Texan, Creole, Redbone, Canadian, French Canadian, Bostonian (yes, that's a real thing), etc. In which case it is less about race than it is about culture, and your self identity tells us more about who you ARE NOW than who your ancestors were.

Step 3: Magic brownies.


tl;dr
Eliminate "race" as a meaningful identifier and replace it with "culture."

 

[ApostateAbe]

re: africa - no, just no. really? 'all africans'? if you can't tell a nilotic from a bantu from a twa, that's your problem, but i promise, they don't look alike. what are the SA coloureds?

I agree! If the argument is that there is excessive genetic diversity within the black African race and therefore races do not exist or are useless (I don't know if this is your argument, but it is common), then it would be a poor argument, as it is a non-sequitur. I suggest thinking of biological races much like you would colors on the color spectrum.

You can draw lines to slice up this color spectrum into colors, and it has about the same problems as the divisions of races. If you ask many people to make divisions of colors independently, then (1) you will have some people with many color categories and some with few, and (2) even with the same number of categories, the dividing lines will be in different places. It does NOT follow that we should wholly discard colors.

Sister: "Can you get me red paint?"

Brother: "I don't know what you mean by 'red.' Colors are just a subjective abstraction, and there is too much diversity within so-called 'red.' Give me the RGB code. Do you want 255-0-0?"

 

[ApostateAbe]

apostateabe - you are expected to contribute!

a few months ago while i was upset about being banned for racism from an RPG forum whilst discussing the politics of the pygmy genocide in rwanda, i had an idea about creating a new system for describing people by their genes, appearances and cultural affiliations. i got bogged down and lost interest, but it was resquested that i post what i remember here so that interested folks might help me hash it out.

Yeah... screw that.

Step 1: Admit to ourselves the sad truth that there is no such thing as "the white race." That "whiteness" is an umbrella that was originally concocted purely to exclude black people from full citizenship in what was originally a binary racial makeup of pre-Civil War America. The entire concept of "whiteness" is now thoroughly obsolete and actually incredibly demeaning to self-identified "white" people who no longer get to enjoy the benefits of white supremacy and whose racial identity is reduced to "Not being black."

Step 2: Encourage people to claim a cultural self-identity that fits their family/traditional circumstances most appropriately: you may be Irish, Polish, Scottish, Welsh, Dutch, Black Texan, White Texan, Creole, Redbone, Canadian, French Canadian, Bostonian (yes, that's a real thing), etc. In which case it is less about race than it is about culture, and your self identity tells us more about who you ARE NOW than who your ancestors were.

Step 3: Magic brownies.


tl;dr
Eliminate "race" as a meaningful identifier and replace it with "culture."

"Admit to ourselves the sad truth..."? There is no white race, and that is a sad truth? There are people in the world who think that the existence of the white race is a happy reality. Like, Nazis. Maybe it is a happy belief for them, but I don't really know those people. What do you think? What would make for a happier existence? If races existed, or if they did not? I expect your answer would be the same as mine: the world would be a much better place if races did not exist. If everyone always believed it, then the Holocaust would have been less likely to occur to the extent that it did. There would have been much less moral justification for slavery and racially oppressive laws. No Rwandan genocide. No race riots. No racial discrimination. None of that. It really would be a better world if race did not exist and it was commonly obvious. So, supposing that races really do exist, would that not be the sad truth? Let's be real about this. I read in scientific papers critical of racial correlations, published in peer-reviewed journals, that "Because of the social ramifications... Bad research on this topic should be discouraged much more strongly than bad research on other, less charged topics." You may have heard that politics has no place in scientific thought, but, on one side of the debate in matters of race, it is openly shameless. And they customarily accuse the other side of being political.

 

[tantric]

dude, what system do you exactly propose - i put mine on the table. and it's genetic, not geographic, you do understand that in 10 year you'll be able to go to mal-wart and buy a kit where you prick your finger, add blood to disposable unit plugged into your computer and have your genome, right? or at least all the markers you ever wanted to know. it's the mfin' 21st century, 'asian' don't mean shit. do you really want to put a bunch of people from all over asian in a room and try to convince them they're a natural group? you'd have bloodshed in an hour. and its nonsense, thais do not look like japanese.....

 

[ApostateAbe]

dude, what system do you exactly propose - i put mine on the table. and it's genetic, not geographic, you do understand that in 10 year you'll be able to go to mal-wart and buy a kit where you prick your finger, add blood to disposable unit plugged into your computer and have your genome, right? or at least all the markers you ever wanted to know. it's the mfin' 21st century, 'asian' don't mean shit. do you really want to put a bunch of people from all over asian in a room and try to convince them they're a natural group? you'd have bloodshed in an hour. and its nonsense, thais do not look like japanese.....

Races are divisible, much like colors on the color spectrum. So, "Mongoloid" may serve someone who is not a Mongoloid, but a Mongoloid would need something more specific--Thai, Japanese, Vietnamese, Filipino, etc. Yes, I do think there will be DNA testing machines for cheap.

 

[Juma]

dude, what system do you exactly propose - i put mine on the table. and it's genetic, not geographic, you do understand that in 10 year you'll be able to go to mal-wart and buy a kit where you prick your finger, add blood to disposable unit plugged into your computer and have your genome, right? or at least all the markers you ever wanted to know. it's the mfin' 21st century, 'asian' don't mean shit. do you really want to put a bunch of people from all over asian in a room and try to convince them they're a natural group? you'd have bloodshed in an hour. and its nonsense, thais do not look like japanese.....

Races are divisible, much like colors on the color spectrum. So, "Mongoloid" may serve someone who is not a Mongoloid, but a Mongoloid would need something more specific--Thai, Japanese, Vietnamese, Filipino, etc. Yes, I do think there will be DNA testing machines for cheap.

So where is brown in the color spectrum?

 

[ApostateAbe]

Races are divisible, much like colors on the color spectrum. So, "Mongoloid" may serve someone who is not a Mongoloid, but a Mongoloid would need something more specific--Thai, Japanese, Vietnamese, Filipino, etc. Yes, I do think there will be DNA testing machines for cheap.

So where is brown in the color spectrum?

Brown isn't on the one-dimensional wavelength color spectrum, but the full array of colors as we know them must be represented as combinations of at least three dimensions, i.e. RGB or HSV. I used the one-dimensional rainbow spectrum for simplicity's sake. And please note that I am not equating races with skin colors.

 

[Juma]

So where is brown in the color spectrum?

Brown isn't on the one-dimensional wavelength color spectrum, but the full array of colors as we know them must be represented as combinations of at least three dimensions, i.e. RGB or HSV. I used the one-dimensional rainbow spectrum for simplicity's sake. And please note that I am not equating races with skin colors.

Yes you do. Why else would you use a one dimensional example?

 

[ApostateAbe]

Brown isn't on the one-dimensional wavelength color spectrum, but the full array of colors as we know them must be represented as combinations of at least three dimensions, i.e. RGB or HSV. I used the one-dimensional rainbow spectrum for simplicity's sake. And please note that I am not equating races with skin colors.

Yes you do. Why else would you use a one dimensional example?

Again--for simplicity's sake. Is that explanation too extraordinary? Like I really was trying to equate races with skin colors and I am now backing out? No. Races are not just one dimension, not just three dimensions, but at least thousands of dimensions, as many as there are alleles that significantly vary by race.

 

[Juma]

Yes you do. Why else would you use a one dimensional example?

Again--for simplicity's sake. Is that explanation too extraordinary? Like I really was trying to equate races with skin colors and I am now backing out? No. Races are not just one dimension, not just three dimensions, but at least thousands of dimensions, as many as there are alleles that significantly vary by race.

And thus invalidates any simplistic one-dimensional example.