What is race?

[AthenaAwakened]

Why is skin color a marker for race and not eye color?
Why is eye shape but not ear shape?

why not fingernail shape?

Why hair texture and not hair color?

Why not try to find out?

More seriously, how do these features vary among human populations? I've never heard of notable variations of fingernails.

Most human populations have black hair and brown eyes, with the main exceptions being northern Europeans and nearby people. Europeans are rather oddly variable by human standards.

that doesn't answer the question.

Race, as we are discussing it, is based on phenotype. And scientists have been trying to prove race genetically ever since they found out there was a difference between Geno and pheno. And not only trying to prove race genetically, but genetically and matching the existing classifications. We have been working backwards with race ever since we started studying it, trying to make it fit with we already believe. And fitting the evidence to the hypothesis is not good science.

 

[EricK]

Has anyone every noticed that a lot of the white kids act like their black at the party till the cops show up? Nom sayin? Pegasus

Is this some sort of joke? If not, could you explain to those of us who are not as racially aware as you exactly what 'acting like they're black' entails?

 

[pegasus8]

Dude what are the parties like in the UK? And I am talking about the good ones.

Has anyone every noticed that a lot of the white kids act like their black at the party till the cops show up? Nom sayin? Pegasus

Is this some sort of joke? If not, could you explain to those of us who are not as racially aware as you exactly what 'acting like they're black' entails?

Well EricK I am simply pointing out a pretty obvious fact here in the states. Well at least those who came from the streets. There is actually a term , street term, used for the white kids acting black. It is called a "Wigger." I do not make this shit up. I just laugh and remember. A lot of the white kids like to act like they belong in a gang and or have this bizarre notion that they look cool if they have that " thug," appeal. All I know that if you are banging you do not want people to know. It is kind of like being a hacker. My friend tells me that he hires hackers for his IT security firm and he asks prospects, " are you a hacker or a yacker." The Man, the cops, will zero on you if your banging like white on rice. Hence the reason why some of the white kids like to look cool, look black, at the party till the cops show up. And it is important to know that I am using the term "black" in a cultural interpretation. There is this famous 49er football player who had this party in San Fran and he invited a butt load of gang bangers. And the party got out of hand and Aldon Smith went to jail. Aldon Smith is black yet he tried to get the "thug appeal" thing going on at his crib that ended in a mess. So this seems to be a cultural perception thing going on. Same thing happened to Michael Vick with the horrible dog fighting fiasco thing.

So my point is that you do not go all acting like your some bad ass street thug sporting your red or blue crap if like you are actually in the sauce. That is how kids get killed everyday. The way you wear your hat, your belt, your pants, your socks and on and on ad nauseam. So EricK do you know why the kids who want to look cool wear their pants sagging? I do not know how they identify themselves in he UK but to get that certain thug look you need your pants hanging low. The gang/thug look comes from the banger having their belts taken away in the pokey. They do this for obvious reason along with your shoe laces. You know weapons and stuff. So this pants sagging crap is supposed to give you street creds and that looking like you are associated.

Now Mexican gangs, claim red or blue as the Crips and Bloods did from LA. Vato gangs do not try to look "black," because they have an entirely different set of rules. Where do you think the style of kids wearing their baseball hats backwards came from? It is actually comical watching the way the high school kids, some of them, dress. Certain shoes, pants, jackets, etc., will denote you are having those street creds and that thug look.

What is ironic is that the black gangs copied the Mexican gangs from LA in the late 60's and 70's. You know wearing certain shirts, pants, red or blue handkerchiefs folded this or that way, etc., to denote who and where you affiliated with. If anyone told me that the Bloods and Crips from the 70's would influence most of the gangs in America and the way "some" of the kids dressed I would have said that your crazy.

I have been to a gazillion parties and a lot in the hood. Yet some of the white boys trying to act hard and "all that," do not try to act "black" at the parties in the ghetto or barrio. They act all that at the rich kids parties in the suburbs and the sorority houses. Well till the cops show up. It can be pretty dam funny when you see it after downing some beers!

They is a song from Offspring called " Pretty Fly for a White Guy," that totally captures what I am talking about. It peaked to # one on the UK single charts in 98-99. You know some wigger cruising in a 64 Impala acting all that. And dude does anyone remember how stupid Vanilla Ice looked back in the day? You know cruising in my Five O with my nine? WTF was that all about?

One could make the argument that all Rock comes from Jazz. And we all know where Jazz came from.

Later and peace

Pegasus

 

[Derec]

Why is skin color a marker for race and not eye color?
Why is eye shape but not ear shape?

why not fingernail shape?

Why hair texture and not hair color?

I would think two things. For one, your pigmented skin covers vast majority of your surface area, so it's a kind of obvious marking. Second, there has been a lack of variance within distinct traditional ethnic/geographic populations. Subsaharan Africans are black, Europeans white. Eye shape of East Asians falls in that second category but not in the first for example, so I think it is the more significant. So while a couple of dark haired brown eyed people might produce a child with blond hair and blue eyes due to carrying recessive genes it hasn't been the case for race. With increasing miscegenation it will become increasingly the case though. Maybe we can stop freaking out about race at that time.

 

[Toni]

Socially and politically, race is a construct used to confer or withhold privilege.

With respect to some medically significant traits, there is actual practical value in knowing what an individual's geographic based heritage might be. It is known that some groups respond differently to some types of medication, for example.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

Why is skin color a marker for race and not eye color?
Why is eye shape but not ear shape?

why not fingernail shape?

Why hair texture and not hair color?

I would think two things. For one, your pigmented skin covers vast majority of your surface area, so it's a kind of obvious marking. Second, there has been a lack of variance within distinct traditional ethnic/geographic populations. Subsaharan Africans are black, Europeans white. Eye shape of East Asians falls in that second category but not in the first for example, so I think it is the more significant. So while a couple of dark haired brown eyed people might produce a child with blond hair and blue eyes due to carrying recessive genes it hasn't been the case for race. With increasing miscegenation it will become increasingly the case though. Maybe we can stop freaking out about race at that time.

If race is just a collection of traits, why would anyone freak out?

 

[AthenaAwakened]

Here is a little exercise for the braver among us

Let's sort some people shall we

http://www.pbs.org/race/002_SortingPeople/002_00-home.htm

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Here is a little exercise for the braver among us

Let's sort some people shall we

http://www.pbs.org/race/002_SortingPeople/002_00-home.htm

Why would something like that be considered relevant to the race debate? It's like saying "You mixed up a Toyota Yaris and a Ford Focus. Therefore, you can't tell the difference between a Ferrari and a Hummer".

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

What purpose does categorizing people by these characteristics serve?

Probably instinctual. One thing to keep in mind, we categorize well beyond race. NY'ers v Bostonians. North End v South End. People who like dogs v People who like cats. Republican v Democrat. Patriot fans v Raider fans. Gays v Straights v Dunno (triple threat!). Countryfolk v Cityfolk (Farmers Only Dot Com).

We love dividing ourselves into groups. A lot of it is arbitrary, other is sociopolitical. We have a gay "race" because of laws created to hold back gay rights. We have a black "race" in America because of that whole slavery followed by Jim Crow thing.

 

[Bronzeage]

What purpose does categorizing people by these characteristics serve?

Probably instinctual. One thing to keep in mind, we categorize well beyond race. NY'ers v Bostonians. North End v South End. People who like dogs v People who like cats. Republican v Democrat. Patriot fans v Raider fans. Gays v Straights v Dunno (triple threat!). Countryfolk v Cityfolk (Farmers Only Dot Com).

We love dividing ourselves into groups. A lot of it is arbitrary, other is sociopolitical. We have a gay "race" because of laws created to hold back gay rights. We have a black "race" in America because of that whole slavery followed by Jim Crow thing.

You have confused "instinctual" with "cultural." All the dichotomies you list are social constructs, where people have different beliefs which they learned, sometime after their birth. If you want to see instinct in action, bring a bunch a Democrats and Republicans into a room and set off the fire alarm. I'm willing to bet you wont be able to tell which is which. It's the same for the rest of your list.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

You have confused "instinctual" with "cultural." All the dichotomies you list are social constructs, where people have different beliefs which they learned, sometime after their birth. If you want to see instinct in action, bring a bunch a Democrats and Republicans into a room and set off the fire alarm. I'm willing to bet you wont be able to tell which is which. It's the same for the rest of your list.

So what? Arbitrary categories are still categories.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

What purpose does categorizing people by these characteristics serve?

Probably instinctual. One thing to keep in mind, we categorize well beyond race. NY'ers v Bostonians. North End v South End. People who like dogs v People who like cats. Republican v Democrat. Patriot fans v Raider fans. Gays v Straights v Dunno (triple threat!). Countryfolk v Cityfolk (Farmers Only Dot Com).

We love dividing ourselves into groups. A lot of it is arbitrary, other is sociopolitical. We have a gay "race" because of laws created to hold back gay rights. We have a black "race" in America because of that whole slavery followed by Jim Crow thing.

You have confused "instinctual" with "cultural." All the dichotomies you list are social constructs, where people have different beliefs which they learned, sometime after their birth. If you want to see instinct in action, bring a bunch a Democrats and Republicans into a room and set off the fire alarm. I'm willing to bet you wont be able to tell which is which. It's the same for the rest of your list.

I'm saying the need to group off is instinctual.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

Here is a little exercise for the braver among us

Let's sort some people shall we

http://www.pbs.org/race/002_SortingPeople/002_00-home.htm

Why would something like that be considered relevant to the race debate? It's like saying "You mixed up a Toyota Yaris and a Ford Focus. Therefore, you can't tell the difference between a Ferrari and a Hummer".

do you think that the differences among the races are as stark as the differences between a Ferrari and a Hummer?
or are they more like the differences between a yaris and a focus?

 

[AthenaAwakened]

You have confused "instinctual" with "cultural." All the dichotomies you list are social constructs, where people have different beliefs which they learned, sometime after their birth. If you want to see instinct in action, bring a bunch a Democrats and Republicans into a room and set off the fire alarm. I'm willing to bet you wont be able to tell which is which. It's the same for the rest of your list.

So what? Arbitrary categories are still categories.

while the categories are arbitrary, their consequences are not. And not one generation of human being since this whole race thing started has gotten it right, hince the ever changing definitions of what is and is not race.

 

[lpetrich]

Jerry Coyne has a nice article about this issue: Are there human races? « Why Evolution Is True

Although most human genetic variation is inside of populations, the between-population variation does correspond to the traditional races fairly well, and JC mentions a recent cluster analysis of human genetic variation.

For 4 clusters, it got sub-Saharan African (Negroid), European-to-Indian (Caucasoid), eastern Asian (Mongoloid), and Native American (Amerindoid).

For 5 clusters, it split the Melanesians and Papuans off from the eastern Asians; they are traditionally Australoid.

For 6 clusters, it split the Kalash of northern Pakistan off from the European-to-Indian axis. So there's something interesting going on here.

ETA: here's another analysis:
File:9 Cluster Tree.png - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linkage tree and Fst distance matrix for 9 population clusters created using data gathered from Cavalli-Sforza, L.L., Menozzi, P. & Piazza, A,. The History and Geography of Human Genes, 1994.

The traditional races are recognizable there also, though there is an early split between northeast and southeast Asians.
The tree:
(African, Everybody Else)
Everybody Else: (Southeast Eurasia, Northwest Eurasia)
Southeast Eurasia: (Australoid, (Southeast Asian, Pacific Islander))
Northwest Eurasia: (Caucasoid, (Northeast Asian, Amerindoid))

 

[EricK]

Here is a little exercise for the braver among us

Let's sort some people shall we

http://www.pbs.org/race/002_SortingPeople/002_00-home.htm

I bravely clicked on the link and thought "I don't know and I don't care. I wouldn't bother to do this in real life so why bother now.". So instead I divided them into ugly/attractive/serial killer/paedophile. Not sure if I managed to identify them correctly though.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

This is a difficult concept and it seems to come up again and again, so let me provide a few points to bust the myth and to clarify the reality…

There is no genetic sequence unique to blacks or whites or Asians. In fact, these categories don’t reflect biological groupings at all. There is more genetic variation in the diverse populations from the continent of Africa (who some would lump into a “black” category) than exists in ALL populations from outside of Africa (the rest of the world) combined!

There are no specific racial genes. There are no genes that make blacks in the USA more susceptible to high blood pressure, just as there are no genes for particular kinds of cancers that can be assigned to only one racial grouping. There is no neurological patterning that distinguishes races from one another, nor are there patterns in muscle development and structure, digestive tracts, hand-eye coordination, or any other such measures.

Even something thought to be so ubiquitous as skin color works only in a limited way as dark or light skin tells us only about a human’s amount of ancestry relative to the equator, not anything about the specific population or part of the planet they might be descended from.

There is not a single biological element unique to any of the groups we call white, black, Asian, Latino, etc. In fact, no matter how hard people try, there has never been a successful scientific way to justify any racial classification, in biology. This is not to say that humans don’t vary biologically, we do, a lot. But rather that the variation is not racially distributed. If you don’t believe me, check it out for yourself by having a look at some of the references below. Seriously, there are no biological races in humans today, period.

Why is busting this myth of a biological basis of race important in a blog for Psychology Today? Because, if you look across the USA you can see that there are patterns of racial difference, such as income inequalities, health disparities, differences in academic achievement and representation in professional sports. If one thinks that these patterns of racial differences have a biological basis, if we see them as “natural,” racial inequality becomes just part of the human experience (remember a book called The Bell Curve?). This fallacy influences people to see racism and inequality not as the products of economic, social, and political histories but more as a natural state of affairs.

back with the link in two shakes

Back

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog...race-is-real-not-in-the-way-many-people-think

 

[Bronzeage]

What purpose does categorizing people by these characteristics serve?

Probably instinctual. One thing to keep in mind, we categorize well beyond race. NY'ers v Bostonians. North End v South End. People who like dogs v People who like cats. Republican v Democrat. Patriot fans v Raider fans. Gays v Straights v Dunno (triple threat!). Countryfolk v Cityfolk (Farmers Only Dot Com).

We love dividing ourselves into groups. A lot of it is arbitrary, other is sociopolitical. We have a gay "race" because of laws created to hold back gay rights. We have a black "race" in America because of that whole slavery followed by Jim Crow thing.

You have confused "instinctual" with "cultural." All the dichotomies you list are social constructs, where people have different beliefs which they learned, sometime after their birth. If you want to see instinct in action, bring a bunch a Democrats and Republicans into a room and set off the fire alarm. I'm willing to bet you wont be able to tell which is which. It's the same for the rest of your list.

I'm saying the need to group off is instinctual.

What evidence is there that the need to group off is instinctual?

Instinct: an innate, typically fixed pattern of behavior in animals in response to certain stimuli. Example: Birds have an instinct to build nests.

Do you mean a human baby is born with an innate knowledge that people of other skin colors should be avoided?

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

What purpose does categorizing people by these characteristics serve?

Probably instinctual. One thing to keep in mind, we categorize well beyond race. NY'ers v Bostonians. North End v South End. People who like dogs v People who like cats. Republican v Democrat. Patriot fans v Raider fans. Gays v Straights v Dunno (triple threat!). Countryfolk v Cityfolk (Farmers Only Dot Com).

We love dividing ourselves into groups. A lot of it is arbitrary, other is sociopolitical. We have a gay "race" because of laws created to hold back gay rights. We have a black "race" in America because of that whole slavery followed by Jim Crow thing.

You have confused "instinctual" with "cultural." All the dichotomies you list are social constructs, where people have different beliefs which they learned, sometime after their birth. If you want to see instinct in action, bring a bunch a Democrats and Republicans into a room and set off the fire alarm. I'm willing to bet you wont be able to tell which is which. It's the same for the rest of your list.

I'm saying the need to group off is instinctual.

What evidence is there that the need to group off is instinctual?

Instinct: an innate, typically fixed pattern of behavior in animals in response to certain stimuli. Example: Birds have an instinct to build nests.

Do you mean a human baby is born with an innate knowledge that people of other skin colors should be avoided?

Yes, that is exactly what I'm saying.

 

[Bronzeage]

What purpose does categorizing people by these characteristics serve?

Probably instinctual. One thing to keep in mind, we categorize well beyond race. NY'ers v Bostonians. North End v South End. People who like dogs v People who like cats. Republican v Democrat. Patriot fans v Raider fans. Gays v Straights v Dunno (triple threat!). Countryfolk v Cityfolk (Farmers Only Dot Com).

We love dividing ourselves into groups. A lot of it is arbitrary, other is sociopolitical. We have a gay "race" because of laws created to hold back gay rights. We have a black "race" in America because of that whole slavery followed by Jim Crow thing.

You have confused "instinctual" with "cultural." All the dichotomies you list are social constructs, where people have different beliefs which they learned, sometime after their birth. If you want to see instinct in action, bring a bunch a Democrats and Republicans into a room and set off the fire alarm. I'm willing to bet you wont be able to tell which is which. It's the same for the rest of your list.

I'm saying the need to group off is instinctual.

What evidence is there that the need to group off is instinctual?

Instinct: an innate, typically fixed pattern of behavior in animals in response to certain stimuli. Example: Birds have an instinct to build nests.

Do you mean a human baby is born with an innate knowledge that people of other skin colors should be avoided?

Yes, that is exactly what I'm saying.

That is a very silly thing to say. Do you have any personal experience with babies?