Is there any such thing as being a "race traitor"?

Great Debates
61

Scientific American recently published a nice phylogenic tree of humankind, The Migration History of Humans: DNA Study Traces Human Origins Across the Continents (sorry, it’s pay-only, but it is relevant and very interesting), that may be of interest to readers of this thread. It shows how different human populations are related both genetically and geographically.

I think the scientific evidence clearly points to the existence of human races, both biological and cultural. There are measurable differences in gene distributions. Where to draw the lines (and how many) is a rehash of the classic biologist debate, Lumpers vs Splitters.

But I think the real issue about “race traitor” is whether there should be any presumed loyalty to others of your race. Why should there be? Few people swear oaths of loyalty to a race. Certainly there are good reasons to work toward the same goals as people similar to you. But I wouldn’t fault anyone for putting their own and family’s interests first.

It follows the same logic after all: if you should display loyalty to people whose only connection with you similar genes/culture, then wouldn’t greater loyalty to those closely related to better? And ultimately, one is most closely related to oneself.

62

Firstly, let’s understand that race = subspecies, if we’re going to be scientific here. There are no recognized extant subspecies of the genus H. sapiens. Period. There are lots and lots of populations that show some genetic differences (meaning frequency of genetic markers or alleles) but that is an entirely different thing.

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A population of people distinguished as a more or less distinct group by genetically transmitted physical characteristics, such as skin color, hair texture, and eye shape or color.

I haven’t posted up to now about the concept of race treason. But I believe it can exist. If a group (including a government) is practicing discrimination against people because of their race and a member of that race supports that discrimination then I’d say that person could be defined as a race traitor. It’s not an absolute definition - there are examples that would fit my offhand definition in a literal sense without really qualifying in the general sense.

64

You said that many people had a “clearly defined” race. That clear definition appears to include the phrase “more or less distinct.” That doesn’t seem at all clear to me. Could you perhaps be a little clearer? An example race might help. If you could, for example, define the black race (or the Caucasoid race, or some other race of your choosing), I do think it’d help folks understand where you’re coming from. It’s entirely possible that once I know what you mean, I’ll agree with you.

Daniel

65

By scientific, you mean biological? (I don’t think you mean to imply culture cannot be studied scientifically.) I do not think that race and subspecies are the same term in biology. (Please correct me (with a cite or two) if I’m wrong. I’m a cladist and don’t put much weight on Linnean classifications, and so don’t remember well.) Races are same-species populations that show strong differentiation from each other. Subspecies are that plus a tendency not to interbreed. Different species are even less likely to interbreed.

My point was this is a continuum of differences and is a common topic of disagreement among biologists. It is not an entirely different thing; it is a degree of difference thing. I am not aware that there is any conclusion among scientists about the nomenclature for different human populations. And no matter what the scientific community decides to call it, there are in fact geographical differences in gene distributions in human populations.

66

The trouble with defining “races” is that human populations often simply don’t work that way.

It is true that there are, or were, a couple of geographic barriers in the world where people on one side of the barrier tended to have a particular set of characteristics, and people on the other side had a different set. The Sahara desert is one, the Pacific and Atlantic oceans are another.

But we quickly realize we have a problem when we try to define who’s Caucasian, who’s Negro, who’s Asian, who’s Native American, and who’s Australian. Like where do people from India fit in? Are they white? When some south Indians are as dark as sub-saharan Africans? Or do Indians get their own race? How about central Asia? Where do people stop being caucasian and start being asian? Are Arabs white? How about Italians and Greeks? How about Sudanese, or Somalis, or Ethiopians? There are several African groups that are genetically distinct from all other African groups, do each of these get their own race, and if not, why not? Are native Americans one race, or are they part of the Asian race? I know plenty of Eskimos who could walk down the street in downtown Seoul and not get a second glance. And Australians, which islands along Wallace’s line are Australoid and which are Asian?

Yes, if you show pictures of people from Sweden, and people from Zimbabwe, most people will be able to sort those pictures into the correct pile with very high accuracy. But can they sort the Italian guy from the Sudanese guy? Can they sort the Kazakh from the Mongol, or the Eskimo from the Korean, or the Indian from the Burmese?

When people say “Race is not a scientific concept, it is arbitrary” all they are saying is that the apparent chaos of human phenotypic variation is real. Humans aren’t sorted into neat groups. Human evolution just didn’t happen that way, although we can imagine that it could have, given different geographic barriers. All human beings are very closely related, it just so happens to be the case that we are all very closely related, but it might not have happened that way, there might have been populations of archaic Homo sapiens or Homo neandertalensis that survived into the modern era, and those groups would have been clear examples of races. But all those populations just happened to go extinct, and so we are left with a situation where all living human beings happen to belong to the same race.

67

:smack: Species, not genus.

Yes, I mean biological. That would be the particular science involved.

If you are proposing some sort of scientific (ie, biological) classification below the level of species, that would be a subspecies, by definition, whether you call it that or whether you call it “race”. You can’t propose some level of classification below subspecies without there being subspecies to begin with. It would be like having 3 species in a Family but no genus.

Now, if you want to use the term “race” to mean some sort of loosely defined social group, then that’s fine. But that’s a social construct, not a scientific classification.

68

I always like showing this picture of Uzbek students in these threads about race. What race are they? It should come as no shock that Uzbekistan is located somewhere between Beijing and Berlin.

69

Wouldn’t they be cauc-asian? You know half caucasian and half asian. :stuck_out_tongue:

70

Uh-huh. Is an Australian aboriginal the same race as a tenth-generation Jamaican? Are Adam Goodes and Colin Powell of the same race?

What race is this man?

Your definition is “more or less” a cobbling together of a handful of superficial physical traits that can vary pretty freely within families, let alone regions.

71

The fact that there exceptions, even millions of exceptions, doesn’t overrule the fact that there are billions of people who do unambiguously belong to one race.

I feel that a rule of thumb that works 999 times out of a thousand is pretty solid. You may feel that a failure rate of one time out of a thousand makes it too weak. This is a difference of personal opinion that’s unlikely to be bridged.

72

Can you name the races, then, as well as the unambiguous markers of membership in a particular race?

I mean, as long as it’s so obvious and all, this should be easy.

73

I think everyone can agree on this:

Many people do engage in a particular cultural practice, whereby they have certain racial categories into which they group the masses of humanity, and in many cases, even if not nearly all, they feel entitled to make an unambiguous such classification, which is justified insofar as that most of their peers would agree. The system of categorization isn’t rendered incoherent simply by the existence of ambiguous cases, any more than color words or movie genres suffer from the same problem.

However, that having been said, any such particular entire system of racial categories itself is basically one of arbitrarily drawn lines and groupings, influenced by rather superficial factors and piddling historical caprices. Outside of the culture-specific attitudes of the society in which it is formulated, it does not track anything of any independent interest; certainly, while there is an extent to which it is “biological” insofar as that will have some correlation with (arbitrarily grouped) genotypical traits, it is not a system of classification which biologists would naturally devise, any more than they would naturally seek to group people by the time zone in which they were born. The system is of no great scientific merit in itself; insofar as there is any reason for scientists to discuss it at all, it is not within biology, but within a sociological study of attitudes towards ethnicity and so forth.

Well, maybe everyone can’t agree on this. But it’s correct.

74

If I may, if the racial groups are truly huge, then trying to define what is and is not “race treason” becomes just as arbitrary as trying to define the race itself - how could (for example) a billion unambiguously white people have a common interest that individuals defy in the form of being race traitors? Has it ever happened that conflict between races (however one defines them) has ever surpassed the conflict within mostly homogeneous nations in the form of political conflicts?

75

What race are people in India? Are they white? Note that there are a billion people living in India. What race are North Africans? What race are Egyptians, Sudanese, Eritreans, Ethiopians or Somalis?

There are 6 billion people in the world. You honestly believe that there are only 6 million people out of that 6 billion that don’t fit into your racial classification scheme? There are more than 30 million “black” people in the US, and the MAJORITY of people who identify as “black” in the US are of mixed African and European descent. There are 100 million people in Mexico, and more than half of Mexicans are mestizo–of mixed Native American and European descent. So how can your rule of thumb apply to 999 out of a thousand people in the world?

76

White. Yes. Noted. White. White, mostly black but white in the north, mostly black but with a white minority, black, black.

I’m sure somebody will not point out that there’s a Korean family living in Addis Ababa that renders everything I just said invalid. After all, a population of 75,000,000 black people and four Asians is not black.

77

What makes Indians and Egyptians “white”? Ethiopians (like many East Africans) are culturally, linguistically, and genetically closer to M.E. Arabs than they are to West Africans. What makes Ethiopians and West Africans the same race? If it’s just the color of their skin, then why are Indians, many of whom have skin as dark as Ethiopians, black?

78

As a description of current American cultural attitudes (and, I would imagine, European, etc.), it strikes me as flatly incorrect to call Indians white. They are not generally perceived that way, nor do they generally self-identify that way.

[As a matter of historical curiosity, the case of United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind is somewhat interesting]

79

So these people are white: http://www.everyculture.com/images/ctc_02_img0344.jpg

But these people are black:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Somaliland_somali_nomad_girls.jpg

Really?

And since Indians are white, how about Nepalese? Are they white? How about Burmese?: File:Amarapuralocals.jpg - Wikipedia

And where along the axis between Eastern Europe and Central Asia do people stop being white and start being Asian? There are hundreds of millions of these people, for crying out loud.

80

Stop confronting Nemo with exceptions! They prove nothing! NOTHING!