This is exactly the point. “Race” as understood by the layman is arbitrary and biologically meaningless.
Because you’re denying that whites can be Africans. Whites have been in South Africa for over 350 years, and countless whites were taken as slaves over the millennia from Europe by African slavers. But you deny their descendants because they are not black. That’s racism.
I try not to throw the term around as a synonym for “things I don’t like,” and try to limit it to (a) situations in which someone is insisting that we change the language to avoid some perceived and usually irrational offense; and (b) attempts to avoid confrontation of realities of the human condition that might make others uncomfortable.
On front (a), there is certainly some political correctness going on with, e.g., campaigns against “retarded.” Retarded is a very descriptive word . . . someone’s mental development is arrested or delayed vis a vis where it would normally be at their age. The effort to change it because “people associate it with stupidity,” partakes of (b) because, well, some retarded people are, well, functionally stupid (another perfectly good and instantly understandable English word), but some people apparently prefer to cover that basic reality with verbal fig leaves (which invariably will have to be replaced in turn, just as “black,” the proud rallying cry of the 1960s, “had to” be replaced with “African American”).
On a broader front, I’d say efforts to make kids’ sports less competitive, and even “anti-bullying” programs, are trying to obscure the fact that there are situations in life where there are winners and losers, and that the Lord of the Flies is kind of on point.
And of course you can say that things have gotten all “meta” in that it’s politically incorrect to be politically correct.
You’ve got to be kidding me. He didn’t say a word of that.
And “countless whites have been taken as slaves from Europe by Africans?” Cite?
Are the current white populations of the African continent descended from slaves or colonists?
Your attempt to find some kind of anti-white racism in UDS’s post is an almost comic example of right wing “political correctness.”
I have seen Rosenberg et al.'s clustering by geography, but I have never seen any indication that such clustering accurately maps to anyone’s idea of “race.”
The problem is none of those mean what African-American is understood to mean in the US. As far as this word goes “Political Correctness” /= factual correctness.
Or perhaps I’m missing something. If someone on the SDMB was crass enough to refer to a collection of people with similar amounts of melatonin how would they go about it in a PC way?
Diogenes the Cynic quoted me selectively. I’ve bold-faced the part he did not delete. Please consider his response in the context of my complete sentences.
But I (and the cited paper) are saying that the genetic clusters do correlate with the layman’s race! Where does the “biological meaninglessness” come in? Is it just the term “race” that you object to? If I wrote only “genetic cluster” would you be happy? But then, to point out that these genetic clusters align so well with layman’s “race” would be objectionable, hunh? That’s right; it’s all about political correctness.
Now, one can find taxonomic systems in biology that go well below the species level, for example
[ul][li]species[/li][li]subspecies[/li][li]variety[/li][li]subvariety[/li][li]form[/li][li]subform[/li][/ul]
I have no idea (and don’t really care) whether the genetic clusters so clearly visible in the human population would be treated as subforms, forms or whatever, were it politically correct to use such taxonomic ranks for humans. They’re just clusters. I’m willing to stipulate that society may be better off ignoring them, and certainly avoiding experiments which seek correlations involving them. But in this forum it sure seems hypocritical for otherwise pro-science people to pretend such clusters don’t exist.
What do you mean by “in a PC way?” How are you defining “PC?”
If you’re talking about skin colr, just use the verbaular for skin color. Nobody gets offended by calling black people black or white people white.
As for white immigrants from Africa, we don’t hypenate European immigrants “European-Americans,” so why would we do it for Africans? Do it by country, regardless of the race, because you’re describing a geographical origin, not a skin color.
“African-American” for blacks is more generalized because the population it primarily refers to – descendents of African slaves – cannot readily identify specific geograpical locations for ancestry beyond (for the most part) the general region of West Africa.
I don’t think the phrase is all that ubiquitous anymore, though. It’s certainly not insisted on. It’s perfectly acceptable to say “black.” That’s what most black people say.
The lay word “race” doesn’t mean anything, so it’s not significant that self-identifican can map to it. Those clusters are not subspecies or subgroups, they are just descriptive of sociological groupings.
Homo sapiens is not subspeciated. On your list, we stop at “species” we do not divide biologically below that. Thgere is no such thing as even a human subspecies, much less varieties or forms.
The world has long been filled with PC. The right-wing anti-PC campaign is part of the same pattern. Currently it uses the scientific evidence trope displayed in recent threads where a question about evolution is used as a pre-face for ‘racial disparity in IQ’ questions to prove someone is PC because they ignore the ‘science’ about IQ scores. It works all too well because people either fall for the bait because they haven’t seen the IQ research, or they know the game being played and vent their frustrations. Either way, the right-winger ends up reinforcing his belief that all liberals ignore facts and operate on the basis of PC.
In fact, the IQ research shows nothing. IQ tests have traditionally shown ‘racial disparity’. The fact there are no such things as races, and IQ tests provide meaningless results outside of the ‘IQ environment’ will be ignored by those looking for justification of their predjudices.
I already explained the meanings of the various hyphenated-American terms, including the specific meaning of “African-American.” That answered your specific question. Perhaps you should read the portion of your post to which I responded as well as my response in context.
To restate:
The PC term for an African immigrant to the U.S. who is white is *nationality-*American, just as with any other nationality from any continent or any immigrant from Africa who is not white. That is the answer to your question.
African-American specifically refers to people whose ancestors were imported to the U.S. prior to the period when modern nation states were created in Africa. Why is this so difficult to understand?
The network diagram I linked to in the other thread (based on microsatellite genotyping) shows five clusters: Africans, Caucasians, Native Americans, East Asians, and Oceanians. Choice of number of clusters is arbitrary; a 6-cluster interpretation of the same network would probably split Oceanians into Papuans and Australians.
That Amerindian and Australian are best considered as separate from the “traditional 3 races” is very well known; but I certainly never claimed an exact correspondence between any such clustering and the “race” assumptions of any particular layman; and I don’t think I wrote anything to so mislead.
(Before it causes confusion, let’s point out one deficiency on these clading and network diagrams: Using the earlier example, Micronesian is seen as a divergent subcluster within “East Asians” but might be depicted the same way if it was instead a 80:20 mix of East Asians and “Oceanians” (as it likely is).)
Part of the American identity is our immigrant history. Many, many people are quite proud of being Irish-American, etc. I see the term African-American as a means, also, to acknowledge that the descendants of former slaves also have a “we came here from somewhere else” story that is just as much a part of identifying as an American as anyone. But what do you do when there is no country to which to refer? If it is part of our identity to proudly proclaim to be German-American, how can we also include the descendants of slaves? Would you rather they be called Post-Slavery-American? Or maybe Middle-Passage-Americans? Why do proud immigrants from other nations get a moniker and blacks do not? I think every American understands the pride and sense of identity particular to Americans that the X-American term is meant to communicate. Why do we exclude descendants of slaves and call them merely “black”? Did they not also participate in growing this country? What term do you suggest?
ETA: No country to refer to as 1) they didn’t exist and 2) we conveniently destroyed any tie back to the homeland, and most descendants of slaves don’t even know where in Africa they came from in the first place.
The clusters used microsatellite genotypes. That’s DNA.
Cite? I see nothing here but argumentum ab inconvenienti. The thread title is “political correctness”; we see it here in spades.
Pineal-Americans?
So is eye color. That doesn’t make clusters by eye colors into “races.”
[url=]Cite
I was actually slightly wrong, though. Homo sapiens sapiens is a subspecies, but it’s the only one.
If you want to argue that biologists have further subdivided humans taxonomically into forms or varieties, I’ll need to ask you for a cite.
Since I can’t see the paper, maybe you can tell me if they picked these genotypes from first principles, or if they divided the subjects into “races” and fit the genotypes which were a best fit for the prior classification. That just seems like a lot for people to pick a priori.
While this is certainly true when most conservatives use the phrase, there are certainly instances where political correctness fosters ignorance. I think Chief Pedant and Chen 019 would say that political correctness makes people blind to the fact that IQ tests measure SOMETHING and there is a difference in the SOMETHING between races.
Please note that I am not asserting that any academic has divided H. sapiens sapiens into any number of forms or subforms. I’m merely asserting what should be obvious: that genetic clustering can often be imposed on species; I’m agnostic on whether the distinction between, say, Caucasians and Amerindians would be greater or less than that which would normally be associated with, say, “subform”.
You need a cite for this. Of course only one extant subspecies is recognized; but how do you know this is a single variety, with a single subvariety, with a single form, with a single subform? I see nothing from you but argumentum ab inconvenienti. (And even if the distinction between the clusters of human population is so tiny as to be that of sub-sub-subform, that doesn’t make me less right – I assert only that there are clusters, not what taxonomic rank they should be assigned – nor you less wrong – your argument seems to be that genetic analyses normal in other species are somehow off-limits in the case of H. sapiens.)
What’s your cite; a joke?
[URL=Yale School of Medicine | Yale School of Medicine]Here’s a paper](]Cite[/url) that describes its methodology and depicts a 7-cluster network. There are many interesting questions to which I don’t have answers, but those answers are inessential for my point which is the simple syllogism:
[ul][li] racial characteristics tend to be inherited[/li][li] genotypes tend to be inherited[/li][li] one should not be surprised to find that clustering based on racial characteristics (or geography) correlates with genotype clustering[/li][/ul]
This all seems to be so obvious to me, I honestly don’t know what we’re arguing about.