A self-identification of “black” in America correlates with about an 80% chance of descent from sub-Saharan Africa. Thus they are likely to share a evolutionary history. Obviously race isn’t a perfect construct, but it can be useful when applied to groups, as with statistics in general.
I was under the impression that self-identification of “black” in America correlates with exactly a 100% chance of descent from sub-Saharan Africa. Just like all the other self-identities.
Pretty much this. Race doesn’t exist wrt genetics. Humans are pretty obviously all one ‘race’ wrt the ability to interbreed and produce viable offspring. Race as a social construct is equally obvious…after all, we talk about it all the time, you can see it’s effects and impacts on society, etc etc. As others have said, I’m unsure why the OP initially brings this point up then drops it when there really isn’t a debate here, and no gotcha either.
No, there is no biological concept of race. It simply doesn’t exist. There are human populations and they have genetic differences on average, but the concept of a biological race is meaningless. Visual vs non-visual doesn’t enter into it.
I understand what you’re saying, but that argument does kind of feed what the OP is saying; ordinary people who don’t know about genetics do wonder “if race doesn’t exist, why affirmative action?”
Well sure, if the OP’s complaint were simply that the rhetoric about race is potentially confusing to people who don’t understand the issues, that would be one thing. But the initial post clearly suggests that the OP themself doesn’t understand what the rhetoric means.
How can one then categorically define race when it comes to affirmative action? If we’re all such a mixture of genes how can we truthfully aver what race we are? Or does it still go by the old ‘one drop’ rule?
If race is a social construct (as I agree it is) should we not speedily deconstruct it, with the same care one would take disassembling a ticking time bomb?
For your first question, self reporting seems to work 99% of the time.
For your second, we’ve been working on it for decades. The first step is dismantling the remnants of white supremacy, which are weakened but still present to varying degrees in driven aspects of our society. This dismantling, including programs like AA, is taking a long time because so many fight against it.
When white supremacy is no longer a significant factor in policy and practice of our society, we might be able to move towards a truly colorblind society. But doing it backwards just makes it worse, IMO.
Racists use a variety of clues to discern who “wouldn’t be a good fit”. Never do they use genetics or blood quanta. So I’m guessing this is why affirmative action doesn’t either.
We are having a hard enough time dismantling gender, dude. Once we tackle that, then we can get started on color-blinding everyone. To get started, we can force people to diversity their social circles and mandate that they practice random mate selection. Perhaps in three or four generations, we’ll all be the same shade of light brown and it won’t be too difficult for us to let go of our archaic divisions.
Good luck with that, though. We’d probably do better just encouraging everyone to live and work alongside each other, so that it is harder for bigotries and prejudices to set up in the first place.
