I really hate to belabor this point, because I’m generally on the liberal side of this issue, and am only arguing this position because I think you were too absolute in your statements, but… I still don’t think it’s quite that simple.
For instance, there’s a big difference between “this disease seems to be particularly prevalent among Asians” and “this disease seems to be particularly prevalent among people who jog” or “…people who are obese” or “…people who live near that oil refinery”.
I really, *really *don’t think there is a big difference. Not with a group as fuzzy as “Asian”.
I guess the difference I see is this… suppose there were a disease that was particularly virulent among people of Vietnamese and Cambodian descent (or, more precisely, certainly ethnic subgroups therein). With perfect information, we could say “well, this disease happens to be particularly dangerous if you have gene X, and gene X is mostly found among people with ancestors from ethnic groups Y and Z”. And once we had that perfect information, we could communicate that perfect information, and someone with ancestors from Japan or Korea could breathe a sigh of relief.
However, that situation might first be noticed by some doctors, who are presumably generally intelligent but not necessarily trained in precisely distinguishing between Vietnamese tribal groups, noticing that a lot of the patients were “Asian”. At that point, should they say “well, ‘Asian’ is just a big fuzzy group, and to use it is racist, so I’ll just ignore what I saw”? Or should they say “huh, well, there’s at least some chance that this is a useful clue. I’ll ask around and see if my colleagues are noticing the same thing, and if they are, I’ll mention it to the guy from the CDC who can hopefully find some experts who can investigate further and narrow things down more precisely”. I feel like a lot of the overbroad statements made in threads like this imply that the doctor would be racist for even noticing this in the first place, and extra-racist for taking action based on what he noticed, even if that action was prudent and potentially life-saving and acknowledged that “Asian” was hardly a be-all end-all genetic classification.
No, I expect a properly-trained, committed doctor to go “Hey, there’s no way as unscientific a grouping as “Asian” is significant at any meaningful level, so maybe I should look closer at what real commonalities there are besides ‘yellow skin and slanty eyes’. I wouldn’t want to be a total magellan about this!” This isn’t going to take so much time that other people are going to die just because he paused to get more precision. Not in any real-world modern scenario. Not unless you’re into stretching the credulousness of the hypothetical past breaking.
I’m saying that yes, there is* no situation* where leaving it at “Asian” is good enough in this day and age. Maybe for the Victorians. Not us. I’m not saying it makes the doctor an overt racist, but his action is lazy and yes, racist.
But as some scientific racists show, you shouldn’t necessarily expect doctors to be scientists.
Interestingly, I think the actual question posed in the thread title has by now been more than sufficiently answered.
Unbelievable. And if the disease can be traced back to one small area a thousand years ago, but now those people cannot be clearly identified since the area no longer exists and the people with that ancestry don’t even know that, “Oh yeah, great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandma Nuji was from that village”, you’d rather not tell “Asians” to have a particular test because it offends your delicate sensibilities?
Political Correctness first, next and foremost!
Kumba-fucking-ya.
You never cease to amaze, mags. Keep fucking that chicken.
There is no such disease. Diseases (and genetics, and human populations) don’t work that way. “One small area a thousand years ago” means a third of the fucking world will be descended from that village - “Asians” doesn’t quite cover that. Let’s play a game - how many European nobles are descended from the* very first* Aztec king, would you say? You stupid race realists really like pretending the world was a set of isolated clusters up until the invention of the airplane, don’t you?
But I don’t expect you to know any of that. If you did, you might also be capable of elementary statistics, which you’ve shown you are not. Or have you got my r value yet?
Sure genetic diseases work that way.
There is a clear example spanning a bit more than 300 years.
There is a genetic disease, Cayman Ataxia, well recognized in the Cayman Islands. It is caused by a mutation of the ATCAY gene at 19p13.3.
Cayman ataxia follows a recessive inheritance pattern. After examining the family trees of patients, researches are quite confident that they all descend from the same early settler to Cayman. The prevalence of this mutation today is attributed to a founder effect.
Cayman is a good laboratory for examining the spread of such a condition as there was not an indigenous population when the islands were discovered in 1503 when Columbus sailed past. Sir Francis Drake visited in 1586. Permanent settlement took place in the 1600s. Whatever genes those early settlers brought with them formed the basis of the gene pool.
There has been inward and outward migration since. But the frequency of the detrimental ATCAY mutation is much higher in relevant population in the Cayman Islands, with up to 18% of those persons being carriers. A testing of a control group of 1000 persons of various ethnicity outside of Cayman did not detect even one carrier.
Err, no, and your example does nothing to disprove this.
300 << 1000, these islands were particularly isolated (but probably still have some descendants of Charlemagne, I’m sure) and …
So the isolated disease is still isolated, and there’s no larger race you can point to, that Cayman Islanders are a part of, where you can say “Test this group” - you wouldn’t say “CA is a disease of Blacks”, would you? Or even “A disease of Afro-Caribbean people”. No, you’d say “It’s a disease of the Cayman Islands.” So not like what magellan was saying at all. If you wanted to detect this disease in a population, you’d ask “Who here has Cayman ancestors” not “who’s Black”, nor would you try testing every Black person for it on the off-chance.
And even then…this is what has happened to the disease in the last little while: The prevalence of CA is rapidly fading as population mixing occurs. Like I said, diseases, genetics and human populations don’t work that way.
I should have said “gradually fading” there, “rapidly” is an overstatement.
Mr Dibble, you need to stop arguing population genetics when you don’t seem to have a clue.
Please - enlighten me as to what I’ve said that is wrong?
Nothing?
I have often thought: “How must it make * them* feel to be generalized as being so inept that we must give them special considerations, to be normal.”
I am a racist. I accept it fully because I am intellectually honest enough to know that anyone who isn’t deaf, dumb and/or blind is racist. Can you tell the difference between a black and white person over the phone? Then you are racist, too. Do you ever wonder why other races of people treat their kids differently than you do your own? Then you are a racist. The truth is, WE ALL APPARENTLY need a VOCABULARY lesson and some de-sensitivity classes. Words have meaning. The word racist just sounds nifty, I guess. The real word that we should use, that ACCURATELY describes the NEGATIVE aspects of racism is…wait for it… : HATEFUL. Racism is merely the acknowledgement of a difference, due to race. What’s the big deal about that? The weird one’s are not those who acknowledge racial differences or even poke fun at it. The one’s who have a problem are those who are raised, secretly or otherwise, to invoke retribution from ole cracker or are raised to KILL the N-word(s), or are suffering from PTSD from actual sustained racial abuse, not schoolyard picking-on. We all got that, at some point; or you are too cool to be reading and posting here, as those who didn’t get the picking-on are athletes and the rich. Neither of them are here. They are off with their trophy wives; black, white, asian and even a few Beaners, having their tea & cocaine. If you are here, we are all the same in geek-land. Get over the racial whine-card & grow up. I think the dumbest two sets of people in the world are: A) Those who stand in a group and call a lone minority by an epithet. B) Those who actually let it make them angry. C’mon people now. Smile on yo bruddas.
The most racist people in the world have got to be white dudes and chicks who TRY to act black by intentionally dumbing-down their dialect and accent. Do blacks not get offended by these idiots? If I were black, I would say “Do I really sound like that?”
Cool story “brudda”
So, racist and no fucking clue what AA is actually about. That’s just great.
Your parents must be so proud.
Pro tip: Avenue Q is a satirical puppet musical, not real life.
And confusing recognition of nationalities, ethnicities and cultures with racism is stupid.
This seemed like the place to tack on this bit of loveliness.
One of Sarah Palin’s ghost writers posted this on her FB page Monday, Jabuary 20th
*Happy MLK, Jr. Day! “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
Mr. President, in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. and all who commit to ending any racial divide, no more playing the race card.*
perfect pitch
:smack:
I hate to pile on here, but I am amazed that you are so unaware of some basic facts about ALL languages and dialects.
Perhaps you took Spanish in high school? Perhaps you were warned that the word “coger” means “seize” in varieties spoken in Spain, but “fuck” in many varieties spoken in the Americas?
I can see why the African American English example would be harder to grasp – mainly, it feels odd to have two (or more) varieties of English occupying the same geographic space (at least at some scales). But the situation is similar. Keep in mind that most African Americans are bi-dialectal – they can switch to Standard American English in appropriate social situations. (A few white Americans are also bi-dialectal – former NBA player Jason Williams comes to mind. But when Quentin Tarantino acted in his own film “Pulp Fiction” as a white person who acceptably-to-all-around-him used the “n” word as it’s used in AAVE, it sounded false and sparked some debate among filmgoers, because otherwise his character WASN’T speaking AAVE.)