Yes I think so. I think that has a lot to do with the demonisation of smokers. If alcoholics, bad drivers, pedophiles or wife beaters were as easy to spot they would have been the target of choice. Smokers can be seen smoking and if you aren’t one it is convenient to think “not like me…evil.” You spot an obvious physical attribute of someone and pick on them because you don’t like it. Just don’t choose skin color.
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I really doubt that. It probably has more to do with the smell, and the irritation of the sinuses, and the health risks. It’s not like black or white people smell awful enough to make your nose and throat burn from the fumes and are scientifically proven to cause cancer just by being close to you. Racial differences are cosmetic and minor.
Nothing you have posted supports the notion that there is actually a meaningful concept behind the word “race.”
When everyone (who had some number of ancestors living in 1450 in) in sub-Saharan Africa is lumped into a “race,” then the word truly has no meaning. Under the current “definitions,” people who can trace all of their ancestry to 1450 sub-Saharan Africa are lumped into a single group despite the fact that there is more genetic diversity among them than among numerous other perceived groups. People whose had ancestors imported to North America from a fairly restricted region in Western Africa subsequent to that time and whose ancestors include large percentages of Europeans and North American Indians are also included in the same group. After a while, it is difficult to determine just what the qualifications should be to be included in “the group,” yet many bold pronouncements are made regarding “the group.”
When Noah Rosenberg and associates ran their preliminary survey of populations (published in “Genetic Structure of Human Populations” Science, December 20, 2002,), they were able to sequence genes to discover the likelihood of the continent from which any person’s genes originated, but they found, in Africa as well as elsewhere, that those genes did not show relatedness among groups in Africa or Asia or Europe or the Americas. In other words, they were able (using only information from purportedly “pure” groups around the world), to distinguish the likelihood of a person originating from a particular continent. From this, a number of people have noted the frequent association of “continent” and “race” and have said that the “races” are internally related. Yet the information did not indicate any support for the claim. Different groups on different continents did not share traits–they only happened to have lived on the same continents.
If they don’t share traits why are Forensic Anthropologists so good at identifying them? The reliability of attributing a given person to one of five racial categories is 99% using 13 characteristics (Konigsberg et al. 2009).
You may also notice which continent or ethnicity someone is from by looking at them (skin color, hair texture, bone structure, facial features, etc.)
Also, in relation to genetic similarity, Nevan Sesardic posed this question in his recent paper ‘Race: a social destruction of a biological concept’ Biol Philos (2010) 25:143–162: http://www.ln.edu.hk/philoso/staff/sesardic/getfile.php?file=Race.pdf
Q) How often does it happen that a pair of individuals from one population is genetically more dissimilar than two individuals chosen from two geographically separated populations?
A) When many thousands of loci are used as a basis for judging genetic similarity and when individuals are sampled from geographically separated populations the answer is “Never”. (Witherspoon et al. 2007 Genetics 176:351–359.)
Yeah…I think this is kind of an interesting point, and we’ve discussed it before.
It seems like there are basically two camps.
The first camp wants “race” to be a grouping where the individuals in a given race are more related to one another genetically than they are to any other race. They want race to only be considered a reasonable grouping if it can be shown that that population is less genetically diverse than some comparison population and they want to say that race is meaningless if the genetic grouping is not tight. Some want a single specific genetic marker. If you can’t come up with a definition that genetically tight, they want to argue the concept is completely meaningless.
The second group wants to look at how humans self-identify. For this category, not only does culture play a part, but some specific genetic coding for various phenotypic manifestations–skin pigmentation; facial features; personality traits…–become more significant than others. The question then becomes whether that self-identification defines such a loose group genetically that all generalizations about an “average” (or average prevalent) genotype for a specific characteristic retains any meaning at all.
I agree with what I think you have proposed in the past that we should talk more about populations and less about races. Where we may disagree is whether the term has any meaning at all–I think it does–and whether or not there are average genetic differences even at a self-identified race level–and as you know, I think there are.
Are there different “races” of dogs, for a comparitive species with equal “mongrelisation” and diversity?
Well, the concept of race, as opposed to groups based on geography or tribes is a 19th century concept. Does anyone in this discussion, besides me, even know how many races there are/were supposedly? Can you name them? Let’s go back and define the terms we are talking about, then we can discuss if it is natural.
My issue of using the word “race” is that the, (widely mixed audience of people with widely disparate levels of education), audience will take any statement that mentions “race” and apply it to whatever preconceptions they bring to the discussion. This means that the word introduces andpromotes confusion. The perpetuation of confusion in any discussion where social policy and human conflict are going to be directly promoted is a BAD THING.
I do not see the point of perpetuating such confusion, so I prefer that the word be dropped.
If someone wishes to believe that there are geographic differences among peoples, then let them use those terms (and provide evidence to support their belief).
Linnaeus first used the word “race” to identify four groups of humans around 1750. Around 1800, Blumenbach identified five groups. By the end of the 19th century, the popular reckoning stood at three, (Caucasian, Negro, Mongol). The more esoteric ethnologists came up with as many as 60, (with bitter fights between the French and Germans as to who was really the better “race”).
You pays your money and you takes your chances.
Except it’s not geography…it’s race. And the promoters of the word are every bit the members of those self-described races, especially the ones who feel they’ve been given the short end of the stick.
Take Affirmative Action. We don’t lobby for zip-code based AA; we lobby for race-based AA. No one is looking for zip code diversity in the workplace to amend institutional zipcodism. We are looking for race-based AA to amend institutional discrimination based on race.
It’s such a perfectionist view to pretend that “race” is not a category of population, IMHO, Tom. I’ve taken to defining it–when challenged to do so–as “self-described” and just leave it there. While that makes it overly broad genetically (say, for instance, calling President Obama “black”) it still reasonably correlates with something more than just some sort of pure cultural or ethnic basis.
This is extremely disingenuous. Whenever “race” comes up in these discussions, someone attempts to point to the biological origins of it, ignoring the fact that the science, to date, has only established geographical origins. (Review this thread to see examples.)
Affirmative Action is directed in support of women, regardless of “race” and a number of other social divisions that have nothing to do with race.
Beyond that, to the extent that “race” is an equation, it tends to focus on persons with some African ancestry, despite the fact that most of those people are from one specific region in Africa and have significant portions of European and American Indian ancestry. But when we then speak of innate characteristics among those people, we ignore all the other heredity, focusing only on the African and, further, we find people generalizing about sub-Saharan Africans, in general, rather than West Africans with mixed European and North American heritage.
It is clearly a social construct at that point that has nothing to do with biology. If biology was a significant portion of the discussion, then people engaged in that discussion should be much more careful regarding the terms of the discussion rather than acting as though “race” was a biological term.
We use “race” in political discussions because it is shorthand for the broad social* categories that we inherited from previous generations. If you want to have a discussion of current cohorts, then you are still better off eliminating the word “race” from the discussion because someone will attempt to pretend that there is a biological connection among groups for whom there is no legitimate connection. “Self identified” blacks in the U.S. cannot be legitimately equated to Africans: their origins are both too narrow (in terms of Africa) and too broad (in term of the North American experiece) and any discussion that treats the black population of the U.S. as a subset of the sub-Saharan population begins with too many errors to make any sense.
And at this point, I have not even gotten into the issues of what social issues lead to people “self-identifying” by “race.”
If we are going to discuss “race” in the context of U.S. social issues, then we need to be very clear that we are using the word in the social context.
This thread began with a question about inherent “racism” in humanity. As others have noted, there certainly appears to be an innate tribalism in humans that expresses itself as xenophobia. Describing that xenophobia as “racism” simply perpetuates notions of “race” that are outmoded, erroneous, and misleading.
Is it your position, then, that race has no biologic basis? That, for instance, the broad history of discrimination against blacks is not a history of discrimination against a group which has any sort of foundation at all in biology?
If so, I beg to differ. While I agree with most of your positions (I think) on the general weakness of trying to unite blacks (or any other group) into a tightly-defined single population, they certainly have something biologic in common which gives them an average phenotypic appearance–average enough, for instance, to suffer discrimination based simply on that appearance, and the race category to which it assigns them.
What’s disingenuous, in my view, is to pretend that, because “race” is a very broad and loose category, there is no biologic underpinning for it at all. Surely there is some sort of biologic support underpinning why President Obama is lumped in with West African descendants here in the US despite having Kenyan african roots and minimal exposure to a culturally black US upbringing.
The manifestations of phenotype are certainly rooted in biology. People with various skin tones generally get that pigmentation from their parents.
The problem with claiming that “race” has a biological foundation is that then people leap to the conclusion that if they can identify a person’s “race” they can draw conclusions beyond that of the phenotype. Beyond that, they are quite capable (and more than willing) to lump together people who are wholly unrelated based on the association of a few phenotypical characteristics without actually taking the time to discover any differences.
If an Australian Aborigine had been dropped into the middle of Alabama in 1850, (or 1950!), he would have been treated exactly as though he were a person of African descent.
Look at the various threads that have appeared on this board discussing race and athletics and note how many times the propensity of sprinters of West African descent to dominate their sport were conflated with the propensity with the Kalenjin runners of Kenya to dominate marathons to conclude that “Africans” are superior athletes.
If we want to discuss genetic or biological traits, then using the word “race” derails the discussion with errors and confusion. If we want to discuss the sociological ramifications of perceived race, then we need to be sure that the unsupportable “biological” claims are prevented from contaminating the discussion.
Ever hear of the “one drop” rule? Anyone raised in the U.S. who has any appearance of African ancestry will find himself or herself considered “black” and will find it easier to associate with others with some African ancestry. That is a social phenomenon. It appears to be exactly what the president chose to do in high school, college, and his early career.
And that’s my point, which I will probably make poorly since it’s way past my bedtime.
Just because there exists a “one-drop” rule and just because there are all sorts of exceptions which render the category of race fairly loose, it does not mean the whole categorization is completely and utterly without biologic underpinning. Most blacks are mostly black; most whites are mostly white–i.e. the great proportion of the genetic heritage of most of the people belonging to the various races is drawn from their geographic origins. In the case of US blacks, the great proportion of their genetic heritage is sub-saharan afrcian ancestry, and simply because there exists dilution or “one-drop” rules does not mean there is no biologic meaning to being black…we don’t suddenly find Hemoglobin S proportionately distributed among US whites, blacks and asians, for example.
I think most people have enough common sense to realise that this is a generalization. Just as men are taller than women - there is overlap but they do have different height distributions. Similarly, people of west african ancestry are more likely to dominate sprinting. Those of East African ancestry long distance. Obviously you get athletes from other ethnicities but generally those groups are overrepresented in the respective events.
You are disproving your own point. Give us your average East African and West Africans and we will classify them both simply as “black,” ignoring the very real differences between these populations. “Race” is an extremely broad and fuzzy way to classify people that is far more a socially defined thing than a scientific one.
While I think it is unlikely that you will find a culture that doesn’t distinguish between insiders and outsiders, what is considered “insider” and “outsider” may not necessarily be along clear racial lines. To give an example, there are obvious physical differences between the “Han Chinese” you find in different parts of China and yet most will define themselves as a single population. Meanwhile the Chinese recognize the Islamic Hui minority as a separate population, although in reality most Hui are genetically similar to the populations around them.
Another example can be found among the Fulbe, a rather large ethnic group found across West Africa. For the most part Fulbe have a very strong sense of ethnic identity and would consider themselves to a unique population. Racially, however, there is quite a bit of variation from basically white/Arab to full-on black African. These racial differences are not considered important to Fulbe tribal identity. Meanwhile, in the same area, groups that we would consider to be identical consider themselves to be racially distinct.
Well, but you’re just arguing over lumpers versus splitters. When it comes to “race” you’re a splitter. That’s fine. That doesn’t mean lumping is without biologic meaning.
Suppose, for instance, we had a very diverse group of human populations. A subpopulation moves away and has a number of descendants related most directly to the particular subpopulation which moved away. Now we have two populations: Originals and Migrators. The Originals are not particularly related to one another, but they are distinct from the Migrators, and they are distinct in a biological way.
Splitters want to argue that Originals can’t be considered a grouping because they are so diverse. Lumpers want to argue that they do constitute a group because they contain the collective gene pool that never migrated. If genetic differences can be shown between Migrators and Originals, the fact that Originals consist of diverse populations is of no consequence to the argument that they still represent a reasonable, biologically-based grouping. It isn’t the only way to group, but it is a reasonable way and it’s a biologically-based way.
As with any classification system, there are exceptions. Those exceptions–the fuzziness–do not make the entire concept of racial grouping baseless.
And how does your example justify using “race” as any sort of biological category?
It is true that in the U.S. we do not find Hemoglobin S distributed evenly across the populations sociologically identified as “races,” but that is an accident of history. Had U.S. slaves been imported primarily from what is now South Africa rather than the West coast and had the Greek rebellion against the Ottomans resulted in an influx of Greek immigrants at a level similar to the Irish at the time of the famine, we would have a Hemoglobin S distribution that was evenly spread across white and black populations, (or Sickle Cell would be known as a Greek disease that only rarely appeared among blacks).
Yet we still find people generalizing about sub-Saharan African peoples and Sickle Cell under the guise of “race” when that condition is clearly geographical in distribution regardless of perceived “race.”
It is pretty easy to turn claims about “race” and phenotypical distribution on its head by simply introducing some actual facts. Insisting that we hold on to “racial” categories as biological constructs simply means that we continue to propagate errors of understanding.
Yes it was, for any decent definition of race. At that level a family is a race 
I recently watched a program that told the story of the family of Queen Noor. It told of her family’s lobbying in America to be categorized as white. They were immigrants from Syria, and were successful in their petition. If there are objective definitions of race, and if racism were “natural”, then such lobbying would be fruitless or unnecessary.
People don’t go about with DNA kits, and certainly when the racial categories came into use we had no concept of DNA. The working definition most people have for races are mostly based on a collection of superficial physical characteristics. For almost any superficial characteristic you allow race to be pinned on, there will be some people who are not going to be easily categorized by it. Until very recently I thought Shel Silverstein was black. This idea was based on photos of him, probably on his books, that seemed to show him as not fair skinned. I am not the only person to have this impression as a quick google search showed. If race were as black and white as some seem to think, then mistaken impressions like that would not happen.
Blumenbach made an attempt to categorize scientifically, using skull measurements etc. to justify race, but the science isn’t sound by today’s standards. B]tomndebb** gives good example of this.