IzzyR:
I would never claim that no one has posted to this thread from a PC perspective. I do not know the motives or personal orientation of everyone involved and it is probable that someone here finds it PC to align themselves with those who point out the lack of a physical/biological reality for race.
However, I am also pointing out that the scientists who have done the most work to establish that there is no genetic component that can be classified as “racial” were attacked by the PC crowd for trying to disrupt (or steal the heritage or something) of various native peoples and that those PC advocates were successful in reducing the amount of money that the U.S. Congress appropriated for their research.
So we are left with a situation in which a group of PC advocates attack genetic scientists in the middles stages of their studies, and when the studies are released by the non-PC scientists, the results are attacked as being PC. (My irony meter is red-lined on this aspect of the discussion.)
Autumn Wind Chick:
It is very nearly as fascinating as watching the mental gymnastics that you perform to make claims contrary to fact.
It has been pointed out that there may be a useful aspect in the United States to use the cultural definition of “race” to identify local populations in the United States for more frequent questioning or testing regarding various health situations.
It has also been pointed out that even that limited use of “race” has been questioned by the editorial board of the New England Journal of Medicine.
In other words, if a certain population in Africa is subject to higher levels of hypertension, Type II Diabetes, or Sickle Cell Anemia, tests on otherwise healthy individuals who appear to have African ancestors may turn up problems in those individuals at a higher rate than tests run on the whole population of the U.S. Similarly, gene-matching for organ transplants may have a better chance of success among that group than from among the whole population. Focussing funding on a group from which a smaller group has a known characteristic increases the chance that the money will be productive, even though the larger group will have no more need than the general population.
However, if the traits or diseases you are seeking are associated with the Ibo, (from around Nigeria), and if you are interviewing a person whose ancestors were taken from Madagascar, you have no better chance of a match than if you tested a Swede. You are more likely to find a person with Ibo characteristics from among a group of people with dark skin and wiry hair than among pale-skinned blondes. From this perspective, a person’s appearance gives a nice “first cut” for examination.
Unfortunately, without actually doing the tests, you really do not know whether you are talking with a person whose ancestors were from the region around Nigeria or Madagascar or Kenya or anywhere else.
Similarly, when encouraging a group of people to seek tests for health problems, focussing the advertising on the groups who, by culture, are associated, makes economic sense. There will be huge numbers of people among the American black population who are not more at risk for hypertension, diabetes, or Sickle Cell than anyone whose ancestors came from Ireland, Japan, or Samoa. However, because there is a genetic sub-group within the population of American blacks who are susceptible to those diseases, advertising toward the larger cultural group will have the effect of netting the smaller group.
If you sent the same tests, in equal distribution, to every nation in Africa, you would be wasting a lot of money because there is no single “race” in Africa who is subject to those diseases at higher levels than people throughout the world.
