Races don't exist on any biological level. Racists evidently do. Believing in the false construct of biological race doesn't necessarily make you a racist; it doesn't really even seem to be a precondition anymore.
But it was the foundation for sociopolitical racism, so if the concept of race guides your thinking about people's characteristics, especially their non-physical characteristics, you are at least somewhat in danger of racist thinking.
> Finding the right donor for a patient isn’t simple. Donors and patients are matched largely based on genes called human leukocyte antigens (HLAs). These genes code for proteins—or markers—found on most of the cells in your body. When it comes to matching HLA types, a patient’s ethnic background is important in predicting the likelihood of finding a match. That’s because HLA is inherited. Some ethnic groups have more complex tissue types than others, which makes finding a close match more difficult.
> there is a broad scientific agreement that essentialist and typological conceptions of race are untenable
Any educated person with access to the internet who never was even curious about this I'm suspicious of. If you don't arrive at it by the thought experiments a bored teenager might do, it takes like 5 minutes of reading, and then that's done.
This whole discussion is exhausting, isn't it, but it worries me because it seems we have fully gone backwards if people are back to saying "OK biologically you are of the black race, we can prove it".
But like... no one claims there's some essentialist and typological race. Everyone knows that it is lossy but a real category. Whom are you attacking here?
Any educated person knows that there's no one to one mapping between DNA and how the word "Asian" is used. There's a good predictive power for DNA and a high correlation. But that's how language works.
Between a "hill" and a "mountain", there's no concrete boundary. So even this is not essentialist. But no educated person would claim that hills and mountains don't exist as categories.
I think this is what you have done: you want to signal that you are against racism. So you end up using a strawman definition of race and then deny that race as a category itself doesn't exist.
Advice: don't create this strawman. Argue against the real thing: race is a category albeit a fuzzy one that humans use through language and this category has a biological basis.
There is one human race, you can divide them in groups by whatever markers you want, doesn't make it a race. "Tall people" is no more a race than "white people" is.
> I think this is what you have done: you want to signal that you are against racism.
To whom? If you had any idea the spats I got into (let's say with "liberals", as a shorthand) because I heard and understood Body Count before they were even born, and same for MLK and Frederick Douglass. I don't do sides, and I'm not aware of any that would have me, so don't assume about me to get away of the scientific facts on race when it comes to humans.
And this isn't 1950s, so "not being racist" is not a flex to me. It's not something to be proud of, but rather grateful for. Like not sacrificing children to volcanos anymore or whatever doesn't make us better people, it makes us better off. We're lucky to have the opportunity to be less ignorant is all.
You can’t solve racism by playing semantic games and claiming race as a concept itself doesn’t exist. There’s not just a single human race just like there’s no one colour. There’s beauty in our differences.
It doesn’t make you more moral to collapse the white and black race into one.
> Advice: don't create this strawman. Argue against the real thing: race is a category albeit a fuzzy one that humans use through language and this category has a biological basis.
Advice: the above is essentially indistinguishable from the false scientific argumentation that white supremacists use to make their case. It has no meaningful basis in science.
> Advice: the above is essentially indistinguishable from the false scientific argumentation that white supremacists use to make their case
Wow. You make things worse by calling people who think race is a fuzzy category white supremacists. This kinda thing is part of the problem. Please reconsider - its childish and everyone can see through this.
Essentially indistinguishable? That's going so far. Please don't do this. It's so counter-productive to provide evidence for the "they call everything racist/white-supremacist" accusation.
> That article doesn't mention the word "race" once.
Are you being intentionally obtuse by pretending ethnicity and race can't be used interchangeably on a broad level? The entire point of requiring "diversity in bone marrow donation" is that you can't just take bone marrow from an ethnically caucasian ("white" in racial classification terms) and expect the transfer to be successful for an African American person ("black" in racial classification terms). Yes "white", "black" et al are imprecise terms but they broadly align with certain ethnic groups, and there ARE biological differences between ethnicities.
I think this discussion won't be productive because for them, dismissing race as a concept is a way to combat racism itself and prove higher moral ground.
No, I think racism is mostly one of the ways in which little fish get played off against other little fish, and the best way to combat it is also the best way to combat a lot of other big issues, and that is holding the big fish to account. We're angry fighting over table scraps because consolidated power consolidates further and takes all our oxygen. Like in that meme image with a rich guy and a plate with hundreds of cookies, telling a worker "careful, the immigrant wants to steal your cookie".
I think similarly about other "culture war" issues: there are always two sides that have at least one 2+2=5 article of faith, e.g. races being real and super important, or white old men being the source of all sin, or some religion or other, or biological sex being a spectrum. But there's always something, you always have to hand off your brain and reduce yourself below the level of a moderately intelligent and curious teenager. Otherwise, you're "the other", and what that is depends on the group, not you.
So how you instantly have an image of me in your head, simply because I "talked back" or whatever, is hilarious to me. You have no idea about me, and and couldn't guess in a million years how I actually am, but you know your enemy, so I'm probably that. And the most fun part is, I will get told I'm "fash" or MAGA with exactly the same ease. From my perspective, I know with 100% certainty y'all are talking about each other, because none of it even begins to describe me or my conduct, and is always the same dumb shit, very little variation or originality.
I mostly agree/sympathize with this. Though I think it's fascinating that "race is real" is a 2+2=5 example for you, but for me, "race is not real" is 2+2=5. Of course what I really think is that both are quippy oversimplifications. Really the fundamentals underlying both "sides" are all reasonable, and it's just a semantic argument poisoned by social politics, which encourages people to sort of implicitly ignore the semantics another person is using, and at the same time to leave things unsaid in their own retorts too, making room for the other person to continue the cycle.
Races exist at the biological level. I'm surprised this is even contested. IDK what makes you think white person is different from a black person? Is it vibes? Even a kid knows that a white person has different DNA.
Black and white are not races. They are racial discrimination categories. People with black skin are not one identifiable group except "black skin". Which is a heritable trait that affects pigmentation used to create a social discrimination category. It does not make a single meaningfully identifiable group in any other sense. (It's not even consistently the same trait, on a biological level)
You are talking about sociopolitical race discrimination and suggesting it has absolute, immutable biological mappings. It does not. This actually is quite close to real racism.
I make no claim to be smart and calling a high school diploma an education is a stretch. That said, human sex overwhelmingly clusters around two categories, albeit with some intersex outliers. Additionally, Bimodal sex has endured for as long as recorded history, so it appears to be an immutable trait insofar as the species is a stable species and not taking into account that somewhere along the timeline we share a lineage with single-celled organisms.
Race on the other hand, does not neatly cluster into discreet categories that any responsible person would define, draw boundaries around and count. Furthermore, race has not remained stable over recorded history. Populations mix, join and split. Which race were the Old Kingdom Egyptians? Our modern notions of Asian, Caucasian, etc. probably did not even exist during their era.
Using "Race" like this is really bad in Germany and Sweden. As is pointed out in this thread [1] how we use words differs. TIL race has a different meaning in English and Swedish. I use it in both but I've never thought about the difference in how I use it in different languages.
Categories are not fixed between cultures, even colours and numbers are hard to get right. So when you hear a word you can not be clear it is used in your broad meaning, or the narrow meaning.
This was actually my favourite way of nerd sniping back when I was young.
Can you see the fallacy you are doing here? The parent tried to suggest this: simply because a thing can be in a spectrum doesn't make it unworthy of being a category. You've twisted that analogy into this nonsensical book example.
The implication of what you say — that white and black are races — is that indigenous Australians and African Americans are the same "race", because they both have black skin?
There's no need to torture semantics. We all understand how the terms "black" and "white" are used in the English-speaking world. They are umbrella terms with varying usage depending on what superset/subset of people you are talking about in the moment. E.g. in the US, "black" usually refers to dark-skinned people of African descent (I assume you know this), but other dark-skinned people might be included depending on context. Yes, biological/genetic "race" is a many-dimensional spectrum, in which context it's fine to argue that "race" doesn't exist, but that doesn't make the colloquial words used to describe "race" meaningless. It just makes their borders fuzzy when mapped onto a biological context.
Biological race does not, indeed, exist. Really at all. Defining it as a many-dimensional spectrum just so you can to continue to use the word "race", now that is torturing semantics.
The semantics I am referring to are the suggestion that "white" and "black" exist as races on a genetic level.
The example I am introducing is to test the understanding behind that suggestion.
The genders have always been bi-modal, but the well has been poisoned by people calling it "a binary" (hence "non-binary" people). A sad state of affairs.
I think what its trying to say is race as a defined biological categorisation doesn't really exist, at least not to the extent its been described in past. The biological variance between humans is more of spectrum than categories.
race as a cultural / social concept does exist though, and that biology certainly correlates to an extent due to geography and how human society has traditionally functioned.
I.e, the cornish are a race, falling under celtic, which originate from Iberia, but is there a modern biological difference to their surrounding English people? Are they more biologically similar to the modern people inhabiting the Iberian peninsula or those in Kent? And even then, are they really all thatthat biologically different from the modern spanish anyways?
Ah, but it gets messier than that. What's a Celt, anyway? It was traditionally believed that Celts were in some sense a single ethnic group, but the genetics don't _really_ support that, in particular for British and Irish Celts.
> I think what its trying to say is race as a defined biological categorisation
Proof? What do you think the people were asked in the survey? Normal people use race in the normal way. I think white people exist. I think black people exist. Everyone knows this - I don't need any academic to prove me wrong.
And I don't think it makes me racist when some one asks me "are there different human races" and I answer "yes".
Sorry, but most Europeans don't use the term anymore since the Nazis tried to impose a catastrophic societal order based on their race ideology.
White people were only white if they could show bloodlines reaching back generations. One jewish great-grandfather would make you intelligible for the Arian race. They would laugh at your notion of white vs black.
Physiognomic appearance does not equate with genetically discrete populations, so while we can obviously visually identify that people have broadly asian, african, european, polynesian dissent etc; this doesn't equate with other factors stereotypically associated with those 'races'. Race is a folk taxonomy. Ethnicity and genetics are complex - like most things when you make more than a cursory investigation.
So while you might not be racist for thinking so, you're at best misinformed.
Duello, T. M., Rivedal, S., Wickland, C., & Weller, A. (2021). Race and genetics versus ‘race’ in genetics. Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health, 9(1), 232–245. https://doi.org/10.1093/emph/eoab018
Herd, P., Mills, M. C., & Dowd, J. B. (2021). Reconstructing Sociogenomics Research: Dismantling Biological Race and Genetic Essentialism Narratives. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 62(3), 419–435. https://doi.org/10.1177/00221465211018682
Hunt, L. M., & Megyesi, M. S. (2008). Genes, race and research ethics: who’s minding the store? Journal of Medical Ethics, 34(7), 495–500. https://doi.org/10.1136/jme.2007.021295
Lujan, H. L., & DiCarlo, S. E. (2024). Misunderstanding of race as biology has deep negative biological and social consequences. Experimental Physiology, 109(8), 1240–1243.
https://doi.org/10.1113/ep091491
Aren't haplotype groups essentially "race"? Certainly there is not white/black race, but a southern costal Indian would self differentiate from a central one, you can spot the difference visually,culturally and lingustcally and there is also well understood predispositions of different groups to specific ailments (see diabetes). Not my area of expertise so might be way off
I'm no expert on haplogroups either, but cursory googling seems to indicate they are far more numerous and nuanced than the late victorian, scientific-racism derived classifications used today - i.e.: black, white, asian etc.
But we don't need to be specialists in population genetics to observe that human cultures interbreed. We can't reliably correlate visible biomarkers with genetic origin, especially in contemporary multicultural societies or any of the places where numerous land invasions over thousands of years have ensured continual group mixing. For example Indian subcontinent, Afghanistan, Mongolian steppe etc. My nephew is half 'Irish', half 'Indian'. But what does that mean exactly? His ancestry is likely to contain contributions from hundreds of subgroups and linguistic populations across South East India, as well as Ireland and the UK more broadly. Visibly he looks 'Indian', but what does that mean for a determinant of race?
These concepts were engineered in the colonial era. Only the names have changed. In college my friends and I picked up a cut price set of colonial era British encyclopedia. They had lots to say on racial groups, with detailed descriptions of the personality types, intelligence and appearance of groups like 'negroids' and 'hibernians'. Of course none of this was based on what we'd today term scientific reasoning or measurement - and yet the conclusions and stereotypes persist in our culture. Irrespective of powerful counterexamples demonstrating that culture and economics determine an enormous amount of educational and attainment potential. e.g.: Nigerian American economic success [1], the explosive boom and continual exceptional economic performance of Ireland [2], or the absurd difference in educational outcomes of countries which are ethnically homogenous but politically divided - e.g.: North and South Korea, Haiti and Dominican Republic etc.
Remember interindividual differences radically outpace intergroup differences. Which is not to suggest that highly homogenous ethnic groups (e.g.: askinazi jews, or certain West African populations) can't have significant differences in athletic ability. But such differences are on population levels much smaller than observable 'races' per say.
> Physiognomic appearance does not equate with genetically discrete populations
The idea that race affects EXACTLY things that appear on the surface and nothing else is laughable. You need mountains of layers of cognitive dissonance to believe this. For example: different races are susceptible to different diseases.
Instead of hitting tackling racism properly, you are putting fingers in your ears and shouting that race itself doesn't exist. Do you really think you can beat racism like this?
The fact that you can have categories that span bigger spectrums doesn't preclude the category from existing. You can have dark and light colours. But you can also have dark blue light blue and so on. That doesn't mean colour doesn't exist.
> this doesn't equate with other factors stereotypically associated
who is suggesting this? what do you think the people in the survey are asked? They were asked if races exist and they definitely do. White people exist and Black people exist. Normal people won't read your research papers lmao. Colloquially, races do exist and normal people should think that races do exist.
these conversations are always incredibly frustrating.
On one extreme are people who believe that white people are inherently better than black people because of some genetic inheritance. This is obvious nonsense.
On the other extreme are the people like the one you are arguing with who claim that race does not exist because all humans are biologically identical. This is also nonsense as any black person in the US will tell you.
What you seem to be arguing is that ethnicity, and the genetic effects of ethnicity, are real. They are. Race as biological construct, with consequent societal effects is also not real. White people are not inherently more intelligent that Black people.
The other person is technically right, but is one of those people who seem to believe that biological differences do not matter in society, one of those "i don't see colour" types. Race as a social construct is very much real.
Is this thread just one big semantic misunderstanding, then? I think of ethnicity and race as casual synonyms, and when they are distinguished, I think of ethnicity as cultural ("Hispanic") and race as biological (genetically Spanish), both of which are very fuzzy. But it sounds like you're using the term "ethnicity" biologically, the way I would use the term "race", which I'm not used to.
It’s not semantic misunderstanding. It’s one group trying to signal moral upper hand by either playing semantic games or by being ignorant. It’s mostly stemming from signalling moral upper hand. The group seems to think you can beat racism by claiming race itself is not real.
Race theory was always pseudoscience to imply the generalized differences between people who looked differently were genetic and thus inherent traits.
It's an extension of a much older, more insidious idea - blood purity. There are still people who would pretend to trace their own lineage back through every scholar, king, and prophet to Adam, while choosing to believe that everyone else is a mongrel line, inferior and subservient to them in some way.
Way to mix completely different things. Its like saying: Gender exists hence men are better. No one suggests this kinda thing.
Race is not pseudo science. Race is real. White people are meaningfully different from Black people. Its not bad to be different. It doesn't mean one is different from the other. You can't beat racism by claiming race itself is not real!
You seem to keep suggesting that boundaries have to be perfect for categories to exist. This is not the case. White colour and dark colour exist as categories yet are blurry. Yet no sane person suggests colours don’t exist.
There’s no sharp boundary between a hill and a mountain. There’s no sharp boundary between dark and white colours. There’s no sharp boundary between male and female either at the edge cases when you consider intersex. Language has its limitations and it’s obvious to most of us and we don’t have to play semantic juggling each time.
Does the way people use race as a word have biological basis? Absolutely yes. For example you take people who self identify as black and white and try to find whether their DNA can predict their self identified race. You would agree that it can predict to a good extent I hope.
On a side note: I think you have fallen into this popular rabbit hole where you expect sharp boundaries for commonly used words/categories. Such sharp boundaries never exist and every normal person from a child to an adult knows and works around this. This kind of rhetoric is popular with some extremist academic types to signal their in group presence. Tip: if you want to solve racism, don’t get into debates on esoteric definitions of race and pretend race itself doesn’t exist. Normal people aren’t convinced.
What even is biological race? Race as used sociologically has a biological basis. And normal people think that race is real, the same way colour is real.
You have said this
> Races don't exist on any biological level
And it is completely untrue. Sociological race does exist at a biological level. DNA of blacks and whites are different.
Just like wavelength emitted by black and white colours are different.
The survey asked whether race is real - of course race is. Just like colour is real.
White and black are not biological races but words used to describe real clusters of people, even if its lossy. In the entire conversation, you have made a complete strawman, as if people are talking about some made up definition of biological race you have come up with and then claim that "ha that made up definition is not real!"
>race has become a social reality that structures societies and how we experience the world. In this regard, race is real, as is racism, and both have real biological consequences
You said
> Races don't exist on any biological level
My suggestion: separate your moral claims and virtues from objective facts. I think you are spiralling into a maze of arguments that you yourself can't keep up with.
You have taken the phrase "real biological consequences", which is talking about the illness, healthcare, stress, poverty etc. impact of racism on centuries of people and used it to support your essential thesis that race itself can be detected on some biological level.
This is shameful.
> I think you are spiralling into a maze of arguments that you yourself can't keep up with.
Skin color and (facial) bone structure for example. Like it or not, but humans have adapted to living in different climates and have different ancestral lines. Take a picture of an average black person and edit to white skin, it will still not look like a white person.
As the commenter above you already said, this is not a bad thing. People on _hacker_news should be able to understand that being able to define the ==/!= operators on something does not automatically mean that you can define < and >.
It is more obvious with some and a bit more nuanced with others, but in general yes. Just like you can typically see the flat/wide nose in Africans and Asians but not Europeans. Again, there is no implication of one being "better" than the other here, but don't pretend it's impossible to categorize people like this.
Race != Race. Race as a social construct exists but biologically speaking there is no such thing.
In the US the term "race" always refers to the social construct. The german word "Rasse" did not undergo that same change in meaning. Even the most extreme right wing in Germany, the most openly racist people you can find would not dare to use that word in this manner in public. This is far more offensive than using the n-word.
So having germans agree to such statements especially so many is genuinely quite shocking.
It would really just save everyone a lot of time if we just said "branch" instead of "race". We all branched off from some shared ancestors somewhere back in the mists of time. We're all cousins from different branches of the family.
TBH I think the word is often used without much consideration. So where people should say ethnicity or ancestry e.g., they say race instead, because it is just simpler, not because they carry much meaning with it. This is true in German and English..
Also I think given the context you know how people mean these words. But all I see is wild jumping on some words without much context all the time.
> Race as a social construct exists but biologically speaking there is no such thing
Mountains of layers of cognitive dissonance are needed to believe this. Race is absolutely biological. To think otherwise is fooling oneself. You are doing a disservice to combating racism by negating the existence of race itself. Do you really think racism will just go away by suggesting black people and white people are exactly the same internally? Get real man.
