Post: #1

Serious question.

Barack Obama had a black father and a white mother - and we call him black.

Slash (my favourite guitar player) had a white father and a black mother - and we call him white.

So - I'm confused. Are the liberals correct when they say Race is a social construct?

It seems they could be correct since we notice things like Race in people. But we never distinguish between things like hair colour or eye colour.

Yet - on a logical level - it seems the colour of your hair or eyes should be of no more importance (biologically speaking) than the colour of your skin.

As such - are Races even real? Are the liberals correct?

Post: #2

I wonder what they call a typical Brazilian who is mixed with every race on the planet in the US or Europe.

Post: #3

what

no. There are clearly innate biological/genetic differences. Not saying any more though because hbd is gay.

Post: #4

Race is a vague and largely useless way of categorizing people. Ethnicity is much more meaningful since it groups people based on common ancestry, culture, language, religion, etc. It takes into account biological/genetic qualities but much more precisely than race.

Post: #5

Uh oh.

This is covered a lot of other places on teh interwebz. Do we have to re-fight the race wars here?

Anyway, http://www.vdare.com/articles/the-race-faq

Post: #6

You do know there are genetic tests that can determine what your racial makeup is based on just your DNA sample from saliva, hair, semen, skin cells, blood, etc., right?

Anyway, there is more info here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_%28hum...ication%29

Post: #7

It's skin color, nothing else. I'd follow that to its logical conclusion and say that Barack Obama is black, and Slash is white.

But what does it matter for? Saying someone is black, white, yellow, green and whatnot is not an insult. It's just a simple physical description. It also carries certain physical differences with it (ex. black people are more resistant to skin cancer and sunburns, probably are better runners, etc), but I think those are negligible.

So my point is that yes, there are races, and yes, they are more or less clearly biologically defined, but they don't really matter. People who make a fuss over them (on either side) are usually trolling the world.

Contrast this with a liberal who claims that race doesn't exist, because if it did exist it would matter.

Post: #8

Okay - thanks for the links. Will check them out.

Might be best to lock the thread if you think it will start a flame war.

Post: #9

(03-07-2013 08:58 AM)Handsome Creepy Eel Wrote:  It's skin color, nothing else. I'd follow that to its logical conclusion and say that Barack Obama is black, and Slash is white.

But what does it matter for? Saying someone is black, white, yellow, green and whatnot is not an insult. It's just a simple physical description. It also carries certain physical differences with it (ex. black people are more resistant to skin cancer and sunburns, probably are better runners, etc), but I think those are negligible.

So my point is that yes, there are races, and yes, they are more or less clearly biologically defined, but they don't really matter. People who make a fuss over them (on either side) are usually trolling the world.

Contrast this with a liberal who claims that race doesn't exist, because if it did exist it would matter.

From my link:

Quote:Q. Isn't race just about skin color?

A. That's a simplistic verbal shorthand Americans use to refer to ancestry. Nobody really acts as if they believe race is synonymous with skin color.

Q. What do you mean?

A. Consider the golfer Vijay Singh , who during 2004-2005 became the only man in this decade besides Tiger Woods to be the number one ranked player in the world. Singh, who was born in the Fiji Islands of Asian Indian descent, is much darker in skin color than Woods.

Singh is at least as dark as the average African-American. Yet, nobody in America ever thinks of Singh as black or African-American. There's an enormous industry that celebrates the triumphs of blacks in nontraditional venues such as golf. But Singh's accomplishments elicited minimal interest in the U.S.

A 2007 article, for example, asked where are all the black golf champions who were expected to emerge in the wake of Tiger Woods's first Masters championship in 1997. It never mentions the blackest-skinned player on tour, Singh … because we're not actually talking about skin color when we use the word "black," we're talking about sub-Saharan African ancestry.

Post: #10

In a nutshell, humanity is a LOT more inbred than people are comfortable knowing.
So race is roughly your extended family, which sounds to me like a logical biologic reason people feel connected to "their" race.

Why else do "American" women hate hot foreign brides coming to the U.S? More competition.
Why else to racist whites hate miscegenation? More competition.
Why do liberal blue stater's in New York and California avoid minorities like the plague when it comes to neighborhood and school choice? Harder chance of success for their kids.
Why does Joe 6-pack hate all the Messicans crossing the border? More competition for his construction gig.

It boils down to kin trust. Tribal humanity only trusted those that popped out of the vaginas of their own. In Afghanistan they often have first cousin marriage because of the guy splits he will lose his ENTIRE family, not half of it.

What happens when people mix, populations move, and culture shifts? It seems to me that people wren't wired to deal with that. Thus a lot of our "instincts" don't make much sense.

Post: #11

No, race is a biological condition!

Post: #12

White, black, Indian, Japanese, Arab, Jewish, Turkish, etc. nationalists like to use the biological basis of race in order to grant themselves a sense of entitlement. If you're a member of a superior race, the thinking goes, then you can feel credit for all the extraordinary things your people did that even the greatest men in those inferior races did not.

If you're a racialist, you can accomplish nothing of enduring value and yet nevertheless feel like a winner because you get to piggyback onto the achievements of other men who just happen to have similar genes.

Moreover, if you're already inclined to be selfish and uncharitable you can not only justify but positively glorify your miserly ways. "Why should I give to charity? It'll just end up going to *those* people!"

There are significant differences in average cognitive ability and temperament across racial groups, but there's also non-negligible overlap. But if you're an Italian dude gloating over the wonders of Ancient Rome and Renaissance Florence, of Leonardo Da Vinci and Silvio Berlusconi, bear in mind you might fall very far from the mean. That swarthy immigrant you're hating on might be smarter, better mannered, less violent, more industrious, and more inventive than you. Maybe he even speaks Latin and knows Cicero by heart. But hey - you've never accomplished shit in your life but you're distantly related to some people who have so you can contently go to sleep at night anyway.

Post: #13

Yes and no. Americans use race mostly as a social construct e.g. your Obama example, the one drop rule. The fact that we call all Sub-Saharan Africans black as if they are members of a single race-despite the fact that different groups of SS Africans are more different from each other than Europeans are from Northeast Asians- is more evidence that Americans use the social construct definition of race.

Caribbean Hispanics have the reverse of the one drop rule. If someone has significant African ancestry, but also clearly has significant European and/or Native American ancestry, that person is never called "negro". My maternal grandmother fell into that category. By American standards, she probably would have been considered black, but in PR she was not considered black.

Nevertheless, race is real in the sense that you can place most humans into genetically distinct groups.

Post: #14

Also, to play with an "anti-racist" stance I don't exactly endorse because there IS some utility to it, racism is like your appendix: It was probably incredibly important a million years ago but nowadays it doesn't have much use and can flare up from time to time.

Post: #15

Yes and no. There are instances where race is a sociological concept, such as America's one drop rule. Whoopi Goldberg and Rashida Jones are considered the same race and would both be entitled to affirmative action. And Hispanics in America have this weird thing where even the ones that are nearly all European ancestry consider themselves non-whites. In Russia they call everyone blacks who have darker skin, even other Caucasians such as Turks. So it can be sociological concept in ways.

But of course there are different phenotypes of people too that evolved as adaptations to different environments. We call these races in the biological sense. But scientists will tell you that they have no use for the word race. It can also be hard to say where one race ends and the next begins. Some don't consider Turks white because they are at the frontier of Europe. Some don't consider Ethiopians black for example, or at least less black. I tend to think of human races as being somewhat analogous to breeds of dogs. You can have purebreds and you can have mutts, but they are all the same species Canis Domesticus.