The situation in the USA for nonwhite people has improved dramatically *in some areas.*. It was not that long ago that a black man with a Ph.D. could not get a job higher than janitorial work This has changed (it still has a long way to go). On the other hand the conviction of Derek Chauvin was remarkable, trailblazing, pivotal, becau…
The situation in the USA for nonwhite people has improved dramatically *in some areas.*. It was not that long ago that a black man with a Ph.D. could not get a job higher than janitorial work This has changed (it still has a long way to go). On the other hand the conviction of Derek Chauvin was remarkable, trailblazing, pivotal, because for most of my life a policeman who murdered a black man in cold blood could do so without fear of reprisal, not erven the loss of a day's pay.
At the other end, though, racist attitudes among a large minority of Americans have not substantially improved at all; quite the contrary, Trump's "plain speaking" on matters of race has liberated and encouraged these wretched people. Bigots are angrier than ever.
"On the other hand the conviction of Derek Chauvin was remarkable, trailblazing, pivotal, because for most of my life a policeman who murdered a black man in cold blood could do so without fear of reprisal, not even the loss of a day's pay."
I wonder if this is a generational thing, but I honestly wasn't surprised by the Chauvin verdict. I was *relieved*, but not surprised. And I wouldn't have been particularly tempted to blame his acquittal on racism even if he had been acquitted.
As you say, police have been getting away with killing civilians for a long time. Not just black civilians, civilians. Most of those cases don't even make it to trial. The case of Tony Timpa, for example, was dropped and all three officers involved in his killing returned to active duty. Barely a word in the press.
And the fact that there was a time when a black man with a PhD couldn't get a job higher than a janitor, and today the idea is unthinkable, is exactly the kind of progress I'm pointing to. My awareness of how racist America was in the past is precisely why I'm so aware of the progress that's been made.
Racist attitudes haven't improved in some people and places. You're sadly absolutely right. And yes, those people are angrier than ever. But they're angry because they're *losing*. They're angry because their bigotry is dying out. They're dying because for all their efforts, black people are gaining the respect they deserve. I don't take these bigots lightly at all. But their tears are delicious to me😁.
This comment is generic and not aimed at anyone's comment. I often wonder if we would get a better result on fixing race problems with less focus on race. I often see the raw number vs. per capita argument pertaining to the police being immune to justice when they wrongfully kill someone. If we all pile onto the issue without the "it's a bigger problem for my group" stuff and get a better police force, black people benefit along with everyone else. Isn't a good result good, even if it's for everyone?
Would more white people (even the racist ones) join in the effort if they didn't perceive it as all about black people?
Hey Dave, I touch on it in "Confessions of A Race Writer". I'll be posting paywall free versions of it and the rest of December's articles in this week's subscriber thread.👍
Statistics on police convictions are astounding; anyone could be excused for thinking that a badge was a license to wanton murder.
But you know as well as I that while, yes, white people get shot by cops too, PoC are such victims entirely out of proportion to their representation in population,
I too revel in the rage and pain of racists. But I worry more than revel; these are irrational and hate-crazed people and the fact that they are losing makes them feel that violence is more justified than ever. They believe their cause is righteous.
"PoC are such victims entirely out of proportion to their representation in population"
Yes this is true. But as I said in a conversation here recently, black people are also quite dramatically overrepresented in violent crime and homicide. Sadly, with the state of policing, if you encounter the police more often, bad things will happen more often.
Black people are still overrepresented in police shootings if you account for this. And there are many other measures that demonstrate police bias against black people (rates at which we're pulled over, police verbal/physical aggression during non-criminal interactions). But it's important to look at the whole picture.
And yes, I hear you. I don't take racists lightly. I worry too. Especially given the idiots doing everything they can to stir up racial hatred in the name of "antiracism".
Too busy right now for a long answer but ... traffic stops. Let me see your license. Man reaches into his jacket for his wallet. Cop blows his brains out. Doesn't happen too often to white drivers.
I think anyone who calls the cops on a black man for being somewhere like a park should be indicted for attempted murder.
Your last sentence says a lot about the mental state of the nation, alas.
Police kill around 15-25 unarmed Blacks every year, out of 42 million, and out of tens of millions of interactions by 700,000 officers. That's well under 1 in a million. Among the risks that all of us face, that is a very small one, objectively.
However, white liberals when surveyed tend to overestimate by literally a factor of 10 to 1000 or MORE, believing that staggering numbers of Black men, women and children are gunned down in the street every year by police for no reason except racial animus.
I'd be pretty emotional if that were true, too. But it isn't.
As a result of their internal models being many orders of magnitude out of touch with reality, some well intentioned people sincerely believe that each interaction between (unarmed, as in a park) Black people and the police is really, really likely to result in a death - like 50/50 rather than less than one in a million. If the person in question doesn't fight with the police or try to resist arrest, the risk is probably well under one in ten million.
So with this distorted misunderstanding, they can with good conscience assert that any person [which presumably includes any Black person by the way] calling the police about a Black person should be indicted for attempted murder. Just imagine what it would be like to live in a world where such people came to power and could implement the policies they advocate. Even good intentions can have horrific effects if untethered from reality.
Where I live, even a (white) victim of theft or assault by a Black person, can be assailed by progressives if they go to police about it, because of the irrational believe that's that's pretty much a death sentence for a non-capital offense.
From any rational analysis, that's seriously bonkers. Staggeringly so. A society with as widespread delusion that big is in trouble (a society with a similar number of people who think that Trump won the last election is in trouble too; this troubling irrationality comes from both sides).
But it's so darn emotionally satisfying to imagine that one is fighting a noble crusade against a horrendous evil epidemic of unrestrained open season on Black people by cops. Accepting a criminal attack without accountability is a heroic action which will most likely save a Black life from the killer police. Actual facts are like a wet blanket to that fiery payoff, so it's hard to discuss this rationally with those who have been misled by the fuzzy "impression" they got from politically biased sources intentionally misleading them. (Yes, the professional activists are often privately aware of these numbers, but they say what gets them power).
There are many other facets to consider (like whether we should expect proportionality to raw population or to crime, comparisons among all racial/ethnic groups in the US, etc) which would be interesting to discuss. We could look at Roland Fryer's research which dug into finer details and accounted for factors missed by crude numbers. But we can't begin to have a reasoned conversation until some people recognize how grossly distorted their mental models of what's happening have become.
As I said before, if this was happening as frequently as many liberals imagine, I too would have a very different take on it. I do care about disparities, but I believe we have to understand the true nature and scope of a problem before we can implement effective remedies, not go off half cocked based on delusions.
I think this could be a story for Steve. This isn't so much a defense of Trump and Trumpsters as it is a comment on partisan rhetoric. Democrats call everyone not in their tribe a racist and have in some ways stripped the word of real meaning. There's a lot of mind reading, word twisting going on. A desire to see the government enforce immigration law need not be racist.
I don't know if you've done much international travel but outside of the EU, immigration laws, especially pertaining to work are strictly enforced. One of the big changes in the US pertains to immigrants reporting their whereabouts. When my wife immigrated to the US in 1970, green card aliens reported their address on one form every January. Every time they moved the reported that on a different form. She did that until the became a naturalized citizen. Nobody gave a thought to immigration control being racist, it was what every country did and most still do.
Passports now have chips with your data and picture and upon entry into other countries it gets compared (facial recognition) with a camera at the immigration point. My last trip to China they even had it in the hotel that I told immigration I was staying in. Going into the Dominican Republic my daughter mentioned to me that I and the other man in our party who was wearing a hat were told to remove our hats. I pointed to the camera; they were doing facial recognition against our passports.
The point of my comment is that people resent the hell out of being called racists because they are to the political right of Karl Marx. It does not lead to productive discourse on racism.
This goes well beyond irritating; there are perfectly sound reasons for differentiating people on the basis of race that have nothing to do with bigotry. I live in Vietnam and on many official forms e.g. vaccination records there is a set of checkboxes: Vietnamese, Hmong, western ... it isn't bigotry. Maybe they're tracing efficacy of the vaccines. Who cares?
There is this Social Justice Warrior idea that "there are no differences," that race and gender are "social constructs," as biological realities go out the window. And they enforce their views with a rigidity that would give pause to Heinrich Himmler. We are ordered to use gender neutrality in speech, with usages that are completely confusing; crime reports omit race when it is as important in a manhunt as height or any other identifying characteristic.
It's not racist to acknowledge the reality of race; it's not misogyny to acknowledge real differences between men and women. It is important to not regard these differences as inferiority.
"there are perfectly sound reasons for differentiating people on the basis of race that have nothing to do with bigotry."
I've seen you make this argument a number of times in various forms, but I'm still no closer to understanding what reasons you're referring to.
To be clear, I agree with you that this isn't bigotry. I don't feel as if I'm being oppressed when I tick "Black/Other" on a form. But what are the "perfectly sound reasons" for me doing this?
Even if I could class myself simply as "Black/African", Africa is an entire *continent*. There is so much genetic and cultural diversity amongst people in Africa. I'm genetically closer to you than I am to some black people in Africa. So even if the motivation is medical (which I doubt as geneticists are absolutely settled on the idea that race is meaningless), there are far more meaningful ways to group people medically than "your great-grandfather was born on this piece of land" or "your skin is closer to this shade than that shade."
Please help me understand these sound reasons you see.
Yep, that's a good example. I'm actually a carrier (I have sickle cell trait). I became a carrier because my father (African) is also a carrier but my mother (Caribbean) isn't. Both of them look just as black as each other. My sister, thanks to the vagaries of genetics, isn't a carrier. Even though she would tick the same box for "race" as me.
If I wanted to have a child, there'd be no way to know by "race" whether my prospective partner was also a carrier (if both parents are carriers there's a high chance the child will have anemia). The vast majority of black people don't have sickle cell anemia or trait and about 20% of the people who *do* aren't black. Sickle cell trait is a (fairly rare) medical reality, not a racial one. So, in this case, simply asking people whether they have sickle cell trait would be far more useful than asking them whether they have any genealogy from sub-Saharan Africa.
I'm not trying to argue that there aren't physiological realities regarding people from different parts of the world. I'm just saying that we can't meaningfully flatten these out by the concept of race. Melanoma risk, for example, is largely related to how dark somebody's skin is, which is broadly a function of how many of their ancestors lived near the equator. But at what point as we move away from the equator do people become a different "race"? What are the lines of latitude that separate black people from brown people from white people?
Yes, people with lighter skin are more likely to be at risk for skin cancer. Yes, people from sub-Saharan Africa are more likely to have sickle cell trait/anemia. It's useful to know these things. But while "race", by which I think you really mean skin colour, *feels* like a useful shorthand for people's differences, it almost never maps them accurately when you're trying to be even slightly precise.
Fun facts to Know and Tell: SCA survives because it confers malaria resistance. Living in the USA you are unlikely to be exposed to malaria but it's endemic in much of the world.
With two SCA alleles one is likely to come down with SCA and die from it. But with one, as you have, a malaria infection is far less lethal because the one allele has the effect of causing the red blood cells to rupture before the parasites are mature. Zero SCA alleles and malaria is a real danger.
This is just one of several genetic abnormalities that persist because of malaria. Another is favism, allergy to fava beans; this allergy does something similar to red blood cells.
Without the influence of malaria, many genetic deficits would have died our long ago.
I know this has nothing to do with racism.
"(if both parents are carriers there's a high chance the child will have anemia)"
😁 I knew it had something to do with malaria but wasn't clear on the details. I also get bitten by mosquitos less than my sister does which is a huge bonus.
Just addressing one point. Much of what you say I agree with, but once you are talking about medical implications, I think you too easily dismiss race.
First off, what is generally considered invalid is the idea that we can assign all humans to one of four or five discrete non-overlapping categories. All the the genetic and phenotypical traits tend to follow gradients rather than binary functions. That conception of "race" is too oversimplified at best, and I would be glad to discard it because it causes much harm and little or no good.
However, using multifactoral cluster analysis of human traits, one can discover fuzzy clusters, or density areas where population groups can be distinguished. This is more like distinguishing night from day - the boundaries are fuzzy and not clearly defined, but that doesn't mean that there is no meaningful difference between night time and day time. But the thing is - depending on how you set the parameters, your analysis might distinguish 3 or 14 or 25 statistical clusters. There is no reason to strongly highlight just 4 (or 5). But if you do choose parameter which yield 4 clusters, those clusters will tend to correlate with continents. That should not be surprising - there has been statistically more mixing within continents than between them.
What that means is that once you get rid of the concept of hard bounded categories and accept fuzzy statistical clusters, there could be useful medical distintions between clusters in some cases. Now there's no scientific reason to choose 4 clusters for this - probably it would be more accurate to know the effects of medication on 25 clusters of humanity. But on practical terms, probabalistic medical statistics may have been gathered based on self-identified "race" - the 4 cluster model. So that fuzzy proxy may be the best data we have.
Having defended that possibility of race as an unfortunate but sometimes useful proxy for fuzzy genetic cluster in some contexts, I return to assert that other than for medical or research purposes, I think it would be best to discard the obsolete concept of 4 (or 5) "races" as prescientific folklore. It misleads the mind more often than not.
Alas, getting past "race" is hard to do, especially after people have come to voluntarily intermingle it deeply with their concept of self, which must be defended at all cost. That is, race is used as a proxy for culture. Abolishing "race" as a concept then feels to them like their very identity and personhood is under attack. It's a tough problem - even if we can see that it's corrosive to keep reifying race, it has also become a sacred cow. A twisted love/hate thing.
Ah humans. A most amazing group of critters we are.
"but once you are talking about medical implications, I think you too easily dismiss race."
I'd actually be particularly tempted to dismiss race with regards medical implications precisely because when discussing medical implications we should be accurate. Race isn't.
If we talked about ancestry that would be far more useful medically speaking. If we talked about specific conditions (Chris and I touch on sickle cell anaemia/trait below) that would be useful. If we talked about family history, that would be useful. But if we talk about "black" people or even worse, "brown" people, we waste time and resources on people who have completely different risk factors and needs.
As you say, "race" is an enormously oversimplified way of looking at human complexity. And at the time it was conceived, sure, we couldn't do much better (we also hadn't figured out that bloodletting and phrenology weren't medically sound). But now we can.
I'm not suggesting we ignore our differences at all. But especially in a medical context, I think we should be as precise as possible. Ticking "Black" or "White" on a form is not precise.
"Ticking "Black" or "White" on a form is not precise."
I think we have a lot of agreement - it's definitely not precise.
Where we might differ is that I am suggesting that medicine often operates on correlations and probabilities which are not precise or absolute, and that the data which has been gathered often requires inexact proxies for pragmatic reasons.
So for example, one might notice that there are statistically significant different outcomes among 100,000 patients given some treatment, between those who checked white and black. We would agree that the researchers having a complete genotype of all patients would be much better; but in the real world, imprecise proxies are often all we have or can feasibly obtain, and so we need to nevertheless pay attention to any (fuzzy, not precise) signals that nevertheless rise above the noise floor. It's a lot more practical for researchers to acquire data which includes how a race box was checked, than to get a full genetic sequence of every subject (not just a few markers like 23andMe uses).
AND again, I am speaking of a limited context where pragmatically, race may be the best proxy we have for something which IS relevant. This does NOT generalize to most situations we encounter in our lives, and I am not urging more emphasis be placed on the damaging concept of race.
And by the way, I appreciate your way of looking at things in historical context rather than removing them from context to evaluate them in isolation and under today's light.
Your last paragraph says a lot. Actual differences exist, both physical and cultural. What matters is when they matter and when they don't. Sadly, we often err in that. In a perfect world we would all enjoy and value the difference without all the negative judgment.
My last comment was more with regard to the use of political inflammatory accusations. I actually see the political left as more racist than the political right in some matters, but I don't make assumptions or accusation about racism of whole groups or its individual members. That would be just another form of racism.
I'm of the opinion that pretending race and gender are illusions is hardly any better than being racist or misogynist. They're both false. Opposite poles of falsehood, but false.
Mature and whole people see the realities of race and gender and attach no judgments of superiority or inferiority to them.
The situation in the USA for nonwhite people has improved dramatically *in some areas.*. It was not that long ago that a black man with a Ph.D. could not get a job higher than janitorial work This has changed (it still has a long way to go). On the other hand the conviction of Derek Chauvin was remarkable, trailblazing, pivotal, because for most of my life a policeman who murdered a black man in cold blood could do so without fear of reprisal, not erven the loss of a day's pay.
At the other end, though, racist attitudes among a large minority of Americans have not substantially improved at all; quite the contrary, Trump's "plain speaking" on matters of race has liberated and encouraged these wretched people. Bigots are angrier than ever.
"On the other hand the conviction of Derek Chauvin was remarkable, trailblazing, pivotal, because for most of my life a policeman who murdered a black man in cold blood could do so without fear of reprisal, not even the loss of a day's pay."
I wonder if this is a generational thing, but I honestly wasn't surprised by the Chauvin verdict. I was *relieved*, but not surprised. And I wouldn't have been particularly tempted to blame his acquittal on racism even if he had been acquitted.
As you say, police have been getting away with killing civilians for a long time. Not just black civilians, civilians. Most of those cases don't even make it to trial. The case of Tony Timpa, for example, was dropped and all three officers involved in his killing returned to active duty. Barely a word in the press.
And the fact that there was a time when a black man with a PhD couldn't get a job higher than a janitor, and today the idea is unthinkable, is exactly the kind of progress I'm pointing to. My awareness of how racist America was in the past is precisely why I'm so aware of the progress that's been made.
Racist attitudes haven't improved in some people and places. You're sadly absolutely right. And yes, those people are angrier than ever. But they're angry because they're *losing*. They're angry because their bigotry is dying out. They're dying because for all their efforts, black people are gaining the respect they deserve. I don't take these bigots lightly at all. But their tears are delicious to me😁.
This comment is generic and not aimed at anyone's comment. I often wonder if we would get a better result on fixing race problems with less focus on race. I often see the raw number vs. per capita argument pertaining to the police being immune to justice when they wrongfully kill someone. If we all pile onto the issue without the "it's a bigger problem for my group" stuff and get a better police force, black people benefit along with everyone else. Isn't a good result good, even if it's for everyone?
Would more white people (even the racist ones) join in the effort if they didn't perceive it as all about black people?
"I often wonder if we would get a better result on fixing race problems with less focus on race"
I absolutely think we would. I actually wrote this in an article recently.
After deleting my old Medium account which erased all the toxic exchanges, I created a new account. That was the name of that article?
Hey Dave, I touch on it in "Confessions of A Race Writer". I'll be posting paywall free versions of it and the rest of December's articles in this week's subscriber thread.👍
Thanks Steve.
Statistics on police convictions are astounding; anyone could be excused for thinking that a badge was a license to wanton murder.
But you know as well as I that while, yes, white people get shot by cops too, PoC are such victims entirely out of proportion to their representation in population,
I too revel in the rage and pain of racists. But I worry more than revel; these are irrational and hate-crazed people and the fact that they are losing makes them feel that violence is more justified than ever. They believe their cause is righteous.
And I'm a-standing at the crossroads.
Please be careful.
"PoC are such victims entirely out of proportion to their representation in population"
Yes this is true. But as I said in a conversation here recently, black people are also quite dramatically overrepresented in violent crime and homicide. Sadly, with the state of policing, if you encounter the police more often, bad things will happen more often.
Black people are still overrepresented in police shootings if you account for this. And there are many other measures that demonstrate police bias against black people (rates at which we're pulled over, police verbal/physical aggression during non-criminal interactions). But it's important to look at the whole picture.
And yes, I hear you. I don't take racists lightly. I worry too. Especially given the idiots doing everything they can to stir up racial hatred in the name of "antiracism".
Too busy right now for a long answer but ... traffic stops. Let me see your license. Man reaches into his jacket for his wallet. Cop blows his brains out. Doesn't happen too often to white drivers.
I think anyone who calls the cops on a black man for being somewhere like a park should be indicted for attempted murder.
Your last sentence says a lot about the mental state of the nation, alas.
Police kill around 15-25 unarmed Blacks every year, out of 42 million, and out of tens of millions of interactions by 700,000 officers. That's well under 1 in a million. Among the risks that all of us face, that is a very small one, objectively.
However, white liberals when surveyed tend to overestimate by literally a factor of 10 to 1000 or MORE, believing that staggering numbers of Black men, women and children are gunned down in the street every year by police for no reason except racial animus.
I'd be pretty emotional if that were true, too. But it isn't.
As a result of their internal models being many orders of magnitude out of touch with reality, some well intentioned people sincerely believe that each interaction between (unarmed, as in a park) Black people and the police is really, really likely to result in a death - like 50/50 rather than less than one in a million. If the person in question doesn't fight with the police or try to resist arrest, the risk is probably well under one in ten million.
So with this distorted misunderstanding, they can with good conscience assert that any person [which presumably includes any Black person by the way] calling the police about a Black person should be indicted for attempted murder. Just imagine what it would be like to live in a world where such people came to power and could implement the policies they advocate. Even good intentions can have horrific effects if untethered from reality.
Where I live, even a (white) victim of theft or assault by a Black person, can be assailed by progressives if they go to police about it, because of the irrational believe that's that's pretty much a death sentence for a non-capital offense.
From any rational analysis, that's seriously bonkers. Staggeringly so. A society with as widespread delusion that big is in trouble (a society with a similar number of people who think that Trump won the last election is in trouble too; this troubling irrationality comes from both sides).
But it's so darn emotionally satisfying to imagine that one is fighting a noble crusade against a horrendous evil epidemic of unrestrained open season on Black people by cops. Accepting a criminal attack without accountability is a heroic action which will most likely save a Black life from the killer police. Actual facts are like a wet blanket to that fiery payoff, so it's hard to discuss this rationally with those who have been misled by the fuzzy "impression" they got from politically biased sources intentionally misleading them. (Yes, the professional activists are often privately aware of these numbers, but they say what gets them power).
There are many other facets to consider (like whether we should expect proportionality to raw population or to crime, comparisons among all racial/ethnic groups in the US, etc) which would be interesting to discuss. We could look at Roland Fryer's research which dug into finer details and accounted for factors missed by crude numbers. But we can't begin to have a reasoned conversation until some people recognize how grossly distorted their mental models of what's happening have become.
As I said before, if this was happening as frequently as many liberals imagine, I too would have a very different take on it. I do care about disparities, but I believe we have to understand the true nature and scope of a problem before we can implement effective remedies, not go off half cocked based on delusions.
I think this could be a story for Steve. This isn't so much a defense of Trump and Trumpsters as it is a comment on partisan rhetoric. Democrats call everyone not in their tribe a racist and have in some ways stripped the word of real meaning. There's a lot of mind reading, word twisting going on. A desire to see the government enforce immigration law need not be racist.
I don't know if you've done much international travel but outside of the EU, immigration laws, especially pertaining to work are strictly enforced. One of the big changes in the US pertains to immigrants reporting their whereabouts. When my wife immigrated to the US in 1970, green card aliens reported their address on one form every January. Every time they moved the reported that on a different form. She did that until the became a naturalized citizen. Nobody gave a thought to immigration control being racist, it was what every country did and most still do.
Passports now have chips with your data and picture and upon entry into other countries it gets compared (facial recognition) with a camera at the immigration point. My last trip to China they even had it in the hotel that I told immigration I was staying in. Going into the Dominican Republic my daughter mentioned to me that I and the other man in our party who was wearing a hat were told to remove our hats. I pointed to the camera; they were doing facial recognition against our passports.
The point of my comment is that people resent the hell out of being called racists because they are to the political right of Karl Marx. It does not lead to productive discourse on racism.
This goes well beyond irritating; there are perfectly sound reasons for differentiating people on the basis of race that have nothing to do with bigotry. I live in Vietnam and on many official forms e.g. vaccination records there is a set of checkboxes: Vietnamese, Hmong, western ... it isn't bigotry. Maybe they're tracing efficacy of the vaccines. Who cares?
There is this Social Justice Warrior idea that "there are no differences," that race and gender are "social constructs," as biological realities go out the window. And they enforce their views with a rigidity that would give pause to Heinrich Himmler. We are ordered to use gender neutrality in speech, with usages that are completely confusing; crime reports omit race when it is as important in a manhunt as height or any other identifying characteristic.
It's not racist to acknowledge the reality of race; it's not misogyny to acknowledge real differences between men and women. It is important to not regard these differences as inferiority.
"there are perfectly sound reasons for differentiating people on the basis of race that have nothing to do with bigotry."
I've seen you make this argument a number of times in various forms, but I'm still no closer to understanding what reasons you're referring to.
To be clear, I agree with you that this isn't bigotry. I don't feel as if I'm being oppressed when I tick "Black/Other" on a form. But what are the "perfectly sound reasons" for me doing this?
Even if I could class myself simply as "Black/African", Africa is an entire *continent*. There is so much genetic and cultural diversity amongst people in Africa. I'm genetically closer to you than I am to some black people in Africa. So even if the motivation is medical (which I doubt as geneticists are absolutely settled on the idea that race is meaningless), there are far more meaningful ways to group people medically than "your great-grandfather was born on this piece of land" or "your skin is closer to this shade than that shade."
Please help me understand these sound reasons you see.
Here's one: sickle cell anemia.
Another: malignant melanoma
I have no chance whatsoever of getting the former; the latter is quite likely for me, with my titanium oxide complexion.
You have pretty much no chance of getting the latter.
As for "African," that's just sloppy. Moroccans look nothing like Sudanese.
"Here's one: sickle cell anemia."
Yep, that's a good example. I'm actually a carrier (I have sickle cell trait). I became a carrier because my father (African) is also a carrier but my mother (Caribbean) isn't. Both of them look just as black as each other. My sister, thanks to the vagaries of genetics, isn't a carrier. Even though she would tick the same box for "race" as me.
If I wanted to have a child, there'd be no way to know by "race" whether my prospective partner was also a carrier (if both parents are carriers there's a high chance the child will have anemia). The vast majority of black people don't have sickle cell anemia or trait and about 20% of the people who *do* aren't black. Sickle cell trait is a (fairly rare) medical reality, not a racial one. So, in this case, simply asking people whether they have sickle cell trait would be far more useful than asking them whether they have any genealogy from sub-Saharan Africa.
I'm not trying to argue that there aren't physiological realities regarding people from different parts of the world. I'm just saying that we can't meaningfully flatten these out by the concept of race. Melanoma risk, for example, is largely related to how dark somebody's skin is, which is broadly a function of how many of their ancestors lived near the equator. But at what point as we move away from the equator do people become a different "race"? What are the lines of latitude that separate black people from brown people from white people?
Yes, people with lighter skin are more likely to be at risk for skin cancer. Yes, people from sub-Saharan Africa are more likely to have sickle cell trait/anemia. It's useful to know these things. But while "race", by which I think you really mean skin colour, *feels* like a useful shorthand for people's differences, it almost never maps them accurately when you're trying to be even slightly precise.
Fun facts to Know and Tell: SCA survives because it confers malaria resistance. Living in the USA you are unlikely to be exposed to malaria but it's endemic in much of the world.
With two SCA alleles one is likely to come down with SCA and die from it. But with one, as you have, a malaria infection is far less lethal because the one allele has the effect of causing the red blood cells to rupture before the parasites are mature. Zero SCA alleles and malaria is a real danger.
This is just one of several genetic abnormalities that persist because of malaria. Another is favism, allergy to fava beans; this allergy does something similar to red blood cells.
Without the influence of malaria, many genetic deficits would have died our long ago.
I know this has nothing to do with racism.
"(if both parents are carriers there's a high chance the child will have anemia)"
One chance in four.
😁 I knew it had something to do with malaria but wasn't clear on the details. I also get bitten by mosquitos less than my sister does which is a huge bonus.
Just addressing one point. Much of what you say I agree with, but once you are talking about medical implications, I think you too easily dismiss race.
First off, what is generally considered invalid is the idea that we can assign all humans to one of four or five discrete non-overlapping categories. All the the genetic and phenotypical traits tend to follow gradients rather than binary functions. That conception of "race" is too oversimplified at best, and I would be glad to discard it because it causes much harm and little or no good.
However, using multifactoral cluster analysis of human traits, one can discover fuzzy clusters, or density areas where population groups can be distinguished. This is more like distinguishing night from day - the boundaries are fuzzy and not clearly defined, but that doesn't mean that there is no meaningful difference between night time and day time. But the thing is - depending on how you set the parameters, your analysis might distinguish 3 or 14 or 25 statistical clusters. There is no reason to strongly highlight just 4 (or 5). But if you do choose parameter which yield 4 clusters, those clusters will tend to correlate with continents. That should not be surprising - there has been statistically more mixing within continents than between them.
What that means is that once you get rid of the concept of hard bounded categories and accept fuzzy statistical clusters, there could be useful medical distintions between clusters in some cases. Now there's no scientific reason to choose 4 clusters for this - probably it would be more accurate to know the effects of medication on 25 clusters of humanity. But on practical terms, probabalistic medical statistics may have been gathered based on self-identified "race" - the 4 cluster model. So that fuzzy proxy may be the best data we have.
Having defended that possibility of race as an unfortunate but sometimes useful proxy for fuzzy genetic cluster in some contexts, I return to assert that other than for medical or research purposes, I think it would be best to discard the obsolete concept of 4 (or 5) "races" as prescientific folklore. It misleads the mind more often than not.
Alas, getting past "race" is hard to do, especially after people have come to voluntarily intermingle it deeply with their concept of self, which must be defended at all cost. That is, race is used as a proxy for culture. Abolishing "race" as a concept then feels to them like their very identity and personhood is under attack. It's a tough problem - even if we can see that it's corrosive to keep reifying race, it has also become a sacred cow. A twisted love/hate thing.
Ah humans. A most amazing group of critters we are.
"but once you are talking about medical implications, I think you too easily dismiss race."
I'd actually be particularly tempted to dismiss race with regards medical implications precisely because when discussing medical implications we should be accurate. Race isn't.
If we talked about ancestry that would be far more useful medically speaking. If we talked about specific conditions (Chris and I touch on sickle cell anaemia/trait below) that would be useful. If we talked about family history, that would be useful. But if we talk about "black" people or even worse, "brown" people, we waste time and resources on people who have completely different risk factors and needs.
As you say, "race" is an enormously oversimplified way of looking at human complexity. And at the time it was conceived, sure, we couldn't do much better (we also hadn't figured out that bloodletting and phrenology weren't medically sound). But now we can.
I'm not suggesting we ignore our differences at all. But especially in a medical context, I think we should be as precise as possible. Ticking "Black" or "White" on a form is not precise.
"Ticking "Black" or "White" on a form is not precise."
I think we have a lot of agreement - it's definitely not precise.
Where we might differ is that I am suggesting that medicine often operates on correlations and probabilities which are not precise or absolute, and that the data which has been gathered often requires inexact proxies for pragmatic reasons.
So for example, one might notice that there are statistically significant different outcomes among 100,000 patients given some treatment, between those who checked white and black. We would agree that the researchers having a complete genotype of all patients would be much better; but in the real world, imprecise proxies are often all we have or can feasibly obtain, and so we need to nevertheless pay attention to any (fuzzy, not precise) signals that nevertheless rise above the noise floor. It's a lot more practical for researchers to acquire data which includes how a race box was checked, than to get a full genetic sequence of every subject (not just a few markers like 23andMe uses).
AND again, I am speaking of a limited context where pragmatically, race may be the best proxy we have for something which IS relevant. This does NOT generalize to most situations we encounter in our lives, and I am not urging more emphasis be placed on the damaging concept of race.
And by the way, I appreciate your way of looking at things in historical context rather than removing them from context to evaluate them in isolation and under today's light.
Your last paragraph says a lot. Actual differences exist, both physical and cultural. What matters is when they matter and when they don't. Sadly, we often err in that. In a perfect world we would all enjoy and value the difference without all the negative judgment.
My last comment was more with regard to the use of political inflammatory accusations. I actually see the political left as more racist than the political right in some matters, but I don't make assumptions or accusation about racism of whole groups or its individual members. That would be just another form of racism.
I'm of the opinion that pretending race and gender are illusions is hardly any better than being racist or misogynist. They're both false. Opposite poles of falsehood, but false.
Mature and whole people see the realities of race and gender and attach no judgments of superiority or inferiority to them.