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 …
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.
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.