Race or culture isn't the issue but "identity politics" which mandates that one must see themselves and others not as the unique and wonderful individuals they are but as an impersonal member of a class to be treated according to the understood (or assumed) qualities of that class. Nothing is more destructive to cordial interpersonal relations than saying "Oh, you're an X and I will treat you as X-types ought to be treated" without regard to who the individual actually is.
It's not impossible to see, recognize, and appreciate races and cultures as long as the dignity of the individual is maintained.
Race is a little bit the issue, because there's no biological basis for the idea that humans aren't just one single species.
A genuine observation and appreciation of "race" consists of understanding that humans do not have a single appropriate skin tone, mostly. I'm not sure what else there is for you, but it's not there for me.
Yes, humans are one single species, just like the dogs are one single species, and humans do not have a single appropriate skin tone, just like dogs do not have a single appropriate kind of fur, or single appropriate body proportions.
That doesn't change the fact that there are different dog breeds, or different human, well, let's not call them "races" or "breeds", but large vaguely-defined (because they form continuum) groups of distinctly different average appearances.
Edit: just to elaborate slightly, I suspect that if we would undertake a massive gene pool homogenization program (lots and lots of population migrations, cross-whatever marriages and child-bearings), we might in several hundred years arrive at a more or less uniformly skin-toned population in which case one, technically, could term that skin tone as "innately appropriate".
But I personally fail to see any allure in this: what's the point of averaging out the physical differences, they're mostly inconsequential anyway?
Gene pools are at least three-dimensional. Just because humans are diverse, does not imply that the gene pool is not well-mixed. And there's a rather famous anthropological observation that skin colors correlate with latitude, as well as well-understood mechanisms which control that correlation; there's a gentle tug-of-war between lowering the chance of rickets and lowering the chance of skin cancer.
Put another way, we already have had centuries of high-speed travel connecting the world and globalizing the population, and we do have region that produce "uniform" skin tones which look like the average of all of the local skin tones, but those regions also have lots of non-"uniform" skin tones. The people that you imagine are but one thin slice of a much thicker and richer gene pool.
Finally, please don't confuse the deliberate fancy breeding of dogs, pigeons, etc. with humans' natural free choice of how to use their sexuality. We frown on eugenics for humans for precisely the same reasons that dog breeders bemoan hip dysplasia.
What you're missing here is in reality, your life experience, outcomes and how you are treated in society can be very much a consequence of your "identity".
All groups are advocating for is equality of treatment from institutions and from society at large.
Is that too much to ask?
Once we get to that place there's nothing more marginalised groups would love to do then to stop being defined by race.
What you are missing is that "All Groups" are not simply asking for "equality of treatment from institutions and from society at large" in fact many groups are asking for equity not equality, there is a difference.
Sometimes this is referred to was "equality of outcome vs opportunity"
This a (frankly lazy) narrative often used to dismiss demands for equality.
You might be able to point to isolated incidents but to view group advocacy as a whole as malicious power grab is simply not true and a gross misrepresentation.
A better question is probably do you think certain groups are wrong in their perception that they are unfairly treated?
If yes then you are not acknowledging a vast amount of very clearly expressed life experience and if no why be against them advocating for themselves as a group?
As a European, every US election season I'm always dumbfounded by how much the "black vote" is discussed. Just recently, when Kamala Harris was announced as VP, all they talk about is how she will contribute to the black vote. This makes it seem as she was only chosen because of her race, and even worse: it's an insult to black people, grouping them together as having one opinion.
I don't know why there's no backlash against this.
I'm European myself. I don't think we can compare Europe with the US. Due to centuries of slavery and then segregation, black and white communities are still somewhat separate and tend to have different cultures etc. Of course, individually, there are many examples of people who are "in between", but the cultural blocs do exist.
And by the way - in Belgium, parties have to pander to the French or the Dutch voters; in Switzerland, the different language regions have different voting behaviour; in Germany, east Germany votes significantly differently, as does Bavaria; and so on. Voter blocs are not something exclusive to the US, even if the history of the black population doesn't have a direct parallel in Europe.
> in Belgium, parties have to pander to the French or the Dutch voters
Well it's a bit different, as people in Wallonia can only vote for francophone parties and people in Flanders only for Flemish parties. Only Brussels gets both. So in effect, parties don't really have to choose whether to pander to the French-speaking or Dutch-speaking voters.
Which is even worse IMO, because how can you form a functioning federal government from parties that are each elected only by half of the country? Well you can't, as the current situation shows.
The problem with race abolitionism is that it removes the language for discussing racial issues and hides these issues where they cant be addressed. Its essentially the equivalent of saying "All Lives Matter". It attempts to dismiss and ignore the problems that wont go away even if ignored.
It would be nice to live in a world where racial discrimination and issues dont exist and skin colour is as meaningless and superficial as eye colour or the colour of your clothes. And perhaps, someday, this may be the case.
But at the end of the day, racial problems still exists. Racial discrimination still exists. People are still being treated differently by individuals and systems based on their physical features and the colour of their skin. Cops see and treat black people differently, so do doctors and judges and juries and home sellers and bankers and hotel clerks. And that causes real effects and impediments to people of colour that needs to be addressed first.
Identity politics is not saying these people are different. Identity politics is saying that society sees these people as different, and that its a problem that needs to be addressed
There seem to be some conflicting ideas here. On one hand, the concept of 'race' is what allows racism to exist and we need to remove this concept from our collective ideology in order to defeat racism -- people are just people. On the other hand, it is a fact that external biological characteristics (predominantly skin colour and facial structure) result in social clustering and discrimination, at the individual, collective and institutional levels -- racism is real.
I appreciate the principles behind race abolitionism, as I have often applied the same logic to gender, which is arguably even more socially constructed than race, since the appeal to biological characteristics is weaker for defining one's gender than one's race. However, if we remove these ideas from our collective understanding of the world, do we not make it harder to argue cases of legitimate discrimination? If the generally accepted notion is "gender does not exist" or "race does not exist", how does one make the argument "I was discriminated against because of <attributes>?" Or is the idea that once people no longer make the distinction between different groups of attributes, then individual and institutional discrimination will no longer exist? It seems to me that in order for such an approach to be successful, we would need to train ourselves to not notice external characteristics of individuals, effectively becoming colour-blind, a task which not only seems impossible due to the nature of the human mind, but also a dangerous position to take while racism still exists -- since it also blinds us to an understanding of why a person was discriminated against and what factors affected their experience --, and risks destroying our concept of cultural heritage. Perhaps race abolitionism is more suited for a post-racism world?
There was this aphorism: "It does not matter if you believe in God, but whether God believes in you." In the context of race, the lady can abolish races as much as she desires, but it does not matter as far as their are racists.
The US is oddly concerned about race. I remember the first time they asked me about my race filling a form. WTF? How should I know? Also the categories are so arbitrary, I ended up picking other and be done with that.
This is how it works in European countries, e.g. France. “Race” never figures in any government documents, forms and surveys. Mentioning someone’s race considered to be somewhat rude and is regarded as a thing of the past. Not everybody is race-agnostic, but all government organizations and all businesses are required to be race-agnostic by law. This includes never asking about race, particularly in forms and surveys. Identity politics is actively _discouraged_.
I've been very influenced by Isabel Wilkerson's new book to look at America as having a racial caste system that's 400 years old. The entire economic and political history and present of the United States is governed by this caste system; it's even written into the physical geography, e.g. where there is lead and where there are trees. If you don't ask about race on government forms, how are you going to measure progress on dismantling this system?
Abolishing race is a good goal, but it's going to come after we've acknowledged and reckoned with the violence and harm this country has done to so many millions of people. And we've barely even started that process.
We can argue that there is work to do toward equality without discrediting ourselves and our objective with incredible claims about “having barely started” as though we still have slave plantations and so on.
The argument put forth in the book Racecraft [1] is that America's founding on individual liberty juxtaposed with the economic reality of chattel slavery created a contradiction so stark that it was necessary to invent a framework to justify slavery culturally.
[1] Fields, Karen E, and Barbara J. Fields. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. 2012.
We fought our bloodiest war attempting to destroy one side of that contradiction. Individual liberty remains the most important tenet of a free society. Preserving it demands personal responsibility and impartiality. Anything less is pandering.
Some are ahead of the curve, some are so far behind due to fairly homogenous population, that the issue of race is not something anyone making forms thinks about. (because they never expect to meet a non-Slavic person for example)
Identity politics does exist and is encouraged in Europe, it's just not based on "race" (in Europe, or at least in Germany, we prefer to day "ethnicity", as "race" has really bad connotations and is scientifically discarded as a concept).
But cultural identity politics have been going strong forever, going back probably at least to the 19th century idea of nation states. That's why minority languages often get special recognition etc.
This is true as far as I am aware, and I agree. It is (IMO) objectively backwards and ugly to discuss someones physical characteristics instead of their contributions, especially backwards if one are trying to get rid of differences.
That said, you will find many larger companies actively trying to be or at least look diverse.
America historically developed much more race-based laws (e.g. segregation laws, anti-miscegenation laws, and racially motivated immigration laws, as well as a close association between race and the institution of slavery). As a result, race has become much more entrenched as something with legal status in America than in Europe.
> Mentioning someone’s race considered to be somewhat rude and is regarded as a thing of the past.
After reading about some especially unsubtle racism in the French right-wing press today, [1] it struck me how similar France and the United States are in this regard, at least superficially. The centrist people in government condemning the obvious racism, the powerful right-wing political figure offering a weird non-condemnation condemnation that does not call racism by its right name, the far-right publisher's response:
"Our text is not racist at all," it argued. "It is convenient for our opponents to throw that accusation at us."
The author is the Brexit Party's person of color. I'm sure a lot of white men will agree with what she is saying. Just don't be fooled into thinking that minorities in general will adopt this position.
"There were two arguments against race being a real concept: it didn’t cluster nicely, and within-group variation was greater than between group variation. And both of these are equally true of culture. Any mathematical argument considering races as clusters of genes can be used equally well considering cultures as clusters of memes, and will likely return the same results.
Yet I can’t imagine someone saying “culture doesn’t exist” or “culture isn’t real”."
Imagine no more, I do not believe culture - as described in the article - exists. When I talk about culture I talk about the arts and literature of a particular time period, area, language, and social status. If someone talks to me about German culture or even something as narrow as Danish culture I know they are discussing a stereotype or cartoon. Cartoons are of course often useful for rhetorical or humorous effect.
That said there is of another difference between the two concepts - race (as described by racists) is something that is considered to not be created by humans but something essential and unchangeable by the person; whereas culture is always something considered to be created by humans.
The arguments against race, as well as not clustering nicely and the within group-variation thing, all hinge on race being a social construct - like culture.
Perhaps the reason then that race and culture would be so similar is that they are in fact both very much alike in that they are concepts created by humans.
It is much easier to change external categorisations of one's "culture" than to change external categorisations of one's "race"[1].
Then again, I think how we treat people ought to be just as independent of our guess as to their "culture" as of our guess as to their "race".
All humans, with the exception of Jesus H. Christ, are diploid. That must be what the "H" stands for, and I, for one, would attempt not to treat anyone differently just because they happened to be haploid.
Are accents cultural or racial? There's plenty of cultural traits which are heritable and measurable. The difference is that there's only one human race, while there's many different cultural memeplexes.
Race literally doesn't exist: The partitions that you imagine as dividing people aren't actually backed by any particular observable or experiment. Meanwhile, cultural markers do exist: We can measure what people wear, speak, trade, value, etc.
Aside from accents, another good example is that of locally-grown staple foods. Different locales support different crops, so that merely living in a region for a time is sufficient to alter one's diet. Yet it is not due to differences in people, but differences in soil, which determine which crops are grown and eaten where.
> The partitions that you imagine as dividing people aren't actually backed by any particular observable or experiment. Meanwhile, cultural markers do exist: We can measure what people wear, speak, trade, value, etc.
I'm having genuine difficulty wrapping my mind around this argument.
I don't mean to inflame tempers or anything here, but would we agree that any operational definition of "race" probably needs to include some mix of both cultural and phenotypic attributes (including but certainly not limited to skin color)? If so, then:
- aren't the cultural aspects of race just as measurable as you just pointed out -- what people wear, speak, trade, value, etc.?
- aren't variations in human bodies (differences in phenotype) arguably even more measurable than that? It's easy for me to determine from a low-res photo that someone is of East Asian descent. It's nigh impossible for me to tell whether they're culturally Chinese, rural Texan, Jamaican, etc.
To claim that race "literally" doesn't exist while in the next sentence pointing out that cultural markers exist just seems really dissonant to me, and I'm honestly not sure what part of my model of the world needs changing to become compatible with these two claims.
Are you saying that you could chat up a person, maybe interview them, and conclude that they're probably indigenous to Tibet, but phenotypic markers (or whatever your definition of "racial," or even genetic? [1]) are guaranteed to be uninformative toward this conclusion?
No worries. It sounds like you don't have a problem with the latter part, just the former part, so we'll focus on that.
You say that it's "easy" for you to determine whether somebody is "East Asian", just by looking at a photo. What are you looking for, though? Probably some sort of appearance affected by genetics. However, no East Asian can carry the complete gene pool from their region, so no East Asian can carry a set of genetic markers which is guaranteed to produce an appearance which is reliably recognizable. (This isn't specific to East Asia, of course.) So, whatever you're seeing in that photo, it's not just their genes, but also at least some of your biases, which lead you to think that your classification rate is better than it actually is.
Phrases like "cultural aspects of race" are meant to excuse bigotries beyond racism, I think. As soon as we draw a hard line between genes and memes, and agree that they have different mechanisms of action upon people, then suddenly we need to have a very hard look at anything we do which conflates genes and memes.
I'm saying that, when chatting up a person, their genetic history is extremely irrelevant. Maybe their country of origin matters (as for spies), maybe their religious beliefs matter (as when handling dietary restrictions at a dinner), maybe their accent matters (just when trying to chat!) but their genetics, and thus any notion of race, are not germane.
Keep in mind that genes are affected by pedigree collapse but memes are not. We are one race partially because we do not have enough ancestors to have more races; however, this limitation doesn't apply to cultural knowledge.
> You say that it's "easy" for you to determine whether somebody is "East Asian", just by looking at a photo. What are you looking for, though? Probably some sort of appearance affected by genetics. However, no East Asian can carry the complete gene pool from their region, so no East Asian can carry a set of genetic markers which is guaranteed to produce an appearance which is reliably recognizable.
It feels like this discussion is disproportionately weighted toward exceptions to demonstrably real correlations between a person's ancestral origin and their appearance and genes. Why would every member of a given cluster of related people be required to carry every one of the criteria that define the cluster? In my mind, that defeats the whole purpose of clustering in the first place, and seems especially out of place given that normal people in normal situations make fuzzy, heuristic classifications of people based on incomplete information.
Also, doesn't this "nobody carries the complete pool from their region" argument apply equally to any conceivable definition of culture? Not every rural Texan espouses exactly the same cultural values as each other, or cultural memes, or what have you. Despite the inherent fuzziness in defining what it means to be rural Texan, you can still make the definition meaningful. The ability to define a Sherpa culture seems equally plausible as the ability to characterize Sherpa genotypes and phenotypes. The fuzziness of a classification does not negate the fact that fuzzy classification is still possible.
> So, whatever you're seeing in that photo, it's not just their genes, but also at least some of your biases, which lead you to think that your classification rate is better than it actually is.
We know that the sound of the human voice is determined by the shape of the air passageway, including teeth and nose. We know that these shapes vary around the world.
We know that lactose tolerance varies by population, and that this would influence the degree to which milk is used as a staple food.
That "race" is as real as "culture" is, or "sex", or "gender".
So an attempt to abolish identity politics simply by declaring "Those differences don't exist!" won't succeed. They do exist, and sadly, they're considered by some people when making decisions that affect other people's lives and well-being (while, arguably, those shouldn't be considered).
The immutability of race is one of the reasons why we ought not discriminate on the basis of race, but the parent is addressing the question of whether or not race is “real” and our inconsistent treatment of race and culture, another social construct.
This might be of high interest to scholars, but for the regular Joe on the street the realities are way more important. And my feeling is that the OP is trying to shift the discussion from reality (which can be addressed in a way or another) to philosophical debate (well, good luck with that)
As a German I always feel offended, when American sign-up forms (conferences and such) ask for my 'race'. Are they asking for my migrant background? Asking for race is just so Nazi, what should I put there, "Herrenrasse", "Fremdrasse", ...?
Post seems to have been delisted from the front pages, @dang can we get a reason? This is political but seems like a genuinely interesting perspective.
It's not impossible to see, recognize, and appreciate races and cultures as long as the dignity of the individual is maintained.