[Joker_vD]

> the concept of ‘race’ is scientifically and socially unsupportable.

Just like the concept of "culture". See https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/12/does-race-exist-does-c... , here's the kicker:

"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”."

[bryanrasmussen]

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.

[082349872349872]

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.

[1] difficult, but not impossible:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BsmaoQ3Hu4

or, including a genderswap:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EwhkUHjleo

[Kednicma]

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.

[EForEndeavour]

> 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?

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/114/16/4189

[Kednicma]

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.

[EForEndeavour]

> 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.

That makes sense to me.

[burfog]

Accents and staple foods are terrible examples.

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.

[aklemm]

Except that culture is escapable, changeable. Race isn’t. So what is your point exactly?

[Joker_vD]

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).

[throwaway894345]

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.

[soco]

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)