[washadjeffmad]

Race theory was always pseudoscience to imply the generalized differences between people who looked differently were genetic and thus inherent traits.

It's an extension of a much older, more insidious idea - blood purity. There are still people who would pretend to trace their own lineage back through every scholar, king, and prophet to Adam, while choosing to believe that everyone else is a mongrel line, inferior and subservient to them in some way.

[simianwords]

Way to mix completely different things. Its like saying: Gender exists hence men are better. No one suggests this kinda thing.

Race is not pseudo science. Race is real. White people are meaningfully different from Black people. Its not bad to be different. It doesn't mean one is different from the other. You can't beat racism by claiming race itself is not real!

[dofm]

In what ways are white people meaningfully different from black people?

[AnimalMuppet]

Probability of inheriting sickle cell anemia, for one.

[dofm]

All black people? Or just those from some regions or ethnicities?

The point I am making is that “white” and “black” simply aren’t races on any biological basis. It’s nothing more than a social distinction.

The level of scientific ignorance on display here is weird.

[simianwords]

You seem to keep suggesting that boundaries have to be perfect for categories to exist. This is not the case. White colour and dark colour exist as categories yet are blurry. Yet no sane person suggests colours don’t exist.

There’s no sharp boundary between a hill and a mountain. There’s no sharp boundary between dark and white colours. There’s no sharp boundary between male and female either at the edge cases when you consider intersex. Language has its limitations and it’s obvious to most of us and we don’t have to play semantic juggling each time.

Does the way people use race as a word have biological basis? Absolutely yes. For example you take people who self identify as black and white and try to find whether their DNA can predict their self identified race. You would agree that it can predict to a good extent I hope.

On a side note: I think you have fallen into this popular rabbit hole where you expect sharp boundaries for commonly used words/categories. Such sharp boundaries never exist and every normal person from a child to an adult knows and works around this. This kind of rhetoric is popular with some extremist academic types to signal their in group presence. Tip: if you want to solve racism, don’t get into debates on esoteric definitions of race and pretend race itself doesn’t exist. Normal people aren’t convinced.

[dofm]

I am not pretending that sociological concepts of race don’t exist.

I am saying that it is clear from scientific consensus that biological, genetic race does not exist.

If it did, as I keep saying, “white” and “black” would not be biological races. That is actually not plausible. It’s scientific racism to claim it is.

[jdrek1]

Skin color and (facial) bone structure for example. Like it or not, but humans have adapted to living in different climates and have different ancestral lines. Take a picture of an average black person and edit to white skin, it will still not look like a white person.

As the commenter above you already said, this is not a bad thing. People on _hacker_news should be able to understand that being able to define the ==/!= operators on something does not automatically mean that you can define < and >.

[dofm]

All white people are different from all black people in the same way?

They can be told apart like this, absent skin colour?

[jdrek1]

It is more obvious with some and a bit more nuanced with others, but in general yes. Just like you can typically see the flat/wide nose in Africans and Asians but not Europeans. Again, there is no implication of one being "better" than the other here, but don't pretend it's impossible to categorize people like this.