2009-02-10, 11:58 | Link #81 | ||
eyewitness
Join Date: Jan 2007
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Races are a cultural construct and first of all a local agreement about who's "one of us" and who's "one of them". Identifying the three major races as such seems to be a global constant which even a Martian would understand (I think - though I don't even know what those isolated Amazonians have to say about it) but that's pretty much where the common ground ends. Beyond that the distinctions vary from culture to culture and over time and don't necessarily make much sense. Even how to classify individuals into the different races is a cultural agreement which doesn't necessarily make much sense either, and a definition introduced by racists might become explicitly anti-racist a few generations later. If you live in the right place of course. Otherwise you might just watch from the sidelines and wonder. And don't get me started about the ever-changing labels. Long story short, if you want to identify races by looking at DNA, this is no problem at all. Which result would you like to get exactly? We can of course also go another way and classify humans by blood type. This would have the advatage that the routine is pretty simple and the result is definite. We would have the Abians, Beebeans, Abeebians and Zerobians. Of course soon things will get messy again when people with blood type B will become Abians for historical reasons - and people will argue that the difference between Abians and Beebians is a scientific one because Abians have blood type A "on average" while Beebians have blood type B "on average". (I know that the example doesn't make sense because e.g. Abeebians will have Abian and Beebian children - but that's not the point). Quote:
Apart from that I agree to what Vexx said which is a good idea in most cases anyway.
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2009-02-10, 12:34 | Link #82 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Aug 2006
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Race is a socio-political construct not because there aren't genetic differences between people in different regions of the world, but because it is a socio-political interpretation of those differences, as opposed to a scientific one. Much of the anti-race doctrine of modern liberalism has to do with undoing the socio-political stratification of race during the past few centuries, partly to diffuse the immense tensions that have built up in multi-racial societies like the US. In some ways it's gone a little too far - ie denying that genetic differences exist altogether - but for the most part it's had a positive effect on social stability, without which we'd be facing race riots or maybe even wars.
At a more scientific level, there could indeed be "clusters" within the human species that can be categorized as "races." Even so, these categories are meaningful only with respect to the goals of categorization. Indeed, some would argue that all classifications (not just racial ones) are arbitrary - but the reason we differentiate between, say, a chair and a table is that they serve two different functions and we wouldn't want to mix that up. Do racial categories serve a similar purpose? That is the question you have to answer before you decide whether a particular taxonomy of race is meaningful or not. |
2009-03-20, 23:27 | Link #84 | |
Senior Member
Join Date: Feb 2009
Age: 35
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