[Dragaera] Boing!

[Kenneth Gorelick]

>> On 9/8/06, Jon_Lincicum at stream.com <Jon_Lincicum at stream.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> "race is an artifical concept"... Hmmm... I don't agree with  
>>> this. Race
> is
>>> based on visible characteristics, therefore it is not "artificial".
> That
>>> it is based on "superficial" differences, I will grant you.
>>>
>>
>> Not always superficial. Race is a concept designed to classify human
> beings
>> into broad categories so that decisions can be made more easily;  
>> as with
> any
>> classification algorithm, it produces varying results depending  
>> upon your
>> classification parameters. Any attempt to classify all human  
>> beings into
>> exactly one of two races would probably decide that "male" and  
>> "female"
> are
>> different "races", since that produces the clearest division for the
>> greatest number of human attributes; other schemes exist that  
>> classify
>> according to malaria susceptibility lump Nelson Mandella in with
> Italians.
>> The historical conceptions of which races are which (e.g. white  
>> vs. black
>> vs. hispanic vs. asian, to name a common division) probably have good
>> historical reasons for having been chosen, some of which are still  
>> valid
>> today (given four random people, one in each category, you can make a
> good
>> guess as to their relative IQ rankings asian > white > hispanic >  
>> black,
>> IIRC) and some of which are not (you can no longer conclude that  
>> someone
> who
>> is black is probably Muslim). Since it's not explicit in the  
>> historical
>> record why our racial boundaries were set where they were, you can
> certainly
>> argue that race is arbitrary, if not artificial.
>
> This seems to be a much broader definition of "race" than I would use.
>
> I would not say that any grouping by sociological paradigm,  
> independant of
> genetic commonalities, really qualifies as a "race".
>
> And certainly, classifying separate genders as separate races is  
> uncommon,
> if not downright inaccurate.
>
> Majikjon

According to my sources in the world of physical anthropology, the  
concept of "race" as a meaningful term has long ago been discarded.  
It simply has no meaning. Every characteristic attributed to a "race"  
can be alternatively explained. So for now, at least for the  
anthropologists and their apologists, race exists only in the minds  
of racists and those who can benefit from its continued existence.