[Dragaera] Boing!

[Jon_Lincicum at stream.com]

"Maximilian Wilson" <wilson.max at gmail.com> 
Sent by: dragaera-bounces at dragaera.info
09/08/06 08:38 AM

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Re: [Dragaera] Boing!




>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