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How do you think this sounds with a different ethnic group? Are you sure you aren't tainted by racism?
If you listen to the progressives, everything is tainted by racism. Everyone except white liberals views everything through a lens of race, and even they do too, they just are polite enough to say that they don't. For black people, it's negative outcomes that they get handed through the system. For Asians and other minorities, it's perceptions about their ability at math or other minor things. I think, as time goes on and the two separate Overton windows continue to get further away from each other, you will see more and more blatant acknowledgement of things from the perspective of race, as this is something that the progressive left and the "dissident right" share a viewpoint on. Racism is, after all, the default state of humanity. It is natural, in that groups with differences will have disparate outcomes simply because they're different, and they are viewed differently because they are different.
Like, yes, but also no? Mostly no. First of all, we should probably state that race doesn't really exist. There's nothing inherently, fundamentally, deeply different about human groups. There are some genetic quirks here and there. Sometimes these genetic quirks collect in particular geographical and sexual assortment groupings. But groupings mix and blend like crazy, and different quirks show up, and then sometimes get re-blended, and sometimes groupings get big enough that humans in their constant drive for classifying and categorizing and delineating end up giving them a linguistic label. Sometimes, quite frequently in fact, these linguistic labels end up being poorly applied, but sometimes they are pretty accurate, or the label shifts and stretches to match some underlying grouping. And anyways, these labels very often extend poorly and incompletely to individuals: even a single mixed-race person breaks all the categories.
In this context, the modern (popular) understanding of race is probably less objectively "correct" (insofar as it even makes sense to say) than the more ancient understanding of race. Historically, and I mean by that roughly before the initial advent of genetic theories and eugenics and all that stuff, racism was the case where it applied geographically to clustered sexual assortment groups. And usually (but not even all the time) this worked just fine, because mass migrations and mixings were semi-rare. We should also note that even here, culture and race are basically intertwined quite tightly, because both are primarily geographic and spatial in nature (although culture can spread memetically and through trade links faster than actual sexual interlinkage). These migrations did happen though with some decent regularity, but the typical person alive would have limited exposure to other groups anyways. As especially "empires" grew (typically defined as a cross-cultural/ethnic political entities, as opposed to "kingdoms"), and increasingly leveraged what we could call cultural technologies, you did start to see some differentiation.
But here, it's important to take things into perspective. Locally, skin tone differences due to tanning would imply social things mechanically, but melanin differences were not seen as the primary differentiator, and nor were other ethnic groupings. Empire-wide, you'd get some local-geographical discrimination and categorization, but the interplay with culture was also very important. And even more than culture, social status. If you look at Rome, for example, as a time in history when you had different ethnic groups interacting all over, and frequently (in a relative sense), social standing and nationality seemed to matter much more than localized ethnic groupings inherently. There was this general idea of "barbarians" but that had again more to do with culture than race.
Fast forward. Today, many people think of race as skin color, and maybe a few other scattered traits like facial structure or whatever. This is ahistorical, frankly, at least when it comes to skin color. Slavery really did a number on the country and dichotomized things, for one, and also the modern "categories" are, frankly, terrible, even without skin color explicitly. "Hispanic/Latino" is such a uselessly broad categorization. Brazilian is its own pot of crazy. "Middle Eastern/North African" is like, very loosely its own category but doesn't even show up in many official government questions. We now have this vague notion of "white" which sometimes does and sometimes doesn't include Eastern European origin in addition to Western European origin, and sometimes includes Spaniards but sometimes doesn't, and anyways I'm not going to get into all the (common) edge cases, hopefully you get the idea.
And underneath it all, you have increasing rates of "interracial" kids. Underneath it all, even if you are to try and be scientific about "race", you still have to make a highly controversial and indefensible decision, which is where to "snapshot" racial differences as a baseline. When we are talking about Chinese people, are we talking before or after the Mongol invasion? How local are we going? Are 'Han' Chinese from Northern China different than 'Han' Chinese from near the Vietnam border? Do we distinguish Koreans from Chinese? What about Japanese, who objectively stayed more isolated historically? How linearly do we interpret genetic distance? Is a Japanese person more or less different than a Chinese person vs a White English descent person from a Portuguese? Are we just admitting that we're taking culture and history into account, or are we still insisting on some genetic measure? If we're talking genetic facts, are we allowing for snap judgements?
All this to say that sure, historically humans discriminate, but no, they didn't think of race like we do now. Racism is an obsession of modern discourse, and it just doesn't make sense. Most notably, there's this conflation of culture, nationality, and genetic "race" as one giant construct - often this is lazily referred to as "race", but it really is more broad. Maybe we need a better word.
Now, many people here at the Motte seem to take the tack that so what, categories are imprecise, but all that matters is some kind of "predictive accuracy" for my mental heuristics. Can I predict that a Black-presenting person will rob my store, and does that merit treating them different? These are different questions, and have more to do with "discrimination" (which includes much more than race) than they do race itself, and I've gone on too long, but let me just end by saying that if you think historically there was anything remotely like these modern issues of 'asians are good at math' or 'blacks are criminals' you are dead wrong. Historically, those statements are really weird to say. Charitably, you can maybe say that these issues are common to the last ~2 centuries of history, as transportation technologies accelerated migration trends, but you really can't say more than that.
You can take medical images in various different modalities, you can even mask off either the high-frequency or low-frequency spatial data, and use a machine learning classifier to reliably determine self-described race. Race is real, and it is pervasive.
I said "first of all" but so far responses have been fixating on this point rather than the broader point that modern racism doesn't back-extrapolate to history very well at all. That's presentism. Modern racism has at best very imperfect analogies historically (at the very least, pre-industrial ones). I just want to register my annoyance that I'm being argued with on a point that's not germane to the topic I was trying to refute.
What you say is true! Any categorization algorithm, which usually involves some kind of "cutoff" that is chosen, is inherently subject to a confusion matrix with its accompanying tradeoffs. Right? You have false positives, true positives, false negatives, true negatives. To continue that analogy, in the modern world, the tradeoffs are actually kind of large. Total model "accuracy" hits unacceptably low numbers, in my opinion, because of how many blurred borderline cases there are, resulting in miscategorizations of various types. So I guess what I was trying to say is that people have currently 'latched on' to race because of its salience in the political conversation, but it's a poor tool for the job. So sure, race as a categorization algorithm "works" to some extent, and so in that sense it's "real", but we shouldn't be in the habit of substituting models of reality for actual reality. That's the sense by which I call it "not real" - it works (kinda sorta) but it isn't a true depiction of reality. A lot of people especially on this forum go around pretending that race is a Big Deal, and are the equivalent of the gender essentialists (which I actually kind of am) but for race (which I am definitely not). But gender is like, obviously and self-evidently a Big Deal, and race is... well, it just isn't. Not by itself!
This is why I always try and insist that we should have different conversations for issues of race (broad category that, critically intersects with a lot of more-potent things like culture, social status, economics, etc that we might as well discuss more directly!) than we do for issues of discrimination (where we debate and talk about ethics and how they intersect with practical reality and probability) because otherwise everyone always ends up at cross-purposes.
If your foundation is built on shifting sand, your point collapses; no need to deal specifically with the upper stories.
The rest of the reply is just blowing smoke. That race can be determined with high accuracy based on varied physical characteristics which don't measure the usual things we associate with race (skin color, facial features) demonstrates that race 'exists'. No, it does not matter that the technique is not perfect; that something cannot be measured perfectly does not mean it does not exist.
If race does not exist, it is clearly not a Big Deal (by any reasonable definition). If race does exist, it is not proven to be a Big Deal -- but the possibility still exists. You haven't shown it's not a Big Deal. You "insist" on making that assumption, but it is unsupported.
Oh please, why don't you try and apply some reading comprehension, eh?
The definition of race is relevant only because the original claim - "racism is the default state of humanity" invokes it indirectly (you can't have racism without race). The obvious implication is that by racism they meant our current definition, and as I demonstrated, the current definition doesn't apply to the past very well at all. Thus the claim is false.
If you want to be incredibly pedantic about race not existing, fine, let me rephrase: race is fundamentally incapable of being defined with any kind of real rigor. Happy?
We still have to recognize that (the modern idea of) race has more of the properties of a social construct than it does the properties of some innate, rigorous, underlying biological truth. Sure, fine, it exists on a continuum or something, but this is very much a "category made for man, not man for the categories" kind of situation. The fact most data collection about them is done via self-identification is more revealing that it would at first appear. The fact that even a single mixed-race child doesn't fit in either category is revealing. The fact that you somehow think that race can be determined with high accuracy based on physical features also belies how you've been psy-opped by modern society into putting great faith into something fundamentally illogical - it leads to the opinion that race is purely determined and exclusively defined in terms of how others see you. That's contradictory!
Babies at 2 years old, if exposed only to people of one race, will respond to people from another race differently.
They have their own category. Words like "mulatto", "quadroon", "octoroon" exist.
Okay, well this is a classic illustration of my frustration. We have some words, hydro above listed some more, but we don't use them. You might as well say they don't exist, at least when we talk race. When I say race, 95% of everyone thinks about the big categories. Ethnicity as I've already said is a better word, even if it's still imprecise. I'm also not saying that no one can tell differences between genetic clusters, or that there aren't a handful of discernable phenotypic differences. It should come as no surprise to anyone that babies can pick out race differences, humans are super-learners after all, and that goes double for facial processing and recognition. (It's also true that even adults suffer difficulties in telling faces apart in other races when less familiar with other races).
But words like "octoroon" actually run contrary to your point: that it was used at all historically actually underscores how race is often a social construct in actual practice (reality). If you're 7/8ths white, you are probably going to pass as white, and probably going to be functionally white. Only a society with major socioeconomic and political hang-ups would ever invent some hyper-specific word to describe someone with 1/8th Black parentage on a particular side of the family, I mean that's pretty self-evident, yes?
The simple math of the matter is that words like "mulatto" and the other "halves" hydro listed are only useful for exactly one generation! That makes their utility highly questionable. What's the daughter of a mulatto and a Hispanic man? etc.
The liberal idea that the "experience" of race matters more than the actual facts of race is taken to the extreme by some loonies, bandwagoners, and idiots... but the idea behind it isn't that wrong actually. Say you are highly embedded in Black culture, maybe you're 3/4 Black, but your skin comes out lighter and you pass as White. Are you Black? Are you treated as Black? Many of them say that they feel like they got the worst of both worlds, others think but don't say that they get the best of both worlds, and the situation gets more complicated if you're raised without Black culture at all, or confounded in either case depending on your economic status. Again, on the spectrum of consistent, useful, biological genetic cluster to somewhat arbitrary, contextually influenced social construct, race seems to fall much more on the social construct side in most of the ways that matter.
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Perhaps to you. How would you define a quadroon? In Japan the term used is (quarter) クオーター which refers to a Japanese person who had one grandparent who is non-Japanese (in other words, if they had a non-Japanese parent they would be half (ハーフ) thus the non-Japanese grandparent splits it more finely.
I have always found this odd because, in the same way as the terms you list above--which I have only ever used in reference to black influence on whites--in Japan the terms are only used for white influence on Japanese. In other words when a child has a black (or otherwise non-white) grandparent or parent here they are typically not referred to as half / ハーフ. Or if they are, there is a specific mention of 黒人 (or black) or maybe Chinese or Korean or whatever (but these people are typically just referred to as Chinese or Korean, regardless of Japanese parentage.) In conversation if you were to hear someone say "She is haafu" you would assume that her mother or father is white. Not black, not Southeast Asian, Pakistani, or whatever.
I'm curious how you personally use the terms you list, if you do use them. I haven't heard the words (quadroon, etc.) uttered out loud unironically ever in my life, and I was born and raised in more or less rural Alabama, and both sets of grandparents regularly used the term "nigger" though notably (to me) neither of my parents ever said the word within my earshot and wouldn't allow it said in the house (by me or my brother.) Of course we couldn't swear, either, and get away with it.
I'm also interested in your claim about babies. Is that from a sociological study? If so, could you produce it? I have noticed many--not all of course, but many--on this site are quick to reject all sociology (or other soft science) as hookum, until of course a study pops up which reinforces an idea that is not a progressive talking point. The conclusion itself, in any case, would not be particularly surprising, and I'm not sure what it is you are suggesting that, if generally true, it indicates. After three years living in the Kalahari I remember looking at staff photos and having a mild jarring sensation when I saw how much my own white face stood out, how clearly different I was in appearance to my colleagues. I would imagine the starkness of difference would be relevant to the babies with whom this study was conducted. In other words, could you show a Japanese baby a Korean woman or, to get a bit further afield, a Nepalese woman, and have the baby "respond differently"? I assure you many Japanese would consider the Korean and Nepalese a different race entirely to Japanese. Though you are of course free to argue with them.
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So?
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