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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.
Why do you believe this to be true?
To summarize: genetic diversity and local groupings are constantly changing (fact of history) and any definition of race you make fundamentally requires you to choose a snapshot in time to use as a baseline (bad and subjective); this concept of race, ill-defined (it's a very high-dimensional space), generalizes poorly to groups with any significant intermixing (which is most groups), and especially generalizes poorly to any given individual (especially recently mixed-race ones). Slicing race more finely, in terms of geographic origin (e.g. "ethnicity"), fixes some of these problems, but far from all.
This is property of all most classifications, even non-biological. If you could live for millions of years, you could observe speciation too, and at each point it might seem that differences are negligible (until they aren't).
No it doesn't. You can tell apart a Swede from an Yoruba instantly but telling apart a Dane from a Swede would be slightly better than random guess.
Austronesians discovered unpopulated Madagascar about 1.5 kyears ago, but solid majority of ancestry in today's population is African -- Austronesians couldn't resist malaria, but Africans could. Only some highlander populations in Madagscar have slim Asian majority. This is very much unlike European colonization of Americas, where Europeans were able to take over peoples who had high population agricultural societies -- because diseases were killing natives but had much less effect on Europeans.
What does that mean? There is large and growing amount of mixed-raced people, but, say, most of population of China and India isn't product of recent hybridization. It's possible to DNA analyze any resident of China and India and determine if they have or do not have >5% DNA from Sub-Saharan Africans of Australoids.
I would agree that race has little meaning for f2 hybrids, but then if we compare Chinese-English f2 hybrids and Papuan-Yoruba f2 hybrids, they would be different in very systemic manner!
Okay, but we're right here, right now, and last I checked we're a long, long way from being separated into different human sub-species. We interbreed without real issue, genetic distance is pretty close compared to, say, our former cousins the neanderthals or whatnot, and we don't really inhabit different ecological niches or anything either. Sure, we have a few random health quirks like disease resistance, predisposition to certain conditions, etc. but these are pretty minor overall.
What do you call the child of a Dane and a Yoruba? Why do we call a black Brazilian Hispanic? What about someone with more indigenous heritage from Chiapas in Mexico? Or half Inuit? What about Zohran Mamdani, who was born in Uganda to Indian and African-American parents? Do we still care about English vs Irish vs German vs Slavic vs French heritage differences within the "White" category? What about Palestinians vs Persians vs Turks vs Afghans? How close are they? Are they Asian? MENA? Something else, or are more specifics needed? The problems go on.
The fact of the matter is that particularly in America, where intermarriage rates are rising for almost every category, the underlying categories will increasingly be revealed as fundamentally flawed. The fact of the matter is that modern racism grew up partly out of the Transatlantic slave trade, but also out of the Enlightenment-era emergence of early forms of modern nationalism. The people and society who began to spread what we now would label racism (we're talking ~1700s) hadn't even figured out evolution yet, and wouldn't for over a century, so they hardly were working from scientific principles to begin with! Yet for some reason a lot of people seem to be so fixated on perpetuating those same thought patterns despite their obviously poisoned and low-quality origins. Now given, there's still some debate, but by and large the evidence and scholarly (by actual scholars not the performant ones) suggests that most people do indeed think about race differently today than they used to, and it's mostly driven by a white vs black paradigm and its influence on Western thought.
Mulatto.
Negro(their preferred term for themselves- call them preto and they'll whoop your ass).
'Illegal' in the most common case, but if you're looking for a racial description probably 'Mayan' or 'Indian, feather not dot'.
Half-caste
Desi
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