Race isn’t real, science says. Advocates want the census to reflect that.

[mclumber1]

Census should reflect that race isn’t real, advocates say - The Washington Post

WWW.WASHINGTONPOST.COM

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The Human Genome Project convinced the vast majority of scientists that race doesn’t exist. Now a cohort of professionals and academics wants to change society.

 

I've long held that race is a pretty poor way of describing oneself.  I think using culture (or sub-culture) or nationality provides better detail about who you are and the way you think compared to race or even ethnicity.  

[TUFKAK]

Yes, I demand bodybuilder be added to the census.

[TheLeon]

34 minutes ago, TUFKAK said:

Yes, I demand bodybuilder be added to the census.

And I’ll mark the box labeled “shapeless blob”.

[TUFKAK]

Just now, TheLeon said:

And I’ll mark the box labeled “shapeless blob”.

Pretty sure American is already understood to be there.

[Bacon]

Oh yeah? If race isn't real, how come NASCAR exists?

, Atheists

[Zaku3]

23 hours ago, mclumber1 said:

Census should reflect that race isn’t real, advocates say - The Washington Post

WWW.WASHINGTONPOST.COM

---

The Human Genome Project convinced the vast majority of scientists that race doesn’t exist. Now a cohort of professionals and academics...

 

I've long held that race is a pretty poor way of describing oneself.  I think using culture (or sub-culture) or nationality provides better detail about who you are and the way you think compared to race or even ethnicity.  

 

Race is white people cope so they don't have to feel as bad about being colonizers/oppressors. Just a social contruct with no scientific basis. 

 

[mclumber1]

22 minutes ago, Zaku3 said:

 

Race is white people cope so they don't have to feel as bad about being colonizers/oppressors. Just a social contruct with no scientific basis. 

 

 

Race as a modern concept really took off in the 17th century, with "whites" at the top and "blacks" at the bottom, as a means to justify the enslavement of people who were supposedly inferior to Europeans.  

[TUFKAK]

Has nobody read Herodotus here? Ffs

[SuperSpreader]

11 minutes ago, TUFKAK said:

Has nobody read Herodotus here? Ffs

That's gonna be my next dog's name. 

[mclumber1]

12 minutes ago, TUFKAK said:

Has nobody read Herodotus here? Ffs

[Fizzzzle]

So, like... Race (at least our interpretation of it for the last ~300 years) absolutely IS a construct white people made to make themselves feel better about colonialism and slavery. That's a fact. There is zero to little genetic reason to separate people based on race.

 

However, *because* it has been a cultural construct for roughly 10 generations of people (not that long if you think about it), you can't just say it doesn't exist. We willed it into existence and we can't just pretend it isn't there. There are people who live different lives than you do because of how society perceives their race. Even if it's made up. My favorite examples are Trevor Noah and Barack Obama. Noah's father was a Swiss German, damn near as Aryan as you can get. Obama's mother was a white girl from Kansas. Shouldn't that mean they are both equally black and white? ... No, they're just black.

 

Basically until we figure out how to unfuck 300 years of social programming, I don't know what this is meant to achieve. We know that we can't solve racism by pretending it isn't there anymore (see: the last 50 years).

 

On the other hand... Maybe it would be a good idea to legally remove questions about race from everything... I definitely think it would be a good idea to remove race from medical forms (you can get down a rabbit hole about health problems that affect black people more than white people or vise versa and whether it's a tail wagging the dog situation, and I'm not qualified to speak on that)

 

 

.... I don't know, man. Point is race shouldn't exist, but it does. And I feel like until we really figure out how to unfuck ourselves, we have to treat it like it's a real thing, even if it's not.

[CitizenVectron]

10 minutes ago, Fizzzzle said:

Noah's father was a Swiss German, damn near as Aryan as you can get. Obama's mother was a white girl from Kansas. Shouldn't that mean they are both equally black and white? ... No, they're just black.

 

Yeah but that's just in America. If they lived somewhere else, they might be considered whiter, by the population. My cousin is half-Ukrainian, half-Japanese. In Canada, everyone calls her asian. When she goes to Japan, they call her white.

[Fizzzzle]

6 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

 

Yeah but that's just in America. If they lived somewhere else, they might be considered whiter, by the population. My cousin is half-Ukrainian, half-Japanese. In Canada, everyone calls her asian. When she goes to Japan, they call her white.

True enough. Even in South Africa they still used mixed race as a common category, just like how in America we used "mulatto" for a while.

[TUFKAK]

59 minutes ago, Fizzzzle said:

So, like... Race (at least our interpretation of it for the last ~300 years) absolutely IS a construct white people made to make themselves feel better about colonialism and slavery. That's a fact. There is zero to little genetic reason to separate people based on race.

 

However, *because* it has been a cultural construct for roughly 10 generations of people (not that long if you think about it), you can't just say it doesn't exist. We willed it into existence and we can't just pretend it isn't there. There are people who live different lives than you do because of how society perceives their race. Even if it's made up. My favorite examples are Trevor Noah and Barack Obama. Noah's father was a Swiss German, damn near as Aryan as you can get. Obama's mother was a white girl from Kansas. Shouldn't that mean they are both equally black and white? ... No, they're just black.

 

Basically until we figure out how to unfuck 300 years of social programming, I don't know what this is meant to achieve. We know that we can't solve racism by pretending it isn't there anymore (see: the last 50 years).

 

On the other hand... Maybe it would be a good idea to legally remove questions about race from everything... I definitely think it would be a good idea to remove race from medical forms (you can get down a rabbit hole about health problems that affect black people more than white people or vise versa and whether it's a tail wagging the dog situation, and I'm not qualified to speak on that)

 

 

.... I don't know, man. Point is race shouldn't exist, but it does. And I feel like until we really figure out how to unfuck ourselves, we have to treat it like it's a real thing, even if it's not.

I’m on mobile so I’m not editing so I’ll only respond to the medical portion.

 

you can’t, we have a whole subsection of gfr that’s differentiated on ethnicity as an example, these distinctions matter. However you want to define it, there are the genetic differences based on populations we attribute to racial variance. Distinction matters.

 

And race has been noted since at least Herodotus, despite what the current trends say. Humans categorize, and 3k years ago they could look at someone different than them and, stay with me, note they looked different.

 

edit, to make my gfr example more clear, what is a normal gfr in a white person is pathological one in a black person, that’s not a social construct.

[SuperSpreader]

10 minutes ago, TUFKAK said:

3k years ago they could look at someone different than them and, stay with me, note they looked different.

 

We don't see color around here 

 

 

[Fizzzzle]

1 hour ago, TUFKAK said:

I’m on mobile so I’m not editing so I’ll only respond to the medical portion.

 

you can’t, we have a whole subsection of gfr that’s differentiated on ethnicity as an example, these distinctions matter. However you want to define it, there are the genetic differences based on populations we attribute to racial variance. Distinction matters.

 

And race has been noted since at least Herodotus, despite what the current trends say. Humans categorize, and 3k years ago they could look at someone different than them and, stay with me, note they looked different.

 

edit, to make my gfr example more clear, what is a normal gfr in a white person is pathological one in a black person, that’s not a social construct.

Okay, so I'm deferring to your expertise on the medical stuff, so I just have questions.

 

For example, if someone has a genetic admixture of only 40% west african, but they physically present as black and identify as black, how would you reconcile that with "they're black, therefore we gravitate towards [x]," when they are predominantly not? If that makes sense.

 

Also, the way people thought about race 2000 years ago is not the same as the way we've thought about it for the last 300 years. Not even close. Yes, ancient Greeks and Romans had physical descriptors of people because that's what humans like to do. We like to categorize things. But it wasn't used to ascribe anything other than basic physical attributes. For example, they might use a term for a region that meant something like "the land where people have dark skin," or they might refer to people from that region as a physical descriptor, but it wasn't tied to an ideology. You have to remember, in Greek and Roman societies, something around 25% of people were enslaved, especially in urban areas (in Sparta slaves made up a vast majority of the population). The overwhelming majority of those people did not look any different from your average citizen. They didn't have nearly as much reason to associate race with social class the way that we do today (not to say they never did).

 

The way the idea of race changed in the late 17th-century/early 18th-century onward specifically evolved to reflect the fact that lots of white people had lots of brown/black people enslaved in much of the new world. It was a fairly rapid change. Slavery, at least in much of Europe, hadn't been (officially) a thing in hundreds of years. Initially, in the 16th century, they rationalized slavery of the natives by cloaking it in evangelism. When enough of the native people died and the labor source started to dry up, they started to import Africans, and initially they justified it the same way. But then... what happened when their enslaved populations started to adopt Christianity? .... then they needed a new reason to justify what they were doing. And so our modern concept of race was born. A whole lot of white people were really uncomfortable reconciling the subjugation of millions of people, so they came up with reasons for why it was okay. THAT is fundamentally why it was different than race in ancient times.

[TUFKAK]

In your example we will lend towards the person carrying the genes which alter kidney function, treat from there then consult renal for further.

[TwinIon]

I quickly read through that article, so forgive me if I'm missing something, but I don't see what these guys are proposing exactly. He's not advocating for getting rid of it entirely:

Quote

he and his fellow racial-category resisters are proposing a middle ground until society catches up. They don’t advocate for the cold-turkey method of the French, whose laws strictly limit data collection on race and ethnicity amid protests of racial discrimination.

Maybe he's asking for essays?

Quote

Hoyt believes the boxes are problematic, but then “one wants to ask, well, what about the persistence of racism?” he said. His hope is that the court’s decision “will be the mother of a better invention, which is not to invite people to express their corporeal reality” but instead share in their essays their experiences with all kinds of adversity.

Seems like he's hoping a better solution arises without actually having one.

 

Scientific basis of race aside, I think the question that matters most is: "does this data have value?" If so, then keep the question. If you have a better formulation that will provide more value, then change it. If there is no value, then get rid of it.

 

I know someone who works with some researchers who did a lot of work on Sickle cell. For research purposes, they needed to find volunteers to donate blood samples. Part of that involved community outreach programs to raise awareness. This was in Chicago, so I don't think they had to try too hard to figure out what areas to focus on, but I'm pretty sure the existing Census data was helpful there.

 

The article lists a few existing uses:

Quote

The racial data in the Census is used at the local, state and federal levels to devise and fund policies and programs. It is also used to evaluate them “to ensure that they fairly and equitably serve the needs of all racial groups and to monitor compliance with anti-discrimination laws, regulations, and policies,” according to the Census website. Significantly, the data is used to draw congressional districts, thereby helping to determine the influence of minority voters and challenge racial gerrymandering.

So yeah, if you've got a better idea what boxes people can check that will achieve these ends in a better way, then great. Otherwise, it would be foolish to do away with otherwise useful information.

[outsida]

Getting rid of race on the census will inevitably be used to disenfranchise minorities.  

[MarSolo]

Race ain’t real? Shaun King is gonna need a new grift!

[mclumber1]

1 minute ago, outsida said:

Getting rid of race on the census will inevitably be used to disenfranchise minorities.  

 

Couldn't you just use zipcode to determine where and how much government aid and other services to give to a disenfranchised group of people?

[stepee]

21 hours ago, Zaku3 said:

 

Race is white people cope so they don't have to feel as bad about being colonizers/oppressors. Just a social contruct with no scientific basis. 

 

 

happy to see you back bb