Is Race a Biologically Real Concept?

[lemur]

Of course race is "real". Everyone can see that a black man is different from a white man.

 

Different in skin colour, skull shape, lip shape, kind of head hair, and behaviour.

 

However, these differences - however blindingly obvious - must not be admitted.

 

Because if they were admitted, they might lead to not very nice conclusions.

 

Conclusions that must at all costs be avoided.

 

Isn't that why most of the posts on this thread, read like gibberish?

It's a really important question why discussions about the underlying nature of racial classification read like gibberish. I think it is because racial ideologies are designed to appeal to the deepest level of common sense. The basic underlying assumption is that things can be classified into similarity and difference of appearance and that things that are in the same category will be more similar to each other than those classified into different categories. It reads like overly-complex gibberish just to describe this logic in an explicit way because it is implicitly taken-for-granted and understood as a reflex.

 

What would be interesting is if racial consciousness could be brought to a level where individuals would have the same level of detail-awareness among individuals of other racial categories as they do within their own category. For example, many whites distinguish among European ethnicities and between different class-levels with certain features signifying those sub-racial distinctions. The question is whether whites and others could expand this level of fine-differentiation to other racial categories, so that e.g. Asian, African, and Latin American sub-racial distinctions became as salient at the cognitive-emotional level for everyone as for the people who make them salient currently?

 

I think when people learn to distinguish between classes and sub-ethnicities beyond their primary group classifications, they start forming cross-cultural identification - e.g. black American solidarity with Palestinian or European minority nationalities with small-country nationalities of Latin America.

 

 

[kitkat]

Why is there more biodiversity in Africa? Is it due to a high number of offspring?

[Ophiolite]

Non africans are descended from a small sub-set of the continent's inhabitants - that is they are descended from the ones who left Africa. The smaller the sub-set the less diversity we would expect to find.

[vampares]

I remember a study that was televised by one of the public broadcasting networks. The study correlated female African-American affluence with high miscarriage/premature births. The medical idiopathic conditions were found to be low progesterone.

 

This study/documentary went through just about every rational and suspicion available. But in nearly identical conditions as their peers, there seemed to be no other cause than biologically based racial differences in a given environment.

 

The conclusion that was made favored racial introspection in regards to things like diet and environment, also cultural biasing things like maternity and social engineering.

Edited December 19, 2011 by vampares

[Moontanman]

Race is not what we all seem to think it is.

 

One of my fav youtubers on race.