4 ms·

Thanks for the great explanation. The height analogy made it click for me.

by mig39 5y ago

tialaramex 5y ago
Also, passing would work for height. Suppose you're 5'11 but your friends are around 6'1 and you were close friends in kindergarten (when you were all shorter of course). You begin wearing platforms that add about an inch to your height. You hang out with other tallers and so people just assume that's what you are, they likely don't insist on measuring you in bare feet at every opportunity. Laws affecting this social construction of "tallers" have much less impact on you than might seem to be the case looking at a medical chart. You would be said to "pass" for a taller. Passing was (and to a lesser extent remains) crucial in the US and many places where variations in appearance were crucial to racial assumptions. If you look white and you act white then, most of the time to a first approximation you are white. But of course this opportunity is much more open to a relatively pale-skinned person than to a dark-skinned poor person which is a further problem on top of the problem that now people are lying about who they are.
KittenInABox 5y ago
One of the other things to point out is that race doesn't correlate all that well with genetics in humans. People who would be described as black have so much genetic diversity that there can be no reasonable argument that there's a genetic basis for their racial label. Certain health conditions or biological differences often have to make far more specific categories than race.
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
  Not sure why downvoted, this is correct. The rest of the world was populated by small (i.e. less genetically diverse) groups who came "out of Africa". So "Africans are more diverse genetically than the inhabitants of the rest of the world combined" https://www.geneticsandsociety.org/article/study-africans-more-genetically-diverse-rest-world https://www.geneticsandsociety.org/article/study-africans-mo... https://blogs.bcm.edu/2018/07/19/genetic-diversity-in-africa-is-greater-than-in-any-other-region-in-the-world/ https://blogs.bcm.edu/2018/07/19/genetic-diversity-in-africa... there are "Larger Genetic Differences Within Africans Than Between Africans and Eurasians" "and the genetic diversity in Eurasians is largely a subset of that in Africans, supporting the out of Africa model of human evolution" https://www.genetics.org/content/161/1/269 https://www.genetics.org/content/161/1/269 The highest genetic diversity is actually among people who are small subgroups of "Africans" - Khoisan not Bantu. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms6692 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms6692 https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24988-humanitys-forgotten-return-to-africa-revealed-in-dna/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24988-humanitys-forgo... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25471224/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25471224/ So, genetically, just as you can't draw a line around "bony fishes" without also including land animals who are also descendants of bony fishes. https://www.sciencealert.com/actually-there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-fish-say-cladists https://www.sciencealert.com/actually-there-is-no-such-thing... Also, you can't genetically call "Africans" a well-defined sub-group of humans, excluding others.

Thanks for the great explanation. The height analogy made it click for me.

by mig39 5y ago

Thanks for the great explanation. The height analogy made it click for me.

Also, passing would work for height. Suppose you're 5'11 but your friends are around 6'1 and you were close friends in kindergarten (when you were all shorter of course). You begin wearing platforms that add about an inch to your height. You hang out with other tallers and so people just assume that's what you are, they likely don't insist on measuring you in bare feet at every opportunity. Laws affecting this social construction of "tallers" have much less impact on you than might seem to be the case looking at a medical chart. You would be said to "pass" for a taller. Passing was (and to a lesser extent remains) crucial in the US and many places where variations in appearance were crucial to racial assumptions. If you look white and you act white then, most of the time to a first approximation you are white. But of course this opportunity is much more open to a relatively pale-skinned person than to a dark-skinned poor person which is a further problem on top of the problem that now people are lying about who they are.

KittenInABox 5y ago

One of the other things to point out is that race doesn't correlate all that well with genetics in humans. People who would be described as black have so much genetic diversity that there can be no reasonable argument that there's a genetic basis for their racial label. Certain health conditions or biological differences often have to make far more specific categories than race.

SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
Not sure why downvoted, this is correct. The rest of the world was populated by small (i.e. less genetically diverse) groups who came "out of Africa". So "Africans are more diverse genetically than the inhabitants of the rest of the world combined" https://www.geneticsandsociety.org/article/study-africans-more-genetically-diverse-rest-world https://www.geneticsandsociety.org/article/study-africans-mo... https://blogs.bcm.edu/2018/07/19/genetic-diversity-in-africa-is-greater-than-in-any-other-region-in-the-world/ https://blogs.bcm.edu/2018/07/19/genetic-diversity-in-africa... there are "Larger Genetic Differences Within Africans Than Between Africans and Eurasians" "and the genetic diversity in Eurasians is largely a subset of that in Africans, supporting the out of Africa model of human evolution" https://www.genetics.org/content/161/1/269 https://www.genetics.org/content/161/1/269 The highest genetic diversity is actually among people who are small subgroups of "Africans" - Khoisan not Bantu. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms6692 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms6692 https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24988-humanitys-forgotten-return-to-africa-revealed-in-dna/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24988-humanitys-forgo... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25471224/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25471224/ So, genetically, just as you can't draw a line around "bony fishes" without also including land animals who are also descendants of bony fishes. https://www.sciencealert.com/actually-there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-fish-say-cladists https://www.sciencealert.com/actually-there-is-no-such-thing... Also, you can't genetically call "Africans" a well-defined sub-group of humans, excluding others.