"Racism"

[Dill]

(03-15-2018, 01:33 PM)fredtoast Wrote: The whole argument that there is no such thing as race just sounds a little silly to me.

There are scientific studies that claim to show that African Americans on average have a higher percentage of fast twitch muscle fiber.  What exactly is your position on those studies?  Are you saying they are not true?  Are you saying there is no such thing as "different races"?

How can you disagree with comments "based on race" and also say there is no such thing as different races?

Sometimes people read the claim "there is no such thing as race" to mean there aren't really darker- or lighter-skinned  people.  Hence the impulse to show "real" differences between diverse human groups--like tall Dinka and short Eskimos.

That is not what the claim means, though, at least when claimed by genetic scientists.  Nowadays saying that a preponderance of fast-twitch muscle fiber in one population proves the existence of race is rather like saying rust on iron proves the existence of phlogiston.  As a useful means of scientific categorization, race has gone the way of epicycles and other concepts which once organized data for scientists, but have been displaced by advancing knowledge.

Race and racism are still with us as legal, social and cultural categories, however. And it is very difficult to decode/interpret human behavior without reference to those categories and what people have imagined, and continue to imagine, that they mean.