"Racism"

[Dill]

(03-16-2018, 11:02 AM)fredtoast Wrote: A trans woman can dress however she wants, but it will not make it impossible for her to get prostate cancer.

I can get a tight perm and a dark spray tan, but I still do not have to worry about sickle-cell anemia.

The fact that it is complicated to divide people into a small number of races does not mean there are not biological differences between people that are generally determined by where their ancestors originated.

I am not saying that we have to pigeonhole every person into one of 4 or 5 broad categories, but at the same time it is silly to ignore the genetic differences.  The reason that an overwhelming majority of WRs, DBs, NBA players, and track stars are black is because on average they have a genetic advantage.  When you try to pretend it is cultural instead of biological you end up saying that white people just don't try as hard or some other silly bullshit like that.

If you really want to address racial issue you can't pretend that all the differences are just cultural.  No one wants to say that blacks on average have lower test score because they are genetically inferior, but if that is the truth we don't gain anything by denying the facts.  There are still plenty of black people who have very high test scores and there are some white WRs and NBA players.  As long as we don't judge the individual based on racial stereotypes then there is no problem. 

Instead of claiming there are no differences we need to get people to not judge individuals based on racial stereotypes.  We don't solve anything by denying the truth.

Two quick points:

1. Murray and Herrnstein, in their book The Bell Curve, claim that blacks on average do have a lower IQ. And they make this argument in hopes it will inform public policy, reduce the amount of taxpayer money "wasted" trying to equalize "natural" differences. Their conclusions have been widely disputed, but their appeal to biology is typical of how the right has traditionally constructed and used "racial facts" which we have to accept because they are "true."

2. You keep saying Bels is claiming or pretending there are no differences.  But he just distinguished between "sex," which is biological, and "gender" which is a social role based upon sex and varies culturally. For example, in an island culture where men fish, farming might be a woman's role, a gendered activity unfit for men. In 19th century US, farming was a man's job. In each culture, people might assume that biology rather than culture is the real basis for their division of labor. Women are "naturally" farmers in one and "naturally" not in another. No ethnologist would be surprised if people in either culture assumed you were denying biological, sexual difference if you told them these women's roles were culturally determined.

Until Bels claims that sex, not gender, is just a cultural construct, you are not refuting any point he has made when you remind us that dressing like a woman will not prevent prostate cancer.