What is race?

[A Revolutionary Tool]

I've been thinking about this lately and I'm totally stumped. What are the standards which you have to have to be classified as a certain race? For example in my childhood I had a Jewish friend. When he told me he was Jewish I had no idea what the hell that even meant. I had(and still pretty much do) associated him as being "white" because that's what he was, pale as a ghost. Same thing with some of my Mexican friends who are pretty white. Whenever they'd say they're "brown" I'd think "WTF, I'm browner than you are". I've basically always thought race had to do with the color of one's skin.

So how do you define what a race is?

(I'm pretty ignorant on this subject because I pretty much haven't ever given a damn what "race" someone was but I'd like to understand a little more about race seeing the historical significance it has had.)

[Widerstand]

"Race" is a biological category subordinated to "species", defined by small differences in both genotype and phenotype but with the ability for different races to breed fertile offspring (different species, by definition, cannot breed fertile offspring).

For example different breeds of dogs constitute different biological races, and there are both differences in genotype and phenotype between, say, a German Shepherd and a Pitbull, yet the two can have offspring, which can in turn have offspring.

As far as I am aware there is no such thing amongst humans, although it can be observed that human sub-populations often have have similar genetic traits. For example Africa has a relatively high rate of people with sickle cell, because it grants pseudo-immunity to malaria and those without it often die pretty fast.This is absolutely no proof of the existence of such a thing as an "African race" though.

Historically, attempts to identify and categorize human races have usually either looked at skin color or other physical traits (phenotype, ignoring genotype), culture (neither phenotype nor genotype, unless culture were biologically determined which can't be proven), origin/ancestry (I guess you could claim this was a form of looking at genotype). Usually they attempted to trace ethnicity, culture or stereotyped traits (which often were made up to begin with) to biological determinants (such as ancestry), which can not be scientifically supported, at all.
More modern attempts (like Sarrazin) have attempted to define race by genes (for example he claimed to have identified a "Jewish gene"), which again, could not be supported by scientific evidence.

TL;DR: Human races are made up.

[The American]

Well race as we know it is groups of people living in different climates adapting (very slightly)to said climate. It doesn't make someone less of a human being to be in China or Africa or anywhere else in the world, we just look different because the people that lived there for thousands of years had to adapt to their environment. Obviously the evolution wasn't radical, it was very minimal because humans haven't been around for too long.
The Africans adapted to their hot climate by having darker skin pigmentation. I heard somewhere that Asians have different eye shape because the fold over their eye allowed them to divert the rays of the sun out of their eyes, and keep the wind out of their eyes since Mongolia, Siberia, northern china gets very windy in winter.
But thats the biological aspect of race, the social notion of race is purely arbitrary and race is often used to divide people as a way of gaining, or staying in power. (see hitler with the jews, hutus with the tutsis etc.)

[Tavarisch_Mike]

There is a looong Good thread on this in the Discrimination forum.

[Palingenisis]

http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/raceI.html

http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/raceII.html

http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/renaissance.html

Interesting set of essays on the subject by a Left Communist (but not a dogmatic euro-centric one). Highly recommended.

[jinx92]

Race, for all purposes, is a social construct. It carries no more value than that which society places on it. Unfortunately, a value was placed on it by the majority of people in history, and now the results are what we see, and the racial tension only divides workers.

[FreeFocus]

It's a social construct. That's not to say that it doesn't have real, material effects that need to inform Leftist positions. It's been employed as a tool for dividing humanity and conquering territory and stealing resources, but simply acknowledging that race isn't biologically "real" won't render inequalities meaningless or make them disappear.


The Africans adapted to their hot climate by having darker skin pigmentation. I heard somewhere that Asians have different eye shape because the fold over their eye allowed them to divert the rays of the sun out of their eyes, and keep the wind out of their eyes since Mongolia, Siberia, northern china gets very windy in winter.

That's possible why it became a predominant trait in Asians; however, I think it's important to note that African populations in southwestern Africa also possess epicanthic folds. It is an ancestral trait that happened to be enhanced in Asian populations.