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| re: I’m not a historian | |
| Last Edit: Singapore/Fling 01:26 pm EST 02/11/21 | |
| Posted by: Singapore/Fling 01:21 pm EST 02/11/21 | |
| In reply to: I’m not a historian - dramedy 12:07 pm EST 02/11/21 | |
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| There is a good deal of research on the history of European powers in the 15th Century, specifically the Portuguese, creating the ideas of race predicated upon skin color, and the modern hierarchy of race in which societal power and status correlates to lightness of skin tone. When we talk about Black people or White people or East Asians, we are using language and a worldview that springs from the beginning of modern Colonialism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Biologically, there is no such thing as race, and the categories we create to contain people around race are a social construct. This isn't to say that there hasn't been ethno-nationalist prejudice for much longer, but that the idea of prejudice based upon the idea of race is relatively recent and created by (and for) people who came to be regarded as White. I did mistype when I wrote 400 years ago, as I was off in my math by an additional 200 years. I've been reading about this in a few books, but the one I'm referencing right now is Ibram X. Kendi's "How to Be an Antiracist", which I highly encourage reading. |
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| Biologically there is no such thing as race? | |
| Posted by: dramedy 03:59 pm EST 02/11/21 | |
| In reply to: re: I’m not a historian - Singapore/Fling 01:21 pm EST 02/11/21 | |
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| That is incorrect. Sickle cell anemia is a generic trait in the black race—I believe it is a mutation that actually prevents malaria. Tay-Sachs is passed down in Jewish decent. I’m sure there are many examples besides these. There are biological traits that are racially based. Even hair is biological based difference based on race. Using these differences to treat people differently is the issue. | |
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| That is correct. Genetics are different than race. | |
| Last Edit: Singapore/Fling 04:32 pm EST 02/11/21 | |
| Posted by: Singapore/Fling 04:26 pm EST 02/11/21 | |
| In reply to: Biologically there is no such thing as race? - dramedy 03:59 pm EST 02/11/21 | |
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| As you admit, you are not a historian and have done no research on this. I encourage you to do the work to educate yourself on this. Biologically, there is no such thing as race in the way that we currently understand race in social terms. There are genetic variations within people who share ancestry, but those groupings are not biologically distinct races. Our understanding of the human genome is relatively new, occurring long after the grouping of people into races, and the scientific evidence shows that these groupings are not based in biology. (How could they be? The creation of race is from a time when leeches were the height of science.) In terms of Sickle Cell Disease, you can do some relatively quick Googling to find reading material showing that the prevalence of this disease in Black Americans can be traced to a relatively small number of specific African communities, including the Yorubans, Mandenkas, and Bantu people. Black Americans with that ancestry are linked to specific genetic communities, but we don't talk about the Yorubans as a race, because people of that ancestry have been folded into the larger grouping of "Black". |
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| Exactly right. | |
| Posted by: Quicheo 03:03 pm EST 02/12/21 | |
| In reply to: That is correct. Genetics are different than race. - Singapore/Fling 04:26 pm EST 02/11/21 | |
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| And as a physician, I would like to comment further that Tay-Sacks and Sickle Cell and other diseases that have a genetic component can jump across the cultural divide sometimes called race or emerge independently in other ethnic, cultural, regional, and family lines. 3 out of 1,000 children from two white parents are born with Sickle Cell trait. Slightly less from two Asian parents. Race, if being most generous to the idea, could be scientifically analogous to a "breed" of dogs or cats, except the variability is significantly greater in the groupings humans have made of themselves, and I hesitate to give any credence to the idea of the superiority of any "pure line". |
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