I had no idea such a project was ever undertaken elsewhere in the world. In any case, I wish some examples of lessons or facts learned during similar studies elsewhere were presented. It sounds fascinating!
Opening statement is doing a disservice. Most parts of the world racism is defined on language/cultural maps, not literally black and white skin. For example the Rwandan genocide, is based on ethnic clashes where all people there have the same literal skin color. But they are part of different ethnicities.
Then you have the bosnian genocide, same skin color and even language. But culturally they were different enough for some other humans to target.
Science absolutely does not claim biological human races exist. Almost all of the major anthropological societies have a statement somewhere like this:
I think that statements like this are usually written more for political than for scientific reasons. Yes, "races do not exist" is true in the sense that 19th century classifications made by racist Europeans do not do a good job of mapping the reality of human genetic diversity. However, race does exist in the sense that, for example, two randomly selected people from China are likely to be closer to each other genetically than either is to a randomly selected person from England - and not only that, but it is also likely that the average person or, for that matter, computer algorithm will do a fairly good job of guessing people's genetic distance based on their visual appearance, at least for relatively large genetic distances.
I feel that too often, politically motivated people pick up on such academic statements and use them to justify implying that the very concept of racial difference is inherently empty or wrong and perhaps should even be tabooed. It is a bit of a motte and bailey technique: you first say, "Look at these statements - see, science rejects the very concept of race - any discussion of racial difference is thus unscientific and in any case what are you, some sort of bigot?" And if anyone pushes you more closely on the matter you can just retreat to the actually justifiable position, "Oh well of course I did not mean that there are no identifiable patterns in human genetic diversity, that would be absurd, I just meant that old European racial classifications are inaccurate."
The problem is that scientific "race" doesn't quite work that way.
To be scientific about it, you have to be willing to conclude things like that a diverse looking group of people are actually all the same race because they happen to share common genetics, or that what looks like an all white group is really 5 distinct genetic groups that just happen to look similar.
To really find what scientifically accurate genetic group a given person falls into you'd have to be scientific about it, and look at the genetics or at the very least their detailed ancestry. Simply looking at them doesn't cut it. Science is all about precision and eliminating biases.
At that point, what is even the point? You know enough about them to treat them as an individual regardless of what they happen to look like.
I would consider it a stretch to consider modern anthropology to be 'science'.
> "The belief in races as a natural aspect of human biology and the institutional and structural inequities (racism) that have emerged in tandem with such beliefs in European colonial contexts are among the most damaging elements in human societies."
The use of the term "European colonial contexts" betrays its intent immediately. I say this as a non-white person, of non-European origin.
> "Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation. It was never accurate in the past, and it remains inaccurate when referencing contemporary human populations"
Only smart people could be convinced of such foolishness. A classification system as simple as 'race' may not provide an accurate taxonomy for all scientific purposes. It does however provide a sensible abstraction which has persisted uniformly across cultures and time because of its utility. Regardless of to what extent you believe the concept of 'race' explains population differences, there are clearly quantifiable differences between individuals associated with their genetic origins. This is well known in all biological scientific fields: medicine, forensics, pharmacology...
You have a bit of a contradiction going on here. Your first sentence states that you think anthropology isn't science and your last sentence cites it as an example of a "biological scientific field". The part of forensics that deals with human bodies and especially racial classification is called forensic anthropology.
Now, the relationship between academic and forensic anthropologists is pretty fraught, but not because the regular anthropologists are out there inventing new genders all the time. It's because forensic anthropology uses outdated methodologies widely considered unscientific, including racial identifications. That's why the US National Academy called for forensic science reform back in 2009 and why you still get debates like this between academics and forensic anthropologists: https://doi.org/10.1111/1556-4029.14513
RE: ... there are clearly quantifiable differences between individuals associated with their genetic origins. This is well known in all biological scientific fields: medicine, forensics, pharmacology
This point falls apart with "mixed-race" individuals. People have mixed since the dawn of man. The real conflict is cultural.
No, I disagree. Colors can be mixed together, so does that mean that the color blue does not exists? Can you point me where exactly blue starts and ends on a rainbow? Let's go even further, and take two mixed colors - purple (blue+red) and lime (green+yellow) - they're both mixed, so does that mean that there is no difference between those two? This is a fallacy. People might've mixed, but it doesn't make everyone the same. This is blatantly false. In the actual reality you just inherit some traits from one parent and some from the other. I'm not denying cultural differences obviously, but it does not contradict anything, it's just how genetics work. Race is just a superset of ethnicity, and it's more fuzzy around the edges.
Respectfully, mixing colors in lifeforms is not as binary as "purple (blue+red) and lime (green+yellow)". A black rose and a white rose does not produce a gray rose. A black cat and a white cat will not give gray cat. Two black dogs can give you a gray dog with blue eyes.
> Only smart people could be convinced of such foolishness. A classification system as simple as 'race' may not provide an accurate taxonomy for all scientific purposes. It does however provide a sensible abstraction which has persisted uniformly across cultures and time because of its utility.
Notions of race (either at the high level of what race in general is, or at the lower level of what defines specific races) are not, even approximately, consistent across either space or time. I mean, I get that it makes building arguments much easier if you can start with your conclusion and just invent whatever premises are convenient to support it, but...
Probably not any time soon. The current trend among the woke crowd seems to be emphasizing importance of race, rather than trying to get past it.
Worst racists of today are ones who divide people to privileged and underprivileged simply based on their skin colour, when the reality is way more complicated.
It's funny how the rest of the World is suddenly expected to adhere to U.S. cultural boundaries even though they simply don't apply. All of a sudden I've somehow changed ethnicity to "White". Simultaneously, people of African, Middle-Eastern and Indian origin -- some of the most ethnically diverse areas on the entire planet -- are just considered "Black" and thought of as a single group.
I like that you recognise that reality is complicated.
However your comment underestimates racism. It may not have happened in front of your eyes, but in this world there are people who will for example:
- be willing to verbally _or physically_ assault a person because of their skin colour (yes, to the point of serious injury or death)
- deliberately undermine a good candidate's chances of getting a job or promotion _because of their skin colour_
- deliberately undermine a good tenant's chances of finding a place to live close to work or a good school
Most people (including myself) are shocked to learn of situations like this once presented with evidence of it. I'm honestly talking about something as straightforward and undeniably racist as: a landlord asking a real estate startup to screen out any black tenants.
There's also a huge range of experiences where the above happen across lines of race but more accidentally. Racist outcomes without racist intentions. All the kids who can afford to live near the good schools are white, all the informal mentorship happens to people who are similar in background to the founder, etc.
The reason "emphasising importance of race" happens is because there's no chance of avoiding or preventing these situations if we pretend/hope that they don't happen. I might have misinterpreted you, but "trying to get past it" feels like pretend/hope rather than a willingness to fix things.
I didn't read GP is underestimating racism, but as sharing your goal but disagreeing with the means. The problem with the race-focussed approach to end racism is you can't change race.
But most racist problems actually manifest themselves as socioeconomic problems. And you can tackle those. And when doing so you can even gain allies, because poverty, bad schools and so on affect people regardless of skin color, which means fighting for better schools, higher wages etc. unites people regardless of skin color.
"The reason "emphasising importance of race" happens is because there's no chance of avoiding or preventing these situations if we pretend/hope that they don't happen."
How can we move past the racial thing, when we focus so much of racial things?
I think it just reinforces the racial thinking, when with every decision concerning other people, the race factor has to be taken into account.
I want to treat humans as humans and this is my solution towards a world without racism. I don't want to have to be nicer to a person because he or she is of black skin color. Or give special reasons in case of other skincolor, why this person did not qualify for a job. Or actually having to employ people because of their skin color. That would be racism to me, even if it might be well intentioned one.
I do not think there is such a thing as "positive discrimination". Discrimination remains discrimination.
I would ask when you ignore a problem does it go away? In my experience the answer is always no. You have to face a problem head on. The fact of the matter is people still experience racism all the time to this day.
No one should be asking you to hire someone simply because they’re of a different skin color. Most of the time in my experience people ask you to be more aware of you and how you feel, and to ask yourself am I doing this perhaps because of some unconscious bias I have?
"I would ask when you ignore a problem does it go away?"
Where did I say, I am ignoring it? For personal reasons, I am very aware it exists.
I said my personal solution is simply to not treat people different based on race.
I rather change the world by giving a good example, than trying to impose my fix onto the world.
"No one should be asking you to hire someone simply because they’re of a different skin color. "
But people are promoting the idea to push positive discrimination - meaning exactly this, employing persons based on their skin color to meet a percentage of minorities - and not on their qualifications. And I believe this is very wrong and not helping the cause.
> I want to treat humans as humans and this is my solution towards a world without racism. I don't want to have to be nicer to a person because he or she is of black skin color. Or give special reasons in case of other skincolor, why this person did not qualify for a job. Or actually having to employ people because of their skin color. That would be racism to me, even if it might be well intentioned one.
But right now, you actually object to people saying "racism exists and affects how things turn out".
Except that comment you are responding to does not call for any laws. Neither thread nor original article is not about implementing any laws.
Your own comment is literally against talking about race or focusing on it. While it does have final note about positive discrimination, the majority is not about positive discrimination.
Yes, I 100% agree that reality is complicated and not everything is about race, but some things are still about race and we shouldn't be afraid to talk about it.
Racists aren't idiots, most of them know they can't openly spout racial slurs any more and still be taken seriously, so they use proxy issues framed in ways that do more harm to the groups they hate than to middle class white Americans.
You can't simultaneously solve every single social problem in existence out of fear of being called the real bigots, and making it all about whichever example of bigotry or injustice you're talking about in the moment. Sometimes you have to zoom in on a particular sub problem, be it income, education, crime, pollution, housing, disability, race, class, homelessness, or whatever.
So no, in short I don't think the worst racists of today are the ones who talk about the privileges or difficulties that come with being born into one race or another. The worst racists are still the same people they've always been, the people who try to hurt or kill the racial groups they don't like using every tool at their disposal, be it he media, the police, the law or whatever.
> Opening statement is doing a disservice. Most parts of the world racism is defined
But this was written by a journalist. You have to translate Journalistese into English as you read it. For example "in most parts of the world" means "here where I live". In a similar way, "everybody" means "a cousin of mine", and so on. Once you get used to their language, newspapers start to make more sense. A bit less interesting, but definitely more informative.
The target audience for the article are white Europeans living in the USA or Europe, where racism is often targeted at black Africans or African heritage.
In general, genetic differentiation in populations of India is low (0.26-1.7%), but overall genetic differentiation in 18 mixed populations of India is higher (2.23%), similar to the largest single study on 16 tribal groups from central India (2.18%).
Genetic diversity is actually not that high in India. There have been genetic sequencing projects in Indian groups (look up Dr. Thangaraj's publications from CCMB), and Indian caste groups have low diversity due to strict endogamy.
If you make a connection between genes and disease, it is often a complex/weak link. Most of the on/off genes have already been discovered, by now we have gotten down to the more complex ones based on interactions, etc.
Having worked with genetic data a lot I know that the reason for the wealth of European genetic data therefore lies in the limited generalizability based on more diverse datasets.
If you try to generalize from a worldwide genetic dataset, you will probably fail. Your inferences from this diverse dataset to individual genomes will be abysmal. Predictions are already difficult to make from a country-specific dataset to an inhabitant of such country.
I don't know why people always want to see race everywhere. For scientific reasons, it has been way more convenient to sequence more people of European origin. In my opinion, that has nothing to do with racism. It is a matter of what data has better availability and is more valuable right now (not even in terms of application - simply in terms of being able to detect complex underlying patterns).
Now that the cost of sequencing is getting lower and lower and availability increases everywhere, it is great to see more diverse genomes sequenced. This will help us understand more of the genome - still, this is no magic bullet by a long shot. The problems stated above get bigger with dissimilarity. Many discoveries made in African genomes can probably not be generalized unto the remaining world.
Current methods are just not sufficient to dig deep into the genome and its mechanics. At this point, we would probably need to sequence the whole of earths population a few times to be able to make consistently accurate and significant predictions across many complex traits and diseases.
> For scientific reasons, it has been way more convenient to sequence more people of European origin.
I'm personally interested in human origins, so from my perspective yet another "convenience" dataset from Europe is nearly useless. There's a lot more reasons to build this than just the search for medical magic bullets.
A dataset with no variability makes it impossible to find any useful pattern. You are only counting the blue M&Ms in the jar.
> Europeans are not clones
In terms of genetic diversity, yes, they are. I don't know where you get your opinion from, but in science, the more representitive the scientific sample of the population is better the statistical analysis of that population. A European/Asian only dataset it not representative of the actual human genetic diversity.
Accidentally removed my comment when I wanted to reply, but whatever.
I never said that we can infer everything from European data. I never said collecting African genetic data is pointless. I know that Europeans do not vary nearly as much from a genetic standpoint as Africans (although they're definitely not clones). I know you can't generalise using European/Asian data. I know larger samples describe the population better.
All I said is that it's easier to analyse data that is less variable, and that Europeans aren't clones. Both points are true. Finding patterns is more difficult when there is more variance in the data. That doesn't mean it's pointless, it's actually more useful, but it's also more difficult.
The European datasets are essentially useless because they lack diversity. So you cannot make any generalisations. You need a highly diverse dataset to start looking for patterns of expression in subgroups to draw any meaningful conclusions.
Just to add to this. I work adjacent to a lab developing forensic kits for black South African populations. The kits developed in the US and Europe don't really work on Xhosa or Zulu populations. This is incredibly important due to the high levels of gender violence in the country.
Great. Maybe the availability of data that isn't easily analyzable by GWAS will finally move genomics away from correlational studies and towards actually trying to understand causation.
I'm not quite sure if I understand what they're trying to do. Are they trying to say that it isn't just skin color? That's the entire point of "racism", that it's not just visible characteristics.
> That's the entire point of "racism", that it's not just visible characteristics.
The way I learned it is that racism is believing that races exists AND that there is a (one dimensional) hierarchy between these races. Europeans are better at lactose tolerance than Africans and Asians. That's a fact. In no way that makes them have more worth as humans being or put them "above" the others. Believing that would be racism.
There certainly are individuals who believe that, just like there are some Black individuals (Black nationalists/Israelites) who believe the exact opposite - that Whites are "inferior" and Blacks are "superior". But at core this really isn't what nationalist/separatist movements are about. It's that races are distinct both genetically and culturally - not inherently better or worse, just different - and incompatible with each other. Furthermore, if you look at the current and historic nationalist movements, the motivation is rarely (if ever) "we're superior, they're subhumans, why won't we just kill them", but perceived oppression from the other side.
Not even anecdotally. Different color, same vicious sentiment.
Mind you this is not a majority way of thinking. A small minority get a high enough profile to perpetuate conflict.
66 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadThen you have the bosnian genocide, same skin color and even language. But culturally they were different enough for some other humans to target.
When can we be post-race?
https://physanth.org/about/position-statements/aapa-statemen...
Or this:
https://www.americananthro.org/ConnectWithAAA/Content.aspx?I...
Those statements also explain why being post-race is more difficult than it should be.
I feel that too often, politically motivated people pick up on such academic statements and use them to justify implying that the very concept of racial difference is inherently empty or wrong and perhaps should even be tabooed. It is a bit of a motte and bailey technique: you first say, "Look at these statements - see, science rejects the very concept of race - any discussion of racial difference is thus unscientific and in any case what are you, some sort of bigot?" And if anyone pushes you more closely on the matter you can just retreat to the actually justifiable position, "Oh well of course I did not mean that there are no identifiable patterns in human genetic diversity, that would be absurd, I just meant that old European racial classifications are inaccurate."
To be scientific about it, you have to be willing to conclude things like that a diverse looking group of people are actually all the same race because they happen to share common genetics, or that what looks like an all white group is really 5 distinct genetic groups that just happen to look similar.
To really find what scientifically accurate genetic group a given person falls into you'd have to be scientific about it, and look at the genetics or at the very least their detailed ancestry. Simply looking at them doesn't cut it. Science is all about precision and eliminating biases.
At that point, what is even the point? You know enough about them to treat them as an individual regardless of what they happen to look like.
> "The belief in races as a natural aspect of human biology and the institutional and structural inequities (racism) that have emerged in tandem with such beliefs in European colonial contexts are among the most damaging elements in human societies."
The use of the term "European colonial contexts" betrays its intent immediately. I say this as a non-white person, of non-European origin.
> "Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation. It was never accurate in the past, and it remains inaccurate when referencing contemporary human populations"
Only smart people could be convinced of such foolishness. A classification system as simple as 'race' may not provide an accurate taxonomy for all scientific purposes. It does however provide a sensible abstraction which has persisted uniformly across cultures and time because of its utility. Regardless of to what extent you believe the concept of 'race' explains population differences, there are clearly quantifiable differences between individuals associated with their genetic origins. This is well known in all biological scientific fields: medicine, forensics, pharmacology...
On what basis do you state that?
Now, the relationship between academic and forensic anthropologists is pretty fraught, but not because the regular anthropologists are out there inventing new genders all the time. It's because forensic anthropology uses outdated methodologies widely considered unscientific, including racial identifications. That's why the US National Academy called for forensic science reform back in 2009 and why you still get debates like this between academics and forensic anthropologists: https://doi.org/10.1111/1556-4029.14513
Notions of race (either at the high level of what race in general is, or at the lower level of what defines specific races) are not, even approximately, consistent across either space or time. I mean, I get that it makes building arguments much easier if you can start with your conclusion and just invent whatever premises are convenient to support it, but...
Worst racists of today are ones who divide people to privileged and underprivileged simply based on their skin colour, when the reality is way more complicated.
It's outright ridiculous.
However your comment underestimates racism. It may not have happened in front of your eyes, but in this world there are people who will for example:
- be willing to verbally _or physically_ assault a person because of their skin colour (yes, to the point of serious injury or death)
- deliberately undermine a good candidate's chances of getting a job or promotion _because of their skin colour_
- deliberately undermine a good tenant's chances of finding a place to live close to work or a good school
Most people (including myself) are shocked to learn of situations like this once presented with evidence of it. I'm honestly talking about something as straightforward and undeniably racist as: a landlord asking a real estate startup to screen out any black tenants.
There's also a huge range of experiences where the above happen across lines of race but more accidentally. Racist outcomes without racist intentions. All the kids who can afford to live near the good schools are white, all the informal mentorship happens to people who are similar in background to the founder, etc.
The reason "emphasising importance of race" happens is because there's no chance of avoiding or preventing these situations if we pretend/hope that they don't happen. I might have misinterpreted you, but "trying to get past it" feels like pretend/hope rather than a willingness to fix things.
But most racist problems actually manifest themselves as socioeconomic problems. And you can tackle those. And when doing so you can even gain allies, because poverty, bad schools and so on affect people regardless of skin color, which means fighting for better schools, higher wages etc. unites people regardless of skin color.
How can we move past the racial thing, when we focus so much of racial things?
I think it just reinforces the racial thinking, when with every decision concerning other people, the race factor has to be taken into account.
I want to treat humans as humans and this is my solution towards a world without racism. I don't want to have to be nicer to a person because he or she is of black skin color. Or give special reasons in case of other skincolor, why this person did not qualify for a job. Or actually having to employ people because of their skin color. That would be racism to me, even if it might be well intentioned one.
I do not think there is such a thing as "positive discrimination". Discrimination remains discrimination.
No one should be asking you to hire someone simply because they’re of a different skin color. Most of the time in my experience people ask you to be more aware of you and how you feel, and to ask yourself am I doing this perhaps because of some unconscious bias I have?
Where did I say, I am ignoring it? For personal reasons, I am very aware it exists.
I said my personal solution is simply to not treat people different based on race. I rather change the world by giving a good example, than trying to impose my fix onto the world.
"No one should be asking you to hire someone simply because they’re of a different skin color. "
But people are promoting the idea to push positive discrimination - meaning exactly this, employing persons based on their skin color to meet a percentage of minorities - and not on their qualifications. And I believe this is very wrong and not helping the cause.
this is very much what is happening. There are quotas that need to be filled, and it is tied to performance numbers too.
Also, not just for race, for all diversity - like gender, etc.
But right now, you actually object to people saying "racism exists and affects how things turn out".
Your own comment is literally against talking about race or focusing on it. While it does have final note about positive discrimination, the majority is not about positive discrimination.
The applied context in this thread, does.
"The current trend among the woke crowd seems to be emphasizing importance of race, rather than trying to get past it."
I mean why are there laws getting implemented against racism in the shape of "positive discrimination" if various activists would not support it?
I'm sorry, but I have to ask. How do you feel about affirmative action?
Racists aren't idiots, most of them know they can't openly spout racial slurs any more and still be taken seriously, so they use proxy issues framed in ways that do more harm to the groups they hate than to middle class white Americans.
You can't simultaneously solve every single social problem in existence out of fear of being called the real bigots, and making it all about whichever example of bigotry or injustice you're talking about in the moment. Sometimes you have to zoom in on a particular sub problem, be it income, education, crime, pollution, housing, disability, race, class, homelessness, or whatever.
So no, in short I don't think the worst racists of today are the ones who talk about the privileges or difficulties that come with being born into one race or another. The worst racists are still the same people they've always been, the people who try to hurt or kill the racial groups they don't like using every tool at their disposal, be it he media, the police, the law or whatever.
Also social class - protecting skin from sun had been a display that you are of non-working class rather then different genetic pool...
But this was written by a journalist. You have to translate Journalistese into English as you read it. For example "in most parts of the world" means "here where I live". In a similar way, "everybody" means "a cousin of mine", and so on. Once you get used to their language, newspapers start to make more sense. A bit less interesting, but definitely more informative.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8908794/
https://blogs.bcm.edu/2018/07/19/genetic-diversity-in-africa...
"Africans have world's greatest genetic variation"
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna30502963
This is not surprising, it supports the "out of Africa" model of human origins.
Having worked with genetic data a lot I know that the reason for the wealth of European genetic data therefore lies in the limited generalizability based on more diverse datasets.
If you try to generalize from a worldwide genetic dataset, you will probably fail. Your inferences from this diverse dataset to individual genomes will be abysmal. Predictions are already difficult to make from a country-specific dataset to an inhabitant of such country.
I don't know why people always want to see race everywhere. For scientific reasons, it has been way more convenient to sequence more people of European origin. In my opinion, that has nothing to do with racism. It is a matter of what data has better availability and is more valuable right now (not even in terms of application - simply in terms of being able to detect complex underlying patterns). Now that the cost of sequencing is getting lower and lower and availability increases everywhere, it is great to see more diverse genomes sequenced. This will help us understand more of the genome - still, this is no magic bullet by a long shot. The problems stated above get bigger with dissimilarity. Many discoveries made in African genomes can probably not be generalized unto the remaining world.
Current methods are just not sufficient to dig deep into the genome and its mechanics. At this point, we would probably need to sequence the whole of earths population a few times to be able to make consistently accurate and significant predictions across many complex traits and diseases.
I'm personally interested in human origins, so from my perspective yet another "convenience" dataset from Europe is nearly useless. There's a lot more reasons to build this than just the search for medical magic bullets.
That's a scientific reason to sequence the genes of African people more.
> Europeans are not clones
In terms of genetic diversity, yes, they are. I don't know where you get your opinion from, but in science, the more representitive the scientific sample of the population is better the statistical analysis of that population. A European/Asian only dataset it not representative of the actual human genetic diversity.
I never said that we can infer everything from European data. I never said collecting African genetic data is pointless. I know that Europeans do not vary nearly as much from a genetic standpoint as Africans (although they're definitely not clones). I know you can't generalise using European/Asian data. I know larger samples describe the population better.
All I said is that it's easier to analyse data that is less variable, and that Europeans aren't clones. Both points are true. Finding patterns is more difficult when there is more variance in the data. That doesn't mean it's pointless, it's actually more useful, but it's also more difficult.
Just to add to this. I work adjacent to a lab developing forensic kits for black South African populations. The kits developed in the US and Europe don't really work on Xhosa or Zulu populations. This is incredibly important due to the high levels of gender violence in the country.
It's still a great project though.
I'm sure there are more things related to black/African people that can be discussed than racism. There is more than one subject out there.
By the way, why there is no author?
The way I learned it is that racism is believing that races exists AND that there is a (one dimensional) hierarchy between these races. Europeans are better at lactose tolerance than Africans and Asians. That's a fact. In no way that makes them have more worth as humans being or put them "above" the others. Believing that would be racism.
Because it's the Economist, they never run a byline on any of their published content, normally.