
An Argument for Race Abolitionism (2020) - rictoo
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/08/04/we-need-to-abolish-race/
======
mikece
Race or culture isn't the issue but "identity politics" which mandates that
one must see themselves and others not as the unique and wonderful individuals
they are but as an impersonal member of a class to be treated according to the
understood (or assumed) qualities of that class. Nothing is more destructive
to cordial interpersonal relations than saying "Oh, you're an X and I will
treat you as X-types ought to be treated" without regard to who the individual
actually is.

It's not impossible to see, recognize, and appreciate races and cultures as
long as the dignity of the individual is maintained.

~~~
Kednicma
Race is a little bit the issue, because there's no biological basis for the
idea that humans aren't just one single species.

A genuine observation and appreciation of "race" consists of understanding
that humans do not have a single appropriate skin tone, mostly. I'm not sure
what else there is for you, but it's not there for me.

~~~
Joker_vD
Yes, humans are one single species, just like the dogs are one single species,
and humans do not have a single appropriate skin tone, just like dogs do not
have a single appropriate kind of fur, or single appropriate body proportions.

That doesn't change the fact that there are different dog breeds, or different
human, well, let's not call them "races" or "breeds", but large vaguely-
defined (because they form continuum) groups of distinctly different average
appearances.

Edit: just to elaborate slightly, I suspect that if we would undertake a
massive gene pool homogenization program (lots and lots of population
migrations, cross-whatever marriages and child-bearings), we might in several
hundred years arrive at a more or less uniformly skin-toned population in
which case one, technically, could term that skin tone as "innately
appropriate".

But I personally fail to see any allure in this: what's the point of averaging
out the physical differences, they're mostly inconsequential anyway?

~~~
Kednicma
Gene pools are at least three-dimensional. Just because humans are diverse,
does not imply that the gene pool is not well-mixed. And there's a rather
famous anthropological observation that skin colors correlate with latitude,
as well as well-understood mechanisms which control that correlation; there's
a gentle tug-of-war between lowering the chance of rickets and lowering the
chance of skin cancer.

Put another way, we _already have_ had centuries of high-speed travel
connecting the world and globalizing the population, and we _do_ have region
that produce "uniform" skin tones which look like the average of all of the
local skin tones, but those regions _also have_ lots of non-"uniform" skin
tones. The people that you imagine are but one thin slice of a much thicker
and richer gene pool.

Finally, please don't confuse the deliberate fancy breeding of dogs, pigeons,
etc. with humans' natural free choice of how to use their sexuality. We frown
on eugenics for humans for precisely the same reasons that dog breeders bemoan
hip dysplasia.

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joaomacp
As a European, every US election season I'm always dumbfounded by how much the
"black vote" is discussed. Just recently, when Kamala Harris was announced as
VP, all they talk about is how she will contribute to the black vote. This
makes it seem as she was only chosen because of her race, and even worse: it's
an insult to black people, grouping them together as having one opinion.

I don't know why there's no backlash against this.

~~~
Tainnor
I'm European myself. I don't think we can compare Europe with the US. Due to
centuries of slavery and then segregation, black and white communities are
still somewhat separate and tend to have different cultures etc. Of course,
individually, there are many examples of people who are "in between", but the
cultural blocs do exist.

And by the way - in Belgium, parties have to pander to the French or the Dutch
voters; in Switzerland, the different language regions have different voting
behaviour; in Germany, east Germany votes significantly differently, as does
Bavaria; and so on. Voter blocs are not something exclusive to the US, even if
the history of the black population doesn't have a direct parallel in Europe.

~~~
seszett
> _in Belgium, parties have to pander to the French or the Dutch voters_

Well it's a bit different, as people in Wallonia can only vote for francophone
parties and people in Flanders only for Flemish parties. Only Brussels gets
both. So in effect, parties don't really have to choose whether to pander to
the French-speaking or Dutch-speaking voters.

Which is even worse IMO, because how can you form a functioning federal
government from parties that are each elected only by half of the country?
Well you can't, as the current situation shows.

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bitemealienboi
The problem with race abolitionism is that it removes the language for
discussing racial issues and hides these issues where they cant be addressed.
Its essentially the equivalent of saying "All Lives Matter". It attempts to
dismiss and ignore the problems that wont go away even if ignored.

It would be nice to live in a world where racial discrimination and issues
dont exist and skin colour is as meaningless and superficial as eye colour or
the colour of your clothes. And perhaps, someday, this may be the case.

But at the end of the day, racial problems still exists. Racial discrimination
still exists. People are _still_ being treated differently by individuals and
systems based on their physical features and the colour of their skin. Cops
see and treat black people differently, so do doctors and judges and juries
and home sellers and bankers and hotel clerks. And that causes real effects
and impediments to people of colour that needs to be addressed first.

Identity politics is not saying these people _are_ different. Identity
politics is saying that _society sees these people as different_ , and that
its a problem that needs to be addressed

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wcerfgba
There seem to be some conflicting ideas here. On one hand, the concept of
'race' is what allows racism to exist and we need to remove this concept from
our collective ideology in order to defeat racism -- people are just people.
On the other hand, it is a fact that external biological characteristics
(predominantly skin colour and facial structure) result in social clustering
and discrimination, at the individual, collective and institutional levels --
racism is real.

I appreciate the principles behind race abolitionism, as I have often applied
the same logic to gender, which is arguably even more socially constructed
than race, since the appeal to biological characteristics is weaker for
defining one's gender than one's race. However, if we remove these ideas from
our collective understanding of the world, do we not make it harder to argue
cases of legitimate discrimination? If the generally accepted notion is
"gender does not exist" or "race does not exist", how does one make the
argument "I was discriminated against because of <attributes>?" Or is the idea
that once people no longer make the distinction between different groups of
attributes, then individual and institutional discrimination will no longer
exist? It seems to me that in order for such an approach to be successful, we
would need to train ourselves to not notice external characteristics of
individuals, effectively becoming colour-blind, a task which not only seems
impossible due to the nature of the human mind, but also a dangerous position
to take while racism still exists -- since it also blinds us to an
understanding of why a person was discriminated against and what factors
affected their experience --, and risks destroying our concept of cultural
heritage. Perhaps race abolitionism is more suited for a post-racism world?

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gostsamo
There was this aphorism: "It does not matter if you believe in God, but
whether God believes in you." In the context of race, the lady can abolish
races as much as she desires, but it does not matter as far as their are
racists.

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juancn
The US is oddly concerned about race. I remember the first time they asked me
about my race filling a form. WTF? How should I know? Also the categories are
so arbitrary, I ended up picking other and be done with that.

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atemerev
This is how it works in European countries, e.g. France. “Race” never figures
in any government documents, forms and surveys. Mentioning someone’s race
considered to be somewhat rude and is regarded as a thing of the past. Not
everybody is race-agnostic, but all government organizations and all
businesses are required to be race-agnostic by law. This includes never asking
about race, particularly in forms and surveys. Identity politics is actively
_discouraged_.

I wonder why it is different in America.

~~~
bendoernberg
I've been very influenced by Isabel Wilkerson's new book to look at America as
having a racial caste system that's 400 years old. The entire economic and
political history and present of the United States is governed by this caste
system; it's even written into the physical geography, e.g. where there is
lead and where there are trees. If you don't ask about race on government
forms, how are you going to measure progress on dismantling this system?

Abolishing race is a good goal, but it's going to come after we've
acknowledged and reckoned with the violence and harm this country has done to
so many millions of people. And we've barely even started that process.

~~~
throwaway894345
We can argue that there is work to do toward equality without discrediting
ourselves and our objective with incredible claims about “having barely
started” as though we still have slave plantations and so on.

------
Zigurd
The author is the Brexit Party's person of color. I'm sure a lot of white men
will agree with what she is saying. Just don't be fooled into thinking that
minorities in general will adopt this position.

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Joker_vD
> the concept of ‘race’ is scientifically and socially unsupportable.

Just like the concept of "culture". See
[https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/12/does-race-exist-
does-c...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/12/does-race-exist-does-
culture/) , here's the kicker:

"There were two arguments against race being a real concept: it didn’t cluster
nicely, and within-group variation was greater than between group variation.
_And both of these are equally true of culture._ Any mathematical argument
considering races as clusters of genes can be used equally well considering
cultures as clusters of memes, and will likely return the same results.

Yet I can’t imagine someone saying “culture doesn’t exist” or “culture isn’t
real”."

~~~
Kednicma
Are accents cultural or racial? There's plenty of cultural traits which are
heritable and measurable. The difference is that there's only one human race,
while there's many different cultural memeplexes.

Race literally doesn't exist: The partitions that you imagine as dividing
people aren't actually backed by any particular observable or experiment.
Meanwhile, cultural markers do exist: We can measure what people wear, speak,
trade, value, etc.

Aside from accents, another good example is that of locally-grown staple
foods. Different locales support different crops, so that merely living in a
region for a time is sufficient to alter one's diet. Yet it is not due to
differences in people, but differences in soil, which determine which crops
are grown and eaten where.

~~~
EForEndeavour
> The partitions that you imagine as dividing people aren't actually backed by
> any particular observable or experiment. Meanwhile, cultural markers do
> exist: We can measure what people wear, speak, trade, value, etc.

I'm having genuine difficulty wrapping my mind around this argument.

I don't mean to inflame tempers or anything here, but would we agree that any
operational definition of "race" probably needs to include some mix of both
cultural and phenotypic attributes (including but certainly not limited to
skin color)? If so, then:

\- aren't the cultural aspects of race just as measurable as you just pointed
out -- what people wear, speak, trade, value, etc.?

\- aren't variations in human bodies (differences in phenotype) arguably even
_more_ measurable than that? It's easy for me to determine from a low-res
photo that someone is of East Asian descent. It's nigh impossible for me to
tell whether they're culturally Chinese, rural Texan, Jamaican, etc.

To claim that race "literally" doesn't exist while in the next sentence
pointing out that cultural markers exist just seems really dissonant to me,
and I'm honestly not sure what part of my model of the world needs changing to
become compatible with these two claims.

Are you saying that you could chat up a person, maybe interview them, and
conclude that they're probably indigenous to Tibet, but phenotypic markers (or
whatever your definition of "racial," or even genetic? [1]) are guaranteed to
be uninformative toward this conclusion?

[1]
[https://www.pnas.org/content/114/16/4189](https://www.pnas.org/content/114/16/4189)

~~~
Kednicma
No worries. It sounds like you don't have a problem with the latter part, just
the former part, so we'll focus on that.

You say that it's "easy" for you to determine whether somebody is "East
Asian", just by looking at a photo. What are you looking for, though? Probably
some sort of appearance affected by genetics. However, no East Asian can carry
the complete gene pool from their region, so no East Asian can carry a set of
genetic markers which is guaranteed to produce an appearance which is reliably
recognizable. (This isn't specific to East Asia, of course.) So, whatever
you're seeing in that photo, it's not just their genes, but also at least some
of your biases, which lead you to think that your classification rate is
better than it actually is.

Phrases like "cultural aspects of race" are meant to excuse bigotries beyond
racism, I think. As soon as we draw a hard line between genes and memes, and
agree that they have different mechanisms of action upon people, then suddenly
we need to have a _very_ hard look at anything we do which conflates genes and
memes.

I'm saying that, when chatting up a person, their genetic history is extremely
irrelevant. Maybe their country of origin matters (as for spies), maybe their
religious beliefs matter (as when handling dietary restrictions at a dinner),
maybe their accent matters (just when trying to chat!) but their genetics, and
thus any notion of race, are not germane.

Keep in mind that genes are affected by pedigree collapse but memes are not.
We are one race partially because we do not have enough ancestors to have more
races; however, this limitation doesn't apply to cultural knowledge.

~~~
EForEndeavour
> You say that it's "easy" for you to determine whether somebody is "East
> Asian", just by looking at a photo. What are you looking for, though?
> Probably some sort of appearance affected by genetics. However, no East
> Asian can carry the complete gene pool from their region, so no East Asian
> can carry a set of genetic markers which is guaranteed to produce an
> appearance which is reliably recognizable.

It feels like this discussion is disproportionately weighted toward exceptions
to demonstrably real correlations between a person's ancestral origin and
their appearance and genes. Why would _every_ member of a given cluster of
related people be required to carry every one of the criteria that define the
cluster? In my mind, that defeats the whole purpose of clustering in the first
place, and seems especially out of place given that normal people in normal
situations make fuzzy, heuristic classifications of people based on incomplete
information.

Also, doesn't this "nobody carries the complete pool from their region"
argument apply equally to any conceivable definition of culture? Not every
rural Texan espouses _exactly_ the same cultural values as each other, or
cultural memes, or what have you. Despite the inherent fuzziness in defining
what it means to be rural Texan, you can still make the definition meaningful.
The ability to define a Sherpa culture seems equally plausible as the ability
to characterize Sherpa genotypes and phenotypes. The fuzziness of a
classification does not negate the fact that fuzzy classification is still
possible.

> So, whatever you're seeing in that photo, it's not just their genes, but
> also at least some of your biases, which lead you to think that your
> classification rate is better than it actually is.

That makes sense to me.

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082349872349872
Hofstadter's argument:
[https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.htm...](https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html)

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cuillevel3
As a German I always feel offended, when American sign-up forms (conferences
and such) ask for my 'race'. Are they asking for my migrant background? Asking
for race is just so Nazi, what should I put there, "Herrenrasse",
"Fremdrasse", ...?

There are no different human races.

~~~
082349872349872
Yeah, I used to enter "mutt"

What do real Caucasians (people _from_ the Caucasus) enter in these fields?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23914667](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23914667)

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wcerfgba
Post seems to have been delisted from the front pages, @dang can we get a
reason? This is political but seems like a genuinely interesting perspective.

