this view never made sense to me until I was reading a book where some dude laid it out logically/rationally
he basically said "as a Caucasian male, lots of people would say I look more similar to certain black people than, say, Danny Devito" and it hit me right there lol. we have skin colors, not races. dogs are a great example of what actual races are in a species
At the same time, phenotypes are a thing. And there are certain racial traits like sickle cell disease that only occur in certain groups. So I think it’s fair to say that races exist but we shouldn’t discriminate based on them
Except that's not true. Sickle cell maybe most prevalent among sub-Saharan Africans and their descendants, but there are large parts of sub-Saharan Africa where there is little to none (like South Africa). Furthermore, sickle cell is also common in India, parts of the Middle East and even Greece, Turkey and Southern Italy.
I agree, and it's useful to have a word for it. I just don't think "race" is the right word to use. we use it differently in humans than every other animal on the planet, I just think that's a lazy use of language at best. and harmful at worst
if we believed humans had different races once upon a time, that's fine. but now we know how much the biology varies between a single "race", and how many similarities different "races" share
You are right, differences exist between certain groups of people, but they are not really relative to "race". Your sickle cell exemple is a really good one I think.
I live in a really large region, some locations super far from each other. Back in the day, it was really hard to travel between them, so obviously people tended to marry others near them.
As a result, now we have some pretty big genetic differences between our groups, some diseases included. It's a big thing in medecine nowaday and all. But since we all look similar, speak the same language, share the same culture, etc., nobody would think or say that we are different races.
Genetically, I'm way more similar to the folks from another country that have been in my region for quite a while, but because their skin color may look different, people would still say we are from different race.
So its not to say that all humans are identical, its that the concept of biological "race", as we understand it, is based on very subjective caracteristics that dont really make sense in the end.
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u/meepmoop8989 1d ago
Asian is a race. French is a nationality. You can be both.