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It's pretty much a social construct used to sort people into groups and to create a hierarchy to justify white people thinking that they're superior based on no evidence whatsoever.
It's excessively racist that you think that "White" people only act with racist ends in mind. In fact, singling them out more or less gives other racists a free pass.
Though, there is a mountain of evidence that qualitatively separates most major groups from one another. "Superiority" tends to be a defensive label. What is true is that any attempt at continued separation, which is common across most groups, is purely the prerogative of the in-group and they need not provide a justification nor evidence toward any such "superiority".
"Race" is a phenotypic variable. That is literally what it is.
Genotypic data does not suggest that there is not variation in the human species. Of course there is.
The problem with the concept of race, at least in America (where it is debated most frequently) is that it falls apart very quickly at the genotypic level. Particularly with populations that have been here multiple generations and have intermixed genetically.
It isn't, and it doesn't. You'll find the most significant racial distinction to be defined by the quality and quantity of hominid genetic admixture for any group.
Moreover, no one needs to give you or anyone else a genetic sample justification for in-group political action or exclusion of out-groups.
In other words, what the people of any one group overwhelmingly consider to be a part of their race will be the only politically functional goalpost. Who is accepted will be accepted and who is excluded will be excluded.
This is how it has always worked, and it dismisses any pretension to an abuse of science whose intent is to present politically prejudiced goalposts toward reaching political conclusions.
A person from Africa may look different than a person from Norway, but the two may in fact be more genetically similar than two "white" people from different countries.
Lol...just, no. You've been watching too many Marxist anthropology videos. The hominid admixture difference between the Black and White person, alone, will qualify them as remarkably different in contrast with any two (true, aka not Albino, etc.) "White" people on the planet.
When people mate, their DNA is randomly pooled together to create offspring. The appearance will depend on the randomization.
It's funny how this "randomization" works out in such a way that 99% of the time, a biracial child looks exactly like a combination of the races of the father and mother.
When a white person and a black person do the wild thing with each other, why doesn't the product of their mating turn out looking Chinese? Genetics is random, right?
Race is a lot of made up BS attempting to satisfy one of the strong internal biological imperatives of the homo sapien species: The need to divide into tribes.
No, its the difference in quantity and quality of hominid admixture.
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It is largely just a bunch of physical and genetic characteristics that came to dominate regions in isolation from the rest of the world.
No. Its the result of one modern human group mating with regional hominids. Travel technology was not available to the resulting "races" until sometime after (and not even then for many).
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Groups living nearer the equator all took on characteristically darker skin tone.
No. Equator dwelling hominids had darker skin tone. See any reconstruction of Homo Erectus, Habilis, etc.
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Those father North tended to have much lighter skin.
True, but that doesn't provide any significant information.
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There's even a gradual transition from darker to lighter as you move farther from the equator.
Almost all due to mixing between the very dark and the very light races on either side of those regions.
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You see this world-wide including Africa
North Africans are Arabs mixed with Europeans. Europeans used to dominate the region before the Arab invasion.
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to Europe,
LOL...where? Spain? Your attributing the racial mix in Spain or perhaps Italy to evolution?? This isn't even debatable. The invasions that changed these regions are relatively recent and very well documented.
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India
Dravidians are Central Asians (modern Europeans) mixed with another group.
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and Indo-China to China
East Asians are a modern human group mixed with East Asian Neanderthal and Denisovan.
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to Central Asia
Modern Central Asians are Western Europeans mixed with Mongoloid blood (Mongols). These are Turkish peoples. Original Central Asians (Cauc-Asians) now inhabit Western Europe.
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South/Central Americans
Asians (high Neanderthal / Denisovan admixture with a human group) with a tan and some minor (height, IQ, etc) adaptations to elevation, sun, and nutrient supply.
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to the Inuit/Eskimo peoples.
Literally the same stock as South Central Americans.
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It goes without saying that any given group living in isolation or a few millennia is going to take on distinct physical characteristics.
Most of your "distinct physical characteristics" come from one modern human group mating with hominids around the globe. Any actual environmental adaptations are both minor and tend to manifest excessively slowly. See the most minor of difference between AmerIndians and East Asians.
You'd have to justify significant evolutionary differences, which led to the phenotypically distinct races, from the point of the earliest modern human evidence that we have: which is Cro Magnid man only about thirty thousand years ago. It can't be done. Such a relatively wide difference, brought about solely by genetic mutation, could never come about that quickly.
Moreover, the difference in quality and quantity of hominid admixture provides a much clearer (more obvious) and better explanation for the differences. The genetic mutation theory, which depends on evolution from a single thirty thousand year old Cro Magnid group, is just that. And it doesn't hold water. Whereas we know for certain that we differ according to quality and quantity of hominid admixture. It is much more likely that this Cro Magnid group traveled and their women were raped by hominids (there is no hominid mtDNA lines in the human genepool, meaning that all cross breeding was male hominids with female humans) to create the difference in racial groups.
That is how we are so genetically similar but at the same time different, as well as phenotypically, behaviorally, etc different. We share most of our blood from one group, with the addition of the genetic admixture from various hominid groups accounting for the primary racial differences. The admixture percentage ranges from .5-7% (verified) or possibly greater for any modern human individual across the globe. Moreover, the type of hominid admixture varies and comes from multiple largely unrelated species (verified). That's an amazingly wide difference in genomic composition for differing human racial groups.
It's excessively racist that you think that "White" people only act with racist ends in mind. In fact, singling them out more or less gives other racists a free pass.
Though, there is a mountain of evidence that qualitatively separates most major groups from one another. "Superiority" tends to be a defensive label. What is true is that any attempt at continued separation, which is common across most groups, is purely the prerogative of the in-group and they need not provide a justification nor evidence toward any such "superiority".
Sorry it hurts, but it's true though. Race has no meaning except to categorize, and white people have historically (and generally still do) put themselves on top. It's woven within the fabric of our society.
Anyhow, if you compare two random white people or two random black people or two random Asian people, you'll find about as many differences between them as you would with two people of different races. (For the most part. There are geographic bottlenecks that affect this somewhat.)
That may have been a reasonable position to take before the DNA data started piling up. But we know now that our traditional notions of racial groups correspond very well to actual genetic population groups which arose in various parts of the world due to their geographic isolation from one another. Some people are very surprised when they send in their DNA sample and find out where their people are from. But the vast majority are not.
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Originally Posted by The Dark Enlightenment
Maybe, but races have phenotypic traits in common for an underlying reason: they are partially inbred family groups.
You have answered your own question: what is race?
An arbitrary grouping of human beings based on superficial qualities.
This^^
Like most people in the runner tribe, I have been interested in physical anthro books. I would by far not claim to be expert, but from what I've read the conventional wisdom is that race does not really exist. There can be greater genetic differences within a 'race' than from one 'race' to another.
Shaquille O'Neal and Haile Gebreselassie (marathon runner from Ethiopia) would both be considered of the 'black' race but I as a 'white' might have more genetically in common w/ Haile than Haile does w/ Shaq.
Thus the whole concept of 'race' is errant. It arbitrarily picks a single dimension of a multi-dimensional object as the key to classification of the object.
Sorry it hurts, but it's true though. Race has no meaning except to categorize, and white people have historically (and generally still do) put themselves on top. It's woven within the fabric of our society.
Anyhow, if you compare two random white people or two random black people or two random Asian people, you'll find about as many differences between them as you would with two people of different races. (For the most part. There are geographic bottlenecks that affect this somewhat.)
Liberals implicitly class white people as somehow set apart by their use of the term 'people of color.' It implicitly (and arbitrarily) divides the world into two groups: 'white,' and 'everyone else.'
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