There's no such thing as racial equality... Fact.

Culture is the dominate attribute for behavior, not race.
If you are raised in an environment of vicious bitches and thieves, you WILL behave differently than if you were raised in a caring environment of politeness and charity.

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SkyCore wrote:

Culture is the dominate attribute for behavior, not race.
If you are raised in an environment of vicious bitches and thieves, you WILL behave differently than if you were raised in a caring environment of politeness and charity.

The good old nature vs. nurture debate.

The developments of genetic biology and studies in the past twenty-something years tend towards the importance of genes. If you're wondering how scientists tell if genes or the environment are more important, they look for identical twins separated since early childhood who grew up in different environments and look for similarities and differences. You'll see this scenario with adopted children.

The conclusion? We, of course, react to our environment. However, our genes determine how we react. I recommend Living With Our Genes, a great book with a variety of fascinating information on this and many other topics.

Place two people with different genes in the same environment, and they'll react in vastly different and often opposite ways to it. Another great book discusses this phenomenon: Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. He's a Nazi death camp survivor and describes how in these inhuman, hellish conditions some people turned into monsters and animals, but others turned into saints.

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solwitch wrote:

The interesting part is, it's the materialistic/wealth in this present that dictates which race is superior.

This is the biggest key, economic status determines your social place far more than race. But when this is true and it's also true that we live in a time in which income inequality has been extreme for decades along with something like 43% of persons born into poverty not making it out of poverty - meaning limited upward mobility - and those trends having an impact on minorities disproportionately for various reasons it does suggest some level of (economic) racial inequality.

Overall the stagnate, low wages and the extremely high cost of higher education means for a lot of people if you didn't get your 4 year degree right out of high school it's going to be extremely difficult to get it as an adult. Which is imo the biggest problem. Minorities born into poverty aren't typically getting the proper home or school environment to get into college out of high school on scholarships etc which means they'll have to go back as an adult which can easily be cost prohibitive, feeding a vicious cycle.

I don't agree with the ones who claim that race is a social construct. Humans are the only species in the animal kingdom these people want to make separate classifications for. I'm just pointing out an obvious fact here, but if you had some other species of animal, they wouldn't be classified the same if they were as different in appearance between each other as many of the Human races are. There might be some snowflakes who don't like hearing this but if me saying this makes you melt, then melt. #dontcare

Anything view that doesn't involve acknowledging our differences and respecting each other despite our differences, isn't serious about addressing race, IMO.

Nobody with any amount of rhetoric or word games is going to convince me that race is purely a social construct.

I've heard this one a lot "We're 99.9% similar DNA wise". Well, humans also share 60% of their DNA with a banana. Proud 60% Banana here..... And 0.1% is the difference between someone who's mentally retarded and someone who's a genius. It's also the difference between someone who looks like a Greek God, and someone who looks like they got beat with an ugly stick, then run over by the ugly truck. If such a stark contrast can made between such a minor difference, then don't underestimate the impact of 0.1% when it comes to genetic differences. Because that seemingly small amount can make a night and day difference in reality.

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MrSmiley21 wrote:

I don't agree with the ones who claim that race is a social construct. Humans are the only species in the animal kingdom these people want to make separate classifications for. I'm just pointing out an obvious fact here, but if you had some other species of animal, they wouldn't be classified the same if they were as different in appearance between each other as many of the Human races are. There might be some snowflakes who don't like hearing this but if me saying this makes you melt, then melt. #dontcare

Anything view that doesn't involve acknowledging our differences and respecting each other despite our differences, isn't serious about addressing race, IMO.

Nobody with any amount of rhetoric or word games is going to convince me that race is purely a social construct.

I've heard this one a lot "We're 99.9% similar DNA wise". Well, humans also share 60% of their DNA with a banana. Proud 60% Banana here..... And 0.1% is the difference between someone who's mentally retarded and someone who's a genius. It's also the difference between someone who looks like a Greek God, and someone who looks like they got beat with an ugly stick, then run over by the ugly truck. If such a stark contrast can made between such a minor difference, then don't underestimate the impact of 0.1% when it comes to genetic differences. Because that seemingly small amount can make a night and day difference in reality.

Quite. Bolded the part I like the most.

Even a single gene, which is such a small part of the DNA molecule it can't be expressed in a meaningful percentage, can have a tremendous impact.

The problem with most people is, they think there's this great fence, and it has two sides, and you have to pick one. You're either racist or liberal. It's either the environment, or the genes. Race is either supremely important, or a social construct.

There are no sides. Everything is important. Genes matter. The environment also matters. Race is both a genetic difference and a social construct.

Of course, if everything is important, nothing is.

We get all worked up about words, and words are just an illusion. Everyone attributes them some meaning, and the meanings are all different, and everyone is so fucking sure that their particular illusion is more real than everyone else's.

Madness :)

I don't even think all "Caucasians" or "Asians", etc, are the same group. There are distinct differences from Northern and Southern Europeans, and even Eastern Europeans.

The same goes even for Black people from different parts of Africa. Black people in the horn of Africa have a different look and appearance from Black people in Sub Saharan Africa for example.

Arabs and people from India are considered broadly Caucasian, most of them don't look anything like Europeans who are also considered Caucasian.

Asians vary widely as well. You have East Asians, South East Asians, and even some tribes of Native Americans, like the Inuits are considered to be Asians.

Then you got Polynesians/Pacific Islanders who are different from any of the above groups.

Same goes for Aboriginals from Australia.

There even used to be a race of Pygmies that they believe existed up until a few centuries ago.

"We're all the same" just doesn't hold any water. Just because someone acknowledges there are differences, doesn't mean they hate someone just because they're a different group.

Absolutely. Even in China itself there were 50 different peoples up until recently, and they all had their own language. The writing system may be the same, but I've read the difference and variance between the languages within China are greater than in Europe. The differences aren't just in the language.

I've also read the genetic variance between African people is much greater than between Caucasians.

And the most glaring difference of all: a Caucasian woman on Quora once tried to argue with me that men and women are basically the same, they're just raised in different ways and that's all there is to it. It was in response to a talk about men's higher aggression scores and what causes them (testosterone, the MAOA gene, different functions in prehistoric societies and yes, even the environment).

I refuse to classify myself in the same species as her :D

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Bars wrote:

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

Few of the things you're appealing to are inherent to race. You might as well say "there's no such thing as racial equality because racism ensures that some people are worse off than others. The goal is to reduce racial inequality.

Would you dispute that there are pronounced and observable differences in the physical capabilities of different races? Are sports racist - or perhaps the Chinese and the Indians are generally less suited for basketball players than whites and blacks?

I'd say that if you're going to talk about biological differences between different "races", you need to first define the term. When I speak of race, I am referring entirely to the social construct - the social concept that we can divide people into "black", "white", "asian", etc. I'm fairly convinced that "race" isn't actually a thing. While clearly certain populations have different haplotypes, with the exception of certain very specific populations (for example Nepalese Sherpas, who have a fairly distinctive haplogroup distribution), the result is that nurture (particularly culture and nutrition) is often far more important of a factor than genetics when it comes to ability in sports.

I have to go, I'll respond further later. Check out C0nc0rdance's videos on race if you'd like a geneticist's take on the issue. Short version: there are either hundreds of "races", or just one.

If you read a bit further in the thread, you'll see I and Mr. Smiley agree and support the hundreds of races option. They can nevertheless be grouped in some larger categories based on common patterns. Anyway, what I'm objecting to is the delusional attempts to explain everything with nurture.

Nurture is important, nature is important too. That's all.

About athletic ability and nurture being more important: depends how you look at it. Bad childhood conditions can certainly be restrictive and damaging to athletic ability, but you can't create a gifted athlete simply by good upbringing. The environment is supremely important mostly as a damaging and restrictive factor.

Ask any coach from any sports field about it. They can gather a bunch of kids, put them through a few tests, and they always know which kids have it and which don't. No amount of nurture can change that.

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Bars wrote:

a Caucasian woman on Quora once tried to argue with me that men and women are basically the same, they're just raised in different ways and that's all there is to it

You had a talk with an educated feminist, it's what this ideology revolves around.

The majority of people think it's about social gender equality, while it's mostly about the biological gender equality. The social part is secondary but widely promoted, as it's easier to digest.