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Why is the belief that the human species has races just like cats, dogs, cows, horses, etc. so widespread in the US culture? Even anti-racism rhetoric takes this absurd proposition as a fact. Take this article for example: all the cases where the author talks about ethnicity he uses "race" instead.
It's not just race. Ugly people are incredibly discriminated against. Attractive politicians receive two and a half times as many votes as unattractive ones. Attractive people are far more likely to get hired and get paid 14% more. Unattractive people are twice as likely to be convicted for the same crimes in court, and have to pay damages twice as high on average. http://lesswrong.com/lw/lj/the_halo_effect/
It's not just race. Ugly people are incredibly discriminated against. Attractive politicians receive two and a half times as many votes as unattractive ones. Attractive people are far more likely to get hired and get paid 14% more. Unattractive people are twice as likely to be convicted for the same crimes in court, and have to pay damages twice as high on average. http://lesswrong.com/lw/lj/the_halo_effect/
It's not just race. Ugly people are incredibly discriminated against. Attractive politicians receive two and a half times as many votes as unattractive ones. Attractive people are far more likely to get hired and get paid 14% more. Unattractive people are twice as likely to be convicted for the same crimes in court, and have to pay damages twice as high on average. http://lesswrong.com/lw/lj/the_halo_effect/
Good point. Whenever I read articles like this, I often wonder if we are over-optimizing for racial discrimination and under-optimizing for other other forms. Interestingly, the people who cry out the loudest for racial discrimination often could care less about the type of discrimination you just pointed out (from my experience).
Discrimination in all its forms are often hard to disentangle.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"There is great genetic diversity within all human populations. Pure races, in the sense of genetically homogenous populations, do not exist in the human species today, nor is there any evidence that they have ever existed in the past." - American Association of Physical Anthropologists, 1996 - http://www.virginia.edu/woodson/courses/aas102%20%28spring%2...
This is far from universally agreed on. >when examining the frequency of different alleles (variants of a particular gene) at an individual locus (the location of a particular gene) between individuals, it is nonetheless possible to classify individuals into different racial groups with an accuracy that approaches 100 percent when one takes into account the frequency of the alleles at several loci at the same time. T…
"We also showed that the genetic variation between dog breeds is much greater than the variation within breeds. Between-breed variation is estimated at 27.5 percent. By comparison, genetic variation between human populations is only 5.4 percent. Thus the concept of a dog breed is very real and can be defined not only by the dog's appearance but genetically as well." - http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/feature/2007/5/genet...
It's not just race. Ugly people are incredibly discriminated against. Attractive politicians receive two and a half times as many votes as unattractive ones. Attractive people are far more likely to get hired and get paid 14% more. Unattractive people are twice as likely to be convicted for the same crimes in court, and have to pay damages twice as high on average. http://lesswrong.com/lw/lj/the_halo_effect/
And height. People are more willing to vote for a tall person. Tall people get paid more. etc...
Articles like this always leave out Asians because it does not fit the narrative and forces you to think about culture as a main factor.
The fact that Asians have "done well" in no way implies the lack of racism - and we face plenty of it ourselves, though certainly not to the same tune as blacks and hispanics in this country.
While we're not stereotyped as criminals or parasites, we are stereotyped as weak and single-minded. Asian-American representation in management (or even just technical leadership) is disproportionate to their representation in the rank and file as a result. We also suffer from a whole boatload of "positive" stereotypes that ultimately prove limiting as second- and third-generation Asian-Americans try to exceed the stereotypically associated roles for them.
Try talking to an Asian artist or musician and see how the "logical and good at math" stereotypes works for them.
I do a lot of hiring. It drives me crazy that applicant names (which signal gender and ethnicity) are literally the first thing I see in our candidate screening system. So I wrote a GreaseMonkey script to replace candidate names with dictionary words. It isn't perfect -- names show up on resumes, and every other stage if the hiring process. I wish name-substitution were a standard feature of these systems!
On HackerNews, iirc, there was an article a while ago about someone writing a script to automatically respond to housing ads, as he had a lot of trouble finding an apartment somewhere in Germany, Munich I believe. Ah I found it. So what he'd do is send out applications where he could just change out the name and see which ones get the best response. Here's the quote I wanted to highlight:
> The conclusion from this little study, is that a girl with an italian name, gets an 90% answer rate, a guy with an arab name and is younger than 25 gets, 1% answer rate. The master of all, is the young munich guy who is around 25
As someone with an Arab name, this can get a little bit depressing :p And while I try to stay away from conjuring up victimization plots against me (I'd absolutely hate to go through life feeling as if my ethnicity is holding me back and that any trouble finding an apartment or a job must be at least in part related to this), I can't help but say that it feels familiar to personal experiences, as much as I hate to say it about myself.
So what you're doing is absolutely awesome :) Thank you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good point. Whenever I read articles like this, I often wonder if we are over-optimizing for racial discrimination and under-optimizing for other other forms. Interestingly, the people who cry out the loudest for racial discrimination often could care less about the type of discrimination you just pointed out (from my experience).
The two concepts are IMO not so easily separable - see the widespread finding of blacks in the US to be "unattractive". Attractiveness is, despite the loud griping of evo-psych proponents, largely cultural. Our perceptions of race, of gender roles, of etc etc, contribute greatly to attraction. Discrimination in all its forms are often hard to disentangle.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You missed my point. No, the human species doesn't have races in the scientific sense. What you shouldn't assume is that all mentions of the word "race" are referring to the scientific concept. Quoting census.gov: The racial categories included in the census questionnaire generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this country and not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically, or gene…
If this "social definition" of race is accepted and somehow washed of its original meaning, why keep on using "racism" with the obviously disconnected meaning? How is racism defined in this brave new world of semantic chameleonism? As a synonym for xenophobia?
As for xenophobia and racism, from UNESCO: Xenophobia and racism often overlap, but are distinct phenomena. Whereas racism usually entails distinction based on physical characteristic differences, such as skin colour, hair type, facial features, etc, xenophobia implies behaviour based on the idea that the other is foreign to or originates from outside the community or nation.