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non_radical_centrist  8mo ago (astralcodexten.com)   2897 thread views

How Should We Think About Race And "Lived Experience"?

astralcodexten.com

I'm generally a fan of "blurry" definitions where something can qualify as X if it fulfills a few of many criteria. I think trying to create hard rules around blurry areas like race and culture is fool's errand, and Scott does a great job laying out how overly strict definitions can go wrong.

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African populations have more genetic diversity within different sub-populations as an example.

That's a neat bit of trivia, but not remarkable either. Sticking with the color example, there's more diversity in wavelengths in "Red" (130 nm) than in "Green", "Yellow", and "Orange" combined (125 nm). Groups aren't always the same size, so "African" being more diverse than "European" and "Asian" combined isn't (wouldn't be?) notable.

In addition, the elision between discussing West/Central black African genetics (from which black Americans draw the majority of their ancestry) and African genetics as a whole is another common and classic tactic to distract, when the Western discourse is centered around black Americans. Africa contains populations such as North Africans who are more closely related to other Mediterranean populations (albeit with some more recent black admixture related to reasons such as the slave trade and/or Arab expansion), Ethiopians (who have significant Arab ancestry), Khoisan (who were the first to branch off from the rest of humanity), African pygmies (the second to branch off from the rest of humanity), the Malagasy (who were originally Austronesian).

It'd be like trying to poo-poo the genetic differences between birds and non-Avian dinosaurs because the majority of Archosaurian genetic diversity is found within crocodilians, pterosaurs, and non-Avian dinosaurs.

On a side note, African pygmies have long been on the wrong side of systematic replacement, genocide, rape, and even cannibalism from their West/Central black African neighbors, persisting to this day. Somehow, this phenomenon remains largely undiscussed in mainstream Western discourse.

and even cannibalism from their West/Central black African neighbors, persisting to this day.

Joke: a black African caught a pygmy and cooks him on a spit. An European walks by, sees it and says "No, you cannot eat people!". The African in surprise responds he doesn't. The Europeran points to the pygmy and asks "What's this?". -- "AAh, but it itsn't a human"

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