Talk:race

To say here, too... This article intends to describe the concept of race, not the "fact" that "races" exist. Article is full of US and right-wingers shit and it should be rearranged. However, there are a lot of useful materials. I'll add POV template for the beginning... I would appreciate any kind of help in editing the article. --Millosh 06:57, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

I agree. I've worked a bit on the Wikipedia article and was frustrated by the right wing racist bias. I am a biologists and so I think I understand the biology well. I'll have a go at editing this article in the near future. Cheers. Alun

Removed references

Here is the list of removed references from original Wikipedia article. Maybe it may be useful. For sure, it should be analyzed in the future:

1. Bamshad, Michael and Steve E. Olson. "Does Race Exist?"Scientific American Magazine (10 November 2003). Removed as article (at least in the context of the Wikipedia article) supports existence of "races".

I have read the document... it does not support the existence of "races". In fact it says that 90% of the genetic variability occours within any population, only the remaining 10% can eventually aid in determining the population a person is from. It was referenced by Wikipedia in a misleading way, in my opinion. ~Rev 22 19:35, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Well it's still relevant. In fact no genetic research supports the existence of "races". We should not include only referecnes that support the existence of so called "race", we should include all scientific points of view. Michael Bamshad is a very well known geneticist and he does know what he is talking about. Alun

Large deletions of material.

I'm not entirely sure all of that should have been deletion. Debate within an article is healthy. Ideas that disagree with anarchism shouldn't be removed entirely, but counter-arguments should be added. Zazaban 02:59, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

From my point of view it's not that the ideas are in disagreement with anarchism per se, but that they are only tangentially related to "race". In my opinion the article is best served concentrating on what "race" is. As such I think we can say that it is clearly possible to distinguish groups of people with ancestry from geographically distant parts of the world without necessarily having to explain that the police in different parts of the world use these differences in their work. As for the "race" in medicine section, well this is a very controversial question, and even the proponents of so called "racialised medicine" have conceded that they are not really talking about "race". "Race and intelligence" is pseudoscientific claptrap and only exists to justify right wing claims that people are poor because they are stupid (take a look at the "Bell Curve" where this claim is made explicitly, according to that book poor people are poor because they are stupid, so it's just capitalism rewarding clever people). This article is mainly pasted from the "race" article in Wikipedia, the article in Wikipedia is far too long, and repeats itself a lot. As long as we can discuss why the concept was invented. Talk about racism, the main result of the concept. Say that, yes, there is such a thing as geographically distributed genetic and physical variation within the human population, but that intensive study of this variation has led scientists to conclude that the global classification of humans into discrete groups is impossible based on this variation. We can then have a section about "race" as a social construct, which is what it is. This represents a quite comprehensive discussion of the subject. Part of the problem lies in the dominance of the USA in the discussion and there are several reasons for this. The first is that in the USA "race" seems like a real concept, this is because the USA has some specific historical issues with the concept that other regions of the world do not have, these include: a history of slavery, the Jim Crow laws, segregation, the one drop rule (and the concurrent invention of the "color line"), Anti-miscegenation laws and a strong eugenics movement. The different ethnic groups of the USA are primarily descended from peoples from very different parts of the world, Native Americans, Europeans, West Africans, East Asians, this gives the impression that these groups are distinct, even though when one looks at the global distribution of physical/genetic variation in intermediate groups we see no clear discontinuities. Anti-miscegenation laws in the USA have reinforced the idea that these groups have not mixed and have lead to the idea of a "color line", the one drop rule effectively means someone will be considered African-American if they have certain traits, even if they have a majority European ancestry. Indeed the USA still collects data on "race" when they hold a census. These deep beliefs in artificial black/white endogamous groups are evident in nearly all Wikipedia articles that deal with "race". Take a look, there are very many articles on Wikipedia with the word "race" in the title, something that shocked me when I first started editing there. Because of the dominance of the USA on the internet, and their unusual history regarding the concept of "race" it distorts the picture and leads to an artificially high footprint for this concept. It also leads to an artificially long Wikipedia article. The section on "race in law enforcement" doesn't add value, or information to the article about the concept of "race" in my opinion. The section on "race and intelligence" should never be included because it is the work of a few swivel eyed racists who get their funding from far right groups and proponents of eugenics, people like Arthur Jensen and Phillipe Rushton are just racists, pure and simple, their conclusions are not drawn from anything like good science and rely on a smoke and mirrors approach to statistical manipulation rather than sound scientific investigation. Their basic premise rests on the concept of heritability, but it preys on the fact that most casual observers don't know the difference between heritability and heredity and they deliberately conflate these concepts in their arguments. There's no space for justifying the claims of far right influenced pseudoscience in the article, they have as much credibility as the clams of eugenicists in the 1920s and 1930s in the USA and Germany, if we include it then it should be included in the racism section along with other examples of racism. I don't mean to say that we should not address the issue of human variation and how it is understood or used in medicine or even in policing, but this does not mean that these need their own sections. We can have a discussion about human variation and include a brief mention that this variation is used by police during investigations, but especially in medicine the idea of "racialised medicine" is very tricky, and even those medical researchers who promote this idea can't define what they mean by "race", what they really mean is normal human genetic variation, not sharp biological discontinuities between different "types" of people. So I see the purpose of the article is primarily to discuss "race" as a concept,

• History (why the concept was invented)
• Racism (concequences of the concept)
• Biology (why biologists/anthropologists reject the concept)
• Social construction (identity, how social scientists see "race")

Of course this is just how I see the article. If you have any specific concerns about what I have removed then of course we can discuss how and where to restore these sections, or even restoring them in full. All the best. Alun 18:09, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Then, I suggest some of the deleted material be moved to racism, where it would fit much better. Zazaban 18:27, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree, the "race and intelligence" stuff would fit better there. Alun 05:39, 14 April 2008 (UTC)