Race Statistics are Overvalued

[WellIntentioned101]

Race stats matter, because when you bring in more of a certain group who are say more murderous, then the neighborhood will continue to become more murderous as you increase the concentrations of that race.

Explain how this doesn't matter?

Once again I think you are misunderstanding my point. My point isn't that statistics can't be used to analyze data based on certain factors to assess whether there is a correlation between various things. What I am trying to say is that the different race categories are not well defined categories and so they are poor categories to use when you look at data. Like I have already said, what defines a black person? What defines a white person? When you hear that blacks commit more crimes, specifically which individuals are you talking about? There is no objective measure that separates a black person from a white person or a latino person from a native american person. Take this description of race from wikipedia for example:

"A race is a grouping of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into categories generally viewed as inherently distinct by society. First used to refer to speakers of a common language and then to denote national affiliations, by the 17th century the term race began to refer to physical (phenotypical) traits. Modern scholarship regards race as a social construct, that is, a symbolic identity created to establish some cultural meaning. While partially based on physical similarities within groups, race is not an inherent physical or biological quality.[1][2]"

The groupings are based sometimes on physical traits, sometimes on social qualities, and sometimes it is just a part of your identity. So once again we could go back to the question, what does it mean to say black people commit more crimes? Well if we are talking about differences in physical traits, then why don't we look at the correlation between specific physical features and likelihood to commit a crime? If we are talking about social/cultural qualities, then why don't we look at the correlation between people who celebrate Christmas and people who commit crimes? If we are talking about identities then to ask if blacks commit more crimes is to ask if people who identify as black commit more crimes. And as we are seeing with the transgender movement, anyone can say they identify with anything, so that is not a useful category either.

The last point I'd like to make is that I am not saying that people can't attempt to use race categories in statistics. Considering a question on the US census asks about race (which I think it shouldn't for all these same reasons), I think it's perfectly reasonable to use any and every category to assess data. The title of this post is that race statistics are overvalued. The media, the government, and other groups in the US have made race statistics the most important statistics, to the point where you can't have a discussion about anything without bringing up race and race statistics. I think that race statistics are not very useful for helping to solve problems in America and I think that it could be argued they do more harm than good, but I'll leave that argument for another time.

 

[WellIntentioned101]

Many have argued that race is not real and I would both agree and disagree. Race is real in a similar way to how state boundaries are real. Races are subjective categories defined by imaginary lines that define some people by skin color, some by ancestral origins, and some by community affiliation. Race is real in the sense that it has been defined into existence. Race is not real in the sense that it is not an objective measure. Height is real, eye color is real, IQ is real-- objectively real, they can be measured or observed reliably. This is where my issue with racial statistics begins. What is race? Is it skin color? If so, why are there so many different shades of black and white people? Are there no differences between peach-colored people and olive-colored people? Is race about ancestry? If so, are there no differences between all of the people who immigrated from East Asia over the past couple hundred years? When you hear a statistic that says something like "one in four Latino men are at risk for diabetes" or "black children are however many times more likely to end up in prison than white children," what information are you really getting? When terms like white, black, latino, and asian are so loosely defined (they are also very often self-reported), attempting to correlate them to concrete data like income becomes extremely trivial. Why not let people self-report their skin color from a list of options and see the wage gap between milk-chocolate colored people and chestnut colored people? When you change the boundary lines for these categories we call race, the stats start to sound pretty useless. I think in a lot of cases, these stats end up being more harmful than beneficial. I could go into a whole anti-identity politics argument but I think I'll just stop here.

Echoes of a Prehistoric Horror

The races each evolved from different primate species; some long ago reached their evolutionary expiration date but are still hanging on because of the decadent rule suffocating the evolved races.

Whereas this is a legitimate theory of human origins called polygenism, it is widely accepted as false. I have not looked into all the data to make a comprehensive argument about this but monogenism, also loosely referred to as a branch of the "out of Africa" model, is where consensus on human origins lies. This is the idea that we all came from a single common ancestor regardless of race.

 

[rightwinger]

Many have argued that race is not real and I would both agree and disagree. Race is real in a similar way to how state boundaries are real. Races are subjective categories defined by imaginary lines that define some people by skin color, some by ancestral origins, and some by community affiliation. Race is real in the sense that it has been defined into existence. Race is not real in the sense that it is not an objective measure. Height is real, eye color is real, IQ is real-- objectively real, they can be measured or observed reliably. This is where my issue with racial statistics begins. What is race? Is it skin color? If so, why are there so many different shades of black and white people? Are there no differences between peach-colored people and olive-colored people? Is race about ancestry? If so, are there no differences between all of the people who immigrated from East Asia over the past couple hundred years? When you hear a statistic that says something like "one in four Latino men are at risk for diabetes" or "black children are however many times more likely to end up in prison than white children," what information are you really getting? When terms like white, black, latino, and asian are so loosely defined (they are also very often self-reported), attempting to correlate them to concrete data like income becomes extremely trivial. Why not let people self-report their skin color from a list of options and see the wage gap between milk-chocolate colored people and chestnut colored people? When you change the boundary lines for these categories we call race, the stats start to sound pretty useless. I think in a lot of cases, these stats end up being more harmful than beneficial. I could go into a whole anti-identity politics argument but I think I'll just stop here.

Consider paragraphs

 

[abu afak]

Once again I think you are misunderstanding my point. My point isn't that statistics can't be used to analyze data based on certain factors to assess whether there is a correlation between various things. What I am trying to say is that the different race categories are not well defined categories and so they are poor categories to use when you look at data. Like I have already said, what defines a black person? What defines a white person? When you hear that blacks commit more crimes, specifically which individuals are you talking about? There is no objective measure that separates a black person from a white person or a latino person from a native american person. Take this description of race from wikipedia for example:

"A race is a grouping of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into categories generally viewed as inherently distinct by society. First used to refer to speakers of a common language and then to denote national affiliations, by the 17th century the term race began to refer to physical (phenotypical) traits. Modern scholarship regards race as a social construct, that is, a symbolic identity created to establish some cultural meaning. While partially based on physical similarities within groups, race is not an inherent physical or biological quality.[1][2]"

The groupings are based sometimes on physical traits, sometimes on social qualities, and sometimes it is just a part of your identity. So once again we could go back to the question, what does it mean to say black people commit more crimes? Well if we are talking about differences in physical traits, then why don't we look at the correlation between specific physical features and likelihood to commit a crime? If we are talking about social/cultural qualities, then why don't we look at the correlation between people who celebrate Christmas and people who commit crimes? If we are talking about identities then to ask if blacks commit more crimes is to ask if people who identify as black commit more crimes. And as we are seeing with the transgender movement, anyone can say they identify with anything, so that is not a useful category either.

The last point I'd like to make is that I am not saying that people can't attempt to use race categories in statistics. Considering a question on the US census asks about race (which I think it shouldn't for all these same reasons), I think it's perfectly reasonable to use any and every category to assess data. The title of this post is that race statistics are overvalued. The media, the government, and other groups in the US have made race statistics the most important statistics, to the point where you can't have a discussion about anything without bringing up race and race statistics. I think that race statistics are not very useful for helping to solve problems in America and I think that it could be argued they do more harm than good, but I'll leave that argument for another time.

Your posts are full of crap/intentional ambiguation.

Have races mixed in good degree? Sure. That doesn't mean they don't exist.
Ther most common colloquial usage is 'black'.
American Blacks are, on average, 75% sub-Saharan and 25% Euro/White/Cauc.
A recent admixture, sharing some features of two RACES.

Ausralian Aboriginals, tho also people of color, are a very different Race than sub-Saharans.

Race is not just skin color, it's SETS of features born of tens of thousands of years of separate geographical evolution.

One must distinguish the colloquial and scientific usage.
Race IS Real and is used by Physical and Forensic anthropologists Daily.

And contrary to your assertion, racial self-identification is unbelievable Accurate.

Genetic Structure, Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity, and Confounding in Case-Control Association Studies
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1196372/
Hua Tang,1 Tom Quertermous,2 Beatriz Rodriguez,4 Sharon L. R. Kardia,5
Xiaofeng Zhu,6 Andrew Brown,7 James S. Pankow,8 Michael A. Province,9
Steven C. Hunt,10 Eric Boerwinkle,11 Nicholas J. Schork,12 and Neil J. Risch3,13

Abstract
We have analyzed genetic data for 326 microsatellite markers that were typed uniformly in a large multiethnic population-based sample of individuals as part of a study of the genetics of hypertension (Family Blood Pressure Program). Subjects identified themselves as belonging to one of Four Major racial/ethnic groups (white, African American, East Asian, and Hispanic) and were recruited from 15 different geographic locales within the United States and Taiwan.

Genetic cluster analysis of the microsatellite markers produced four major clusters, which showed near-Perfect correspondence with the Four Self-reported race/ethnicity categories. Of 3,636 subjects of varying race/ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic cluster membership different from their self-identified race/ethnicity. On the other hand, we detected only modest genetic differentiation between different current geographic locales within each race/ethnicity group. Thus, ancient geographic ancestry, which is highly correlated with self-identified race/ethnicity—as opposed to current residence—is the major determinant of genetic structure in the U.S. population. Implications of this genetic structure for case-control association studies are discussed.
[......]​

Really, these uneducated/2c opinions of people who have NO scientific basis, are worthless, and usually PC nonsense.
`

 

[harmonica]

when a certain race commits crime at much higher rates, it does matter and tells the truth

 

[harmonica]

Blacks commit more crime. We don't need a scientist to tell us that. You just ask a corrections officer.

That's not what the UCR says.

yes they do ---

 

[MizMolly]

Of course race is real, that's why forensics are able to determine someone's race with nothing but DNA and/or bones as evidence.

Show me a forensic specialist who can tell a racial difference on the bones of one year old and I’ll show you a liar

The concept of race isn't biological. It's socially defined. No matter what physical trait you try to isolate you can find examples of those traits that are more pronounced in other ethnic groups.

The question of racial affiliation is difficult to answer because although racial classification has some biological components, it's based primarily on social affiliation.

Anthropologists, forensic pathologists don't really consult much outside their own workplace or would be eager to testify in court to justify their determinations (Most stick to minimal use as a shorthand in their ordinary duties)

There is a great deal of science in this field. Anthropological reconstructionists throw around a blizzard of numbers and try and sound smart "The thickness of the skin at the apex of the the zygomatic arch of in a female of X ethnicity and Y body size is typically Z mm, per the standard tables"

This precision shouldn't be mistaken for equivalent accuracy. In fact, many of the leading facial reconstructors in the US are primarily sculptors who have studied the anthropometry and data, rather than the PhDs who gather that data.

Look - You can not tell the race from the bones alone. If there are clothes, soft tissue then it is another thing, but you originally claimed that they can determine the race from the bones. No you can't.

They look at a lot of other things mainly environment. It's not what you think like "O there is a bone....and that belongs to white person"

Dark skin occurs in warmer climates so too do other physiological features which enable a population to better survive and thrive in a particular environment. However, this also means that it is passed-on, since Black people in Chicago don’t suddenly get white skin. This demonstrates the sheer length of time necessary for any environmental constraint to affect our physiology on a genetic level.

So environmental factors which affect us and our ancestors shape the physical features we ascribe as part of the definition for race.

Which is why a forensic anthropologist can often determine race from bones yet geneticists can prove that distant populations are more closely related than troops of chimps.

Which is why we see people of different races as looking different, yet none is greater or lesser than another.

There is only one race - The human race. That's not me being PC and liberal. That's just how it is.

And this evidence from the human genome project.

There are very minor differences in the frequency of certain genes within human populations. But here’s the point all genes are the same across the human species.

This is why blood transfusions and bone marrow transplants work. This is why Asians can give blood to African descended people. This is why a black man's blood can save an white man’s life with a transfusion.and do so on a daily basis.. Some blood types have an affinity for certain groups of people but the genes are the same.

The racist pseudoscience promoted by Europeans white supremacists justified racism. Well, I must say, the propaganda machine has worked for about 500 yrs.

I know you don't like what I'm saying here since like many on USMB you're trying so hard to be a serious guy and give scientific arguments on race, but what I saId (if you've read this far) is the way it is.

Racial identification based on skeletal remains isn’t foolproof, but it’s generally reliable.