Discussion on question by Sursula: How should I address racist comments from a superior?

The common usage of "race" attempts to draw inference on genotype from observable phenotypes. This is how all phylogenetics used to work, but has been roundly discredited by the invention of DNA sequencing which has shown that convergent evolution is quite capable of giving rise to very similar phenotypes but completely different genotypes.

This is why the modern DNA-based species phylogenetic trees are sometimes quite different to those of the 19th century which were based on phenotypic similarity.

@NetServOps: Apologies for bringing up this matter yet again, but your comment "I'll say it again, race has absolutely nothing to do with culture or language." really puzzles me. Race is clearly not about physical traits in any biologically meaningful way (please see my lengthy quotes from Encyclopedia Britannica above) - so if you claim that it is not about culture or language either, then what is it actually about?

A few paragraphs further: "At no point, from the first rudimentary attempts at classifying human populations in the 17th and 18th centuries to the present day, have scientists agreed on the number of races of humankind, the features to be used in the identification of races, or the meaning of race itself."

And again a bit further: "Although most people continue to think of races as physically distinct populations, scientific advances in the 20th century demonstrated that human physical variations do not fit a 'racial' model. Instead, human physical variations tend to overlap. There are no genes that can identify distinct groups that accord with the conventional race categories."

@user2647513: The article "Race (Human)" in Encyclopedia Britannica begins with the following paragraph:

"Race, the idea that the human species is divided into distinct groups on the basis of inherited physical and behavioral differences. Genetic studies in the late 20th century refuted the existence of biogenetically distinct races, and scholars now argue that 'races' are cultural interventions reflecting specific attitudes and beliefs that were imposed on different populations in the wake of western European conquests beginning in the 15th century."

Since this is academia; human races don't exist in biology. There aren't even subspecies. It is then a linguistic construct, and can contain anything. Usually it means skin color. As such, migrants can certainly be a "race", as can muslims.

@JohnEye Interesting, but I think it's telling that the paper you cite chooses to measure the number of people "registered for suspicion" of crime (a phrase which no-one else findable with Google ever uses, but which I'm guessing is a Swedish equivalent of "arrested" or "interviewed under caution"), rather than the number of people actually convicted. If my Google Scholar search found evidence that immigrants are less likely than natives to commit crime, and yours found evidence that immigrants are more likely than natives to be arrested, what does that tell us?

@NetServOps I am not certain where exactly you are going with "most times they do not assimilate so they continue to speak their native tongue and may not make an effort to mix with the communities they live in" without providing even anecdotal evidence. I have met many migrants and first-generation descendants of migrants in my life and most (if not all) of them could speak multiple languages, including the official language of the country where they resided. By the way, what about "western" migrants in countries like UAE (can most of them speak Arabic)?

To take a silly analogy, consider a large room full of round objects of different colors. Some are rocks and some are balls. You could easily group all red spheres, be they rocks or balls, but that doesn't mean that rocks and balls are generally more similar.

In the same way, you can identify specific genomic variants that allow you to cluster individuals into groups matching their ethnicity, and at the same time it can be true that there is a greater level of variation within each group than across groups.

When grouping, you would look for specific alleles, specific sequence variants, that segregate with the group. So the two Africans may share a specific group of variants that allows you to place them in the same cluster. That, however, does not mean that their entire genomes are more similar to each other, it only means that they share specific sequences. So their genomes could still differ more significantly than either of theirs and the European's.

That inter-population variation is greater than intra-population variation and that humans can be grouped into distinct clusters based on genetic features are not mutually exclusive. Two people of African descent may indeed have more dissimilar genomes than a person of African descent and one of European, and at the same time it may be possible to group the two Africans together based on their genetic sequence. The question is what you look at.

@JochenGlueck Certainly didn't mean to come across as 'snarky' though I concede that my language can be blunt at times. I have no ill will towards you, we simply disagree which is fine. I've actually enjoyed the discussion and hope we can have another disagreement in future :)

> We find that commonly used ethnic labels are both insufficient and inaccurate representations of the inferred genetic clusters, and that drug-metabolizing profiles, defined by the distribution of DME variants, differ significantly among the clusters. We note, however, that the complexity of human demographic history means that there is no obvious natural clustering scheme, nor an obvious appropriate degree of resolution

@NetServOps That simply supports the existence of meaningful sub-groups, not of actual races. If you define sub-groups by the presence of specific genetic variants that affect disease susceptibility, this is perfectly reasonable. The problem is trying to extract information that supports the social construct of "race" from such data. For example, you might be able to cluster Finns and Spaniards into different groups, but I don't think anyone would say those two are a different race.

I would, however, sincerely appreciate scientific evidence for the following two claims you made: (i) "the influence of genes and culture on behavior and social outcome [is] a [...] not invalid subject." (ii) That any of the things you mentioned gives rise to a scientifically sound biological definition of "race".

But please note that "races" are meant to be a categorization of human population into certain subsets. Of course you can, in general, categorize any population however you wish to, and for different purposes different categorisations might be useful. The point about race is that it is meant to be a categorization that is somehow intrinsically biological - this only made sense if the genetic data of mankind were divided into several more or less clearly separated clusters.

Yet, the largest (and, in my opinion, more fundamental) part of the article from Encyclopaedia Britannica makes a different point, namely that it is not possible to give a biologically meaningful definition of "race". This point carries a lot of weight since it refers to strong scienctific evidence. You have not commented on this point from the Encyclopaedia Britannica; may I ask about your persepctive on this?

Sorry, fat finger - was aiming for backspace and hit enter -- Last sentence should read It doesn't make a difference to the definition whether the people in the grouping are "correctly considered" or "incorrectly considered" to have common physical characteristics or shared ancestry.

... it's also interesting how neatly one of the OED's other definitions of "race" sidesteps @JochenGlueck's point: the definition is "groupings into which humankind is considered (in various theories or contexts) to be divided on the basis of physical characteristics or shared ancestry." It dohe definition whether they're "corrrectly considered..." or "inc

@NetServOps If you think that's "laughable", then take it up with the compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary, who include "A group of people sharing the same culture, history, language, etc." as one of their definitions of "race".

@NetServOps I wasn't talking about propositions that have a truth value, I was talking about the definitions of some natural-language words and phrases. Definitions are not true or false, they're useful or useless in enabling lucid discussion. Defining key phrases in ways that are different from everyone else's definitions is not particularly helpful to lucid discussion.

@NetServOps Have you ever been to America? The whole country, all of the people there, apart from native Americans, are descended from immigrants or are immigrants themselves.

@NetServOps It's not what I in particular call it, it's an entirely standard definition of a term that gets nearly 20 000 Google Scholar hits and over 500 Google Books hits. I observe that you seem to be working very hard to develop non-standard (or at least narrower-than-standard) definitions of "race" and "racism".

@sleepy Do you downvote every post that only has one perspective? I don't think you do because that's every post we get. This claim is not absurd, and you should take it on face value.

theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/20/… "...it is disingenuous to claim that Islam has no colour. There is actually quite a strong racial dimension to Islamophobia... there have been instances where non-Muslims from Asian communities have been lumped together with Muslims and discriminated against. After the 9/11 attacks, some bearded and turbaned Sikh men found themselves coming under hostile scrutiny. Following the more recent Boston bombings, some media outlets described suspects as being of "Muslim appearance" – whatever that is."

This comment thread is... curious. We're on site called "Academia", and yet this thread contains comments which (i) imply that it were meaningful to make general claims about cities "with a large number of muslim migrants", without any apparent need for differentiation; (ii) remark that correlation is not the same as causality but are, in the very same sentence, happy to ignore this insight if this ignorance fits the political views of the commenter; [...]

[...] (iii) claim that racism could only be about "race" and could thus never be applicable to comments about religious minorities - which blatantly ignores the facts that: (a) there is no meaningful biological concept of different human "races", so that "race" in a human context is per se a social construct (and thus extremelly difficult to define and heavily interrelated to other social concepts such as religion); and that (b) there are various definitions of racism in the literature, many of which definitely include the possibility that there is racism against religious minorities. [...]

[...] I'm now going to flag the question (if it were technically possible, I would rather flag my own comment, since this is really not a problem about the question itself) for moderator attention and ask to move this entire comment thread to chat.