Racism is on a spectrum

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This article is interesting:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anna-kegl ... 09350.html

We white people like to think of racism as a binary, either you're racist or you're not, but in reality it's on a spectrum.

The only racism I know about is -- people fear black people.

As Shrek says, "End of story, bye bye, see ya later".

In my opinion, people are seeing the "check your privilege" and "ur a waycist" crowd for what they are, so a racism spectrum is just another way of making white people racist by default. "Oh come on, you're a little bit waycist" "check your spectrum!"

What a pile of horses**t...

No matter how you slice it, racism has the same ultimate effect upon those you are racist against.

The suggestion that all white people in North America have a "White Identity" that is prone to racial stress is <drumroll> racism.

Or, for the benefit of Generation Meme:

Dumb article is dumb.

I certainly don't have this sort of "racial identity."

O, I agree that it's a spectrum. Pretty much most forms of human behaviors are.

It's far more complicated than how people treat it. You're racist! Has pretty much lost all its meaning nowadays due to how often it's used incorrectly and new quasi-intellectual definitions people use.

By definition, it's:

the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.

If you look at it, science has proven racism "right" in specific instances.

Say, a Negro is usually superior to a Caucasian in direct exposure to sunlight.

If you agree with that truth, you're racist by that definition above.

However, there's many untruths and unproven claims about race that people claim, which is also racism.

One is purely benevolent if it's stated as fact; black people are better in the sun. If they bring it up, they're right, but they're also racist.

The other is often malevolent, and it's what you see supremacist groups use (no matter their race).

(I don't think nationalism needs to be related, but it can be. Wanting an ethnically homogeneous society isn't racist itself, as you can say you don't think another culture is better or worst, you just want them separate.)

Dillogic,

Please don't use that offensive, obsolete term.

These differences aren't based on race, but are rather different frequencies of conditions in different populations.

Take, for example, sickle-cell anemia. A lot of people think that "black people" as a whole are more likely to get it than "white people" as a whole, but if you break things down to the population level, you get a whole different story. In areas where mosquitoes are common people will tend to develop that form of anemia, because it is protective against malaria, a mosquito-borne disease. Otherwise, it's disadvantageous.

People from southern Africa actually have low frequencies of sickle-cell anemia, because mosquitoes there aren't a problem, while Spaniards, Italians, Greeks, and Turks have much higher frequencies, because mosquitoes are a problem in those areas.

The difference is between populations, and there is a smooth distribution of traits as you move from one region to a next; there is generally no sharp cut-off point. Because of this, the concept of clines is likely to be more accurate, which represent gradual variations in traits from one region to another.

Back to racism, race is a social construct and white supremacy is a caste system. Racism is on a spectrum, where you have KKK and other groups on the extreme end, whereas toward the less severe end you get things like unadmitted racial bias. It's not a binary, and white people are always somewhere along this spectrum, as we are the dominant caste and so benefit from keeping it that way, whether individual white people want to or not.

Africans, Negroes (Negro is a scientific term in the same way as Caucasian is; it's better than African as Africa now has natives of European descent, such as South Africa), have melanin to higher amounts than all of the various European groups (unless we're dealing with albinos). That's a race based trait. The same with Australian aboriginals. They developed this through evolution.

It's no coincidence that Negroes have black skin and a different skull shape to Caucasians. They're two groups that developed separately from one another in different parts of the world.

Whilst brown skinned Caucasians exist who are also superior to white skinned Caucasians, they're still inferior to Negroes in this regard.

White Europeans could eventually develop equally dark skin, it'd take many years through evolution or inbreeding for them to as a whole. It's why we're the same species.

Sickle-cell anemia is just one biological difference based on evolution that as you say, doesn't affect all Negroes. Negroes, Caucasians, and the others, also have differences within the overall groups, which is why you can break each one down further.

It's anti-science to deny these things (or to try and shoehorn them away through semantic arguments), and whilst it might not be PC, science doesn't care about that; much like how Earth revolved around the sun.

This is why I don't put much into the term "racism". Science is "racist".

It's bad to judge an individual or groups based on unfounded claims based on race [or anything], and it always will be. I don't think we should hide from science because of this, though. Just because something could be dangerous, doesn't mean it has to be.

So, I'd be on the spectrum of "racism". As would many self-proclaimed anti-racists (they just don't admit it or make up new terms to absolve themselves from the sin).

Dillogic,

We're all the same subspecies, not just the same species. To be a subspecies, you need to have distinct groups with reliable differences between them who don't normally interbreed, even if they are put together in the same environment. If history and genetics have shown us anything, we meet neither requirement to divide our species into extant subspecies. "Race", on the other hand, is a term with no meaning in biology, at least not with regard to humans.

Africa is the most diverse of all the continents because that is where modern humans evolved and spread out from, so to lump the whole population together like you have makes no sense, even if you look at only the Subsaharan Africans:

http://www.africanholocaust.net/peopleofafrica.htm

I think you might be confusing the concepts of "race" and cline. A cline is where you see gradual change in characteristics as you move across geographical regions, and that is what we see with humanity. This is the word used by biologists today. "Race" is a social construct, something that humans use in a particular cultural context to divide people into distinct groups, and is nowhere near being universally applicable because it is impossible to neatly fit much of the world's population into these groups.

"Race" is a poorly defined word not generally used in modern biology. Clines explain modern human variation much better.

I will not accept Marxist redefinition of words. Racism to me is the belief in racial superiority and the resulting abuse, discrimination, and ostracization. Calling racism a 'spectrum' has it lose it's real meaning.

Racism is racism.

But there are different degrees of it.

You have one person who believes in the extermination of an entire race.

You have another person who would be horrified at the notions of the first person, yet still regard that "entire race" as inferior.

The second person is no less racist, and should be "called out" for it--but is less evil about it.

At this point in time, explicit/violent/virulent racism seems to be becoming less common though it definitely still exists;

but implicit/subtle racism, perhaps, is more of an issue than the former.

At a more macrocosmic level, there remains very little de jure racism in the Western World--but there remains, nevertheless, a decent amount of de facto racism.

By the way, I don't believe in most of the Marxist philosophy.

And I firmly believe this to be the purpose. It loses its meaning, which allows them to redefine it in way that demonises subsets of people the Huffpo hold prejudice against. What better way to attack groups of people you're prejudiced against than to redefine language to make them prejudiced by default, and them pure by default!

Huffpo's board is mostly middle class white yuppie women, that employ editors who give themselves endless ridiculous labels and nicknames (when they themselves are against "labelling"). Considering the amount of white guilt they hold, I find it ironic that they feel they have the authority to decide who and what is racist.

There are so many points in history or current affairs they could have borrowed from to add meat to this article but it is yet another fanciful diatribe by virtue signallers.

If you want to see some serious genetic differences between human populations, take a look at this study that looks at Neanderthal y-chromosomes:

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/ ... thals.html

There is no evidence that modern humans have inherited any y-chromosomes from Neanderthals, and the results of this study tell us why: it would have been impossible for anatomically modern women to bear children by Neanderthal fathers, because they would have had a huge immune system response to the hybrid fetus resulting in a miscarriage at best.

This is real genetic separation, real diversion of 2 populations, and it's clear that anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals are different species because of this. Though some reproduction was possible, the fact that there were already major biological roadblocks to reproduction shows that these 2 populations were in fact different species.

EDIT: Copy of the study (PDF):

http://www.cell.com/ajhg/pdf/S0002-9297(16)30033-7.pdf

Yep....that's been pretty well established, alas.

I used to want Neanderthals to be a member of our subspecies. I'm sad that they're a separate species.

This partly might have been behind my depression when I was 13.