There are different families, different tribes, and unless eyes and DNA lie, different races, both in the old "lots of different big tribes" and the more recent "a few really big groups" senses. And it turns out there are some related differences in susceptibility to disease and whatnot that go along with. I'm told even skeletons can sometimes show differences. (No, I'm not bothering about the fuzzy boundaries around the groups.)
The assertion therefore isn't true, and there are plenty of differences between people.
What's the meaning of the differences? The doctors and scientists and technicians can't tell you--"meaning" isn't measurable.
The preacher/priest is the one to tell you that we're all made in the image of God, and that that is more fundamental than family or tribe or race. Or politics or strength or wealth or IQ or empathy. That's not always a welcome message, but trying to hand off the heavy lifting to somebody else is wrong.
3 comments:
There are identifiable groups. If someone wants to call them something other than races, fine, but it doesn't change the reality of there being measurable groups.
I was taught "There are no races, there are only clines" in Anthro 101. The discussion showed that this was a political/cultural statement, not a scientific one, though I could not have articulated that in 1971. People quote any number of semi-facts in support of the idea, but just try and get someone in an actual discussion involving precision.
I feel like "race" as a term might be usefully abandoned. We have plenty of ways of describing differences that don't require it; and its misuse in history could justify our jettisoning it.
Scientifically, however, I think it is correct to say "there is no such thing as race." This is straightforward. A hypothesis was generated at some time in history that humanity was divided into a set of races. This scientific hypothesis differed from earlier ways of dividing people -- 'gens' in the Latin, Greeks versus 'barbarians,' etc. These races were at one point supposed to be roughly based on color rather than language (or genetic heritage: Aboriginal Australians got assigned to 'the Black race' along with Africans they had no near genetic relations with).
The hypothesis proved false. There were numerous attempts to refine it in the 19th century by leading minds of the day. The smartest people believed in it for a long time, and tried to fix the hypothesis so it would stand up. It doesn't.
A hypothesis can become a theory if tests fail to falsify it repeatedly and sufficient numbers of times. A hypothesis that is falsified in every test, though, eventually has to be rejected as false. This one doesn't work, and it can't be fixed.
That doesn't mean there are no differences between people, or that genetics doesn't matter, or whatever. But "Race is not real" is a good, scientific claim that is justified by more than a century of scientific attempts to formalize the hypothesis about what race was, and what races there were, all of which failed empirical testing.
Grim: I feel like "race" as a term might be usefully abandoned.
Well said.
This brings up race as a social construct. The definition of "white" has changed considerably over time, such as whether South Asians are white or not. At one time, even Swedes were considered too swarthy to be considered white.
Ben Franklin: the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth.
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