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"Erased"
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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I find it strange that people say that race is a made up concept, I understand the fundamental and I've absolutely zero problem with anyone from anywhere of any genetic makeup being with anyone or existing anywhere.
However there are absolutely genetic markers that differentiate us race wise and whilst some people may call that 'positive racism' theres a reason why Kenyan runners are the best. Its the same reason why dog breeds exist and have different features.
Personally I like to celebrate our differences, however I understand that people think to stop people weaponising them we should pretend we are all some animorphous blob.
I mean, Eventually we probably will be with the advancements in technology and our ability to more easily migrate. And I also dont care about that either, but I think its a little naieve to pretend that it doesnt exist.
Troll.
For anyone who cares to inform themselves, the Wikipedia article about race is a good place to learn why races don't map to biological reality:
Also, dog breeds exist because humans have actively bred dogs to have certain traits - and I assume you meant "anamorphous"?
I think the thing that really exposes the whole constructed nature of race is asking this question; "Is Obama white?"
Barack Obama's mother is white. His father is black. If I were to ask you "Is Obama black?" most people would say yes, of course. He's the first black president after all.. But the moment we flip the question, it suddenly becomes much harder to answer in the affirmative. If someone tried to claim that America has never had a black president, most people would think they were ignorant, an idiot, or insane. Whiteness has always been constructed in a way that relies on purity. Obama is not white, because he's partly black. But being partly white does not prevent him from being black. There's no rational explanation for that. It doesn't conform to any biological notion of taxonomy. It's not about genetics, it's about vibes. We assign whiteness and blackness based on wholly different, wholly arbitrary criteria.
Credit for this example goes to Innuendo Studios who I believe is also where I encountered the proposition that race is a fiction in the same way that money is; it's something we invented, but because we believe it's real, it has real power.
Race matters because it matters. It shouldn't, but it does. Understanding that race is a fiction is a really important step in deconstructing the harms that racism has done, but it doesn't allow us to dismiss the concerns of racialized people, nor should it ever be reason to prevent people from using race as a way to identify themselves. Black people are black because they live the experience of being in a society that treats them as "black" and not simply as "people." That experience is unique to their blackness, even though that blackness is merely a fiction.
Selection pressure is selection pressure, whether being done by environment or by the active efforts of another species. There's a reason why whether or not you are lactose tolerant has a lot to do with where in the world your ancestors are from, as does your likelihood of several diseases and likelihood of certain resistances/immunities, there are even certain drugs that will work better or worse for people dependent largely on where their ancestors came from. Short of doing thorough genetic testing, "race"/ethnicity is often a good-enough broad brush proxy for where a majority of your ancestors came from for a variety of purposes.
It's really not, when you really go down into the actual numbers. Are the differences significant? yes, do they matter? most likely not. Because even if they are significant, it says nothing about their magnitude, just the likelihood that they are caused by the independent variable.
What this means is, sure, there are genetic differences that correlate significantly with common social categories of race (scientists use ethnicity, because of eugenics), due to continental size selection pressure, which is very broad and non-specific. However, this brush is actually so broad that it doesn't contraindicate common treatment at all. An individual person could or could not be hypersensitive to nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, for example. This has been found to have some pharmacogenetic correlation with some ethnicities. But if you were to alter treatment to one ethnicity assuming that they are more likely to have this genetic difference, you would lose far more patients than you would save. Because the correlation exists, it is significant, but it's magnitude is not very large. Instead, we have individual tests that are far more straight forward and will tell you with higher degree of certainty than ethnicity whether someone has or does not have NSAID sensitivity. There's also no basis to decide to whom to apply this test, based on ethnicity, either. Because all and any ethnicity can have NSAID hypersensitivity. So, we just do the test to everyone and every single patient gets the question “are you allergic to any drug?” regardless of ethnicity, doctors just don't think about ethnicity all that much if they are doing evidence based medicine and are not blatant eugenic racists. That's is how useless of an analysis category race is in science. Genetically speaking, large masses of people are actually not that different from each other that it grants much differential treatment. You rather treat the individual.
To provide a counter-example, hydralazine and isosorbide dinitrate are combined into a single dose as a treatment specifically for black folks with heart failure (initially sold under the brand name BiDil), because the combined drug treatment in general works measurably better on black folks than white folks, to the point that the combo drug was rejected by the FDA based on initial trials (that had a majority white patient base), but was later approved specifically for for black patients because that specific pair of drugs worked enough better in that population to be approved after further trials. It's fallen somewhat out of use as a treatment, not because it was ineffective or "racist" to approve a race-specific treatment, but because better options have been developed in the last 20 years - the drug combo remains approved specifically for heart failure in black folks, however. It's just no longer the first choice.
Literally, they use ethnicity because of negative political associations with race as a term, and also because from a practical standpoint ethnicity is like race, but with more narrow groupings in modern parlance (as noted in the past "race" referred to much narrower groupings, closer to how ethnicity is used now).
Also, eugenics would totally work if we weren't terrible at deciding what "good genes" are and instead inevitably make it about something dumb like skin color and there weren't the massive ethical issues in actually doing it.
Here's a fun question: If you had to choose a hypothesis that would be functionally impossible to properly test because of ethical or political issues but that you strongly suspect is true, what would it be?
It works if it weren't unethical doesn't make the argument you think it makes.
The notion that we suck at choosing the good genes is entirely misled, even if it is just sarcasm. The final question is also morally misled because science and the notion of truth is not amoral. Science, without humans, doesn't exist. And humans are moral beings (constrained by social and moral considerations).
Eugenics is one such field which notions cannot be true because its axioms are inherently unethical. "It works" is not an isolated amoral argument. If it needs the morals of a society to be radically altered to work, then it is not science. It is just racism in a lab coat. The case of dog breeds, for example, doesn't support eugenics. On the contrary it dispproves it.
We have genetically altered dogs (and many other animals) by selective breeding in ways that, according to eugenics, should've eliminated inbreeding and genetic defects. Guess what? it hasn't done that and actually might have made it worse. Historical analysis lead us to the idea that running wild with eugenics will always lead to genocide, regardless of which genetic traits are selected as the best, eugenics is genocide. So, it cannot be severed from its ethical considerations. Science cannot exist devoid of ethics.
If we didn't, we'd be talking about eugenics as that nasty unethical thing we tried once upon a time that eliminated say Huntington's disease from a population, but we decided wasn't worth it because of the ethical issues in actually doing it, rather than as just "racism in a lab coat". The fact that eugenics in practice was about race at all is an example of us being bad at choosing "good genes."
Reality exists, and continues to regardless of whatever moral framework you subscribe to. Moral frameworks are specific to time and culture, what is acceptable politically even moreso. There are and will always be things that are real and are true and perhaps even useful to know or launching points for further understanding that are outside the range of current acceptable social, moral or political considerations, but that doesn't make them less real.
Truth is not limited to the Overton window.
To remove morality you have to remove humans. No humans, no politics and no science.
You can't argue with that. You either have morals and science, or you have pure objective amoral reality but no humans.
Objective truth is an oxymoron, to have objectivity you have to remove the subject. Thus eliminating the dichotomy entirely and making the argument collapse. To have true-false value arguments and statements, you need subjectivity and a frame of reference. This is a logical constraint, without anyone to observe and judge the truth, there's no objective reality to be judged. Minerals and crystals, despite our best efforts, do not elaborate moral judgements, and they definitely don't conduct science.
So when the tree falls in the forest and no one is around not only does it not make a sound, but the forest and the tree don't exist at all in the absence of a subjective observer?
Reality exists and continues to exist regardless of analysis or even consideration by any human. Science is a methodology invented by humans for trying to understand said reality. The earliest examples of scientific thinking are ancient and the social and moral frameworks they operated within are not at all similar to or very compatible at all with that of western Europe and North America in the early 21st century, yet underlying reality continues unabated. And yet we can continue to build off of their discoveries, despite them operating under moral and political frameworks that are abhorrent by modern standards.
You are confusing the map with the territory - the territory cares not that the mapmaker decided parts of it were immoral to include on the map the territory is what is, regardless of anyone's perspective on it. Reality does not conform to the Overton window, only what we can say without running afoul of social, political or moral issues does.
So now we are quoting Korzibsky. Remember that its development, Bateson for example, has as a consequence of the ontological limitations of sensible experience, that one could say the territory is ultimately inaccessible to the mind. Why bother with it thus, since the hypothetical tree only exist because the mind has thus elaborated it and put it in the hypothetical forest to make it fall by sheer will of the model, based on previous sensible experience. A falling tree has to be observed and mapped, in order for a mind to conceive a tree that falls unseen. Its reality cannot be asserted but post-hoc, after observing evidence of its fall. Or ex-ante, by predicting its hypothetical fall by way of a priori evidence.
Or perhaps consider the Bonini's paradox whereas a model as complex and specific as the reality it represents would be impractical and useless for science. To delve and insists on a science that removes the human is folly. The models we create exist entirely within the limits of the mind. Or as Brudilliard puts it:
The model precedes reality. In fact, what reality we can think about if there is no thinking mind to model it? To question what reality would be without a human to think it, is circular idiocy. Suggesting to remove morality from the model requires one to create a thinker without morals, a non human, effectively an alien, that would not be any more real than the moral one. In fact, it would be further removed from reality, as the observer doesn't exist but on the map. What reality can be attested by a meeple that stands over a map?
The problem with "eugenics" has never been the science (the science science, not the race science); selective breeding works with every other species in the world, it'd work with humans too. The problem is that out of every other species in the world, humans are the only ones to have developed "being systematically horrible to each other based off totally meaningless bullshit" and we've kinda embraced that as our whole thing.
In a perfect world where we don't have to worry about any of the practicalities, eugenics could be a wonderful tool for improving humanity as a whole. But humanity is too intrinsically broken to be able to handle it, and the practicalities we're glossing over in this case pretty much instantly become "forcibly sterilizing people we don't like" every time someone brings the idea up.
I would like to challenge you to research exactly which genetic markers differentiate between races and the attempts up to this point to use them to categorize actual people.
The closest thing you might be able to point to as a difference is people who's ancestors left sub-saharan Africa have a barely detectable amount of Neanderthal DNA. Outside of that, there's really not enough DNA variation to create sensical groups out of.
Race is a made up concept, the only thing strange is you denying it
There are no consistent genetics markers to identify people by race. Even crazy things like the ability to use oxygen better found in the Himalayan population is also found in high altitude African and South American countries.
Dog breeds are not a "race" of dogs they are all fucking dogs. Just like human beings, we all share 99% the same genetic code.
Let's just pretend you are right for a second (you are not). Where is the blood test to prove what race you are!?
Even the genetic testing companies admit it is just for entertainment and they are guessing, because the same genetic code a person in Norway has also shows up in the Pacific Islanders.
You don't have to believe me, but you could believe just about every scientist who is an expert on this topic.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-construct-scientists-argue/
"What the study of complete genomes from different parts of the world has shown is that even between Africa and Europe, for example, there is not a single absolute genetic difference, meaning no single variant where all Africans have one variant and all Europeans another one, even when recent migration is disregarded,"
So to sum it up. You are full of shit and you need to stop believing in bullshit propaganda.
Genomics can help to delineate the boundaries of ethnicities. This is useful because people of different races in a shared/neighbouring ethnic regions such as around the Mediterranean often share far more genetic similarity than they do with people of the same race in northern Europe or sub-Saharan Africa. The concept of race has always first and foremost served privileged groups and oppressed groups, often along ethnic lines, but not always. A great example is how pasty ass Irish people were once not considered "white". The genetic argument is typically cherry-picked to reinforce these power structures.