Re:Slack got four of its black female engineers to accept a ...
by smt88 on Thursday February 11, 2016 @10:35AM
(#11080687)
There is no scientific definition of race. People do differ genetically and sometimes those differences can be found in certain ancestral groups, but there is no scientific way to draw hard lines between those groups.
What is someone who is 1/4 African, 1/4 European, and 1/2 Vietnamese? What does their "race" tell you about them?
Even if you could do a genetic test of every single person who, say, applied for a job or a college, you still wouldn't be able to determine their race with any certainty most of the time.
Race is just not an objective definition, and if you knew anything about US history, you'd know that. Most of the landmark civil rights cases were about proving that you can't identify race by appearance, behavior, or even ancestry, since so many blacks had mixed ancestry.
Come off it. Race is an objective reality. Aside from the visually obvious large difference(s) in pigmentation of the skin, there are other hard biological differentiators, like facial shape, the frequency of certain diseases, and many others.
Taking the anti-racism movement into hard, blatant denialism is beyond ridiculous and will only create more people like the friend you're trying to avoid. When there's no one in the middle to temper and explain inconvenient objective realities, people feel like their only option is to go to the extreme that seems to align with their experiences. That hardening of extremity is really bad for everyone.