Then again, I've also definitely heard older people talk that way and they don't seem to mean harm or be angry.
It can apply from a socio economic angle, but that applies only in America or a country that uses American racial profiles for systemic racism.
Edit: Aware this is a controversial viewpoint in non-scientific communities, so here's some interesting comments from Wikipedia on the subject:
> Modern scholarship regards race as a social construct, an identity which is assigned based on rules made by society.[2] While partially based on physical similarities within groups, race does not have an inherent physical or biological meaning.[1][3][4]
> Social conceptions and groupings of races have varied over time, often involving folk taxonomies that define essential types of individuals based on perceived traits.[5] Today, scientists consider such biological essentialism obsolete,[6] and generally discourage racial explanations for collective differentiation in both physical and behavioral traits.[7][8][9][10][11]
> Even though there is a broad scientific agreement that essentialist and typological conceptualizations of race are untenable,[12][13][14][15][16][17] scientists around the world continue to conceptualize race in widely differing ways.[18] While some researchers continue to use the concept of race to make distinctions among fuzzy sets of traits or observable differences in behavior, others in the scientific community suggest that the idea of race is inherently naive[7] or simplistic.[19] Still others argue that, among humans, race has no taxonomic significance because all living humans belong to the same subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens.[20][21]
If there is no correlation between genes and “American race definitions”, how is this possible?
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/1998-10/WUiS-GSRD-07...
https://theconversation.com/racism-is-real-race-is-not-a-phi...
To add a bit more weight it’s worth reading the intro to race on Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
No, the whole distinction of black is dark skin colour, which is a proxy for skin melanin, which is (far as I'm aware) the primary factor determining vitamin D production from sun exposure (which is not directly useful in the body, but is the form that is often measured).
Also, because of the effect on vitamin D production from sun exposure, there is some evidence that other aspects of how vitamin D is handled by the body are different for people with darker skin, maybe because their ancestors got more than enough of it.
This isn't even about social categories “Black” and “White”, it is literally about the direct correlates of skin colour.
[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
Then I remembered that Wales exists :)
If you mean darker skin (darker than what???) then use that term.
Accuracy is important.
> To analyze race/ethnicity, patient data were linked to estimated race/ethnicity proportions reported by zip code in the 2018 5-year American Community Survey (ACS)
I though people of color produces less vitamin D due the skin pigmentation that filters light in UVB spectrum.
There are a few stages between production of vitamin D and the delivery of useful vitamin D to the places where it is needed. The form produced by the skin is not the form needed, so it has to be transformed.
The usual test measures vitamin D levels at a particular stage, and then we infer that if the levels are normal at that stage, they will be normal at the final stage too.
The problem seems to be that this was calibrated based on the levels in light skinned people, and it is starting to look like the relative levels at the different stages are different in darker skinned people.
Think of it not as a dark skinned person's skin produces less than a light skinned person's skin, but rather the light skinned person's skin produces more than the dark skinned person's skin. Their bodies both need the same amount of the final form, and both are able to convert enough to that form, and don't bother converting much more than they need. The result is that the light skinned person has more leftover pre-conversion form. The test measures that pre-conversion form.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/insider/capitalized-black...
The most adequate terminology is still in dispute and most people don't follow this discussion closely. Also it varies from country to country.
For instance, in my country, the "n-work" used to be accepted while "black" was pejorative. But recently, a new line of though emerged: those who think we should adopt the NA convention.
To avoid any controversy, I would had chosen other words:
s/racial/skin color/
s/black/dark skinned people/
s/black/fairer skinned people/
Similarly, white people or “whites” usually refers to people whose ancestors are from Europe, even though there are other people with light skin tones throughout the world (especially Asian or Native American people in high latitudes).
Not really sure what point you’re making.
I agree entirely and said so in my initial comment. As I say elsewhere it was really to inform OP rather than berate them.
I’m presuming you mean “negro” rather than a 6-letter word starting with “ni”?!
As long as they actually are facts, then yes this is true.
However, the presentation and choice of which facts to use can be racist, I'm sure you'll agree with me on that.
@Kednicma asked for evidence: A basic google search finds it. [0][1][2][3]. They complain of downvotes & karma lost: Those may very well come from the desire of many in this community to take basic research steps before leveling very serious accusations.
There is no reason to jump to "racism" so quickly merely because a biological difference is asserted between people of different ethnic backgrounds. Ethnicity is intertwined with genetic background, and it's not up for dispute whether or not genetics influence biology, it's practically axiomatic within the concept of genetics.
I acknowledge that research finding biological differences between ethnic groups can be ammunition for racists, but that must not be the automatic assumption, especially in this community where it violates the community guidelines to jump first to an uncharitable negative interpretation of someone's comments.
[0] https://americanbonehealth.org/nutrition/african-americans-n...
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3894250/
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5954269/
[3] https://web.musc.edu/about/news-center/2019/06/20/vitamin-d-...
You are kind of missing the point, which is that the test used for vitamin D levels is not directly measuring the levels of the kind of vitamin D actually needed. It is measuring a different kind of vitamin D, and then we infer the levels of the other kind from that.
This inference is based on data for light skinned people, and it appears that it is not valid for dark skinned people. It underestimates the amount of the needed kind of vitamin D for them.
This may lead to widespread misdiagnoses of vitamin D deficiencies in African-Americans who in fact have fine levels of the kind of vitamin D that is actually needed.
No, it did not explore systemic racism. It explored physiological differences between races.
Race is a social construct, it's not a scientific category. There is only a continuous spectrum of skin tone. If someone is mixed parentage, what "race" are they?
Race the social construct is a social construct. We are the same species. Period, the end. But differences in genetics and physiology do warrant study because this is how we can find treatments and preventative measures to a multitude of disease.
This is a lot like saying that research that shows that men are more susceptible to heart attacks then women is sexists because gender is a social construct. Gender is a complex topic that evolves with our evolving understanding of wha it means to be human on a philosophical level. But the X chromosome isn’t a social construct and has very direct very tangible effects. You can’t call it a social construct.
In short: when it comes to how we build a society, recognize differences and account for them to bring as much economic opportunity equality to everyone. When it comes to medicine, study everything including genetic differences in order to get the best understanding of the problem at hand. Getting offended doesn’t get us closer to for example a cure for COVID, does it?
I think the point is that races are based on a handful of cherry-picked phenotype differences. On the one hand, these characteristics are a decent proxy for human migrations in the past and might map to evolutionary events with clinical implications. On the other hand, another set of genetically conditioned characteristics would be similarly good at that. In an alternate universe, humans might have defined race based on hair color and height, and that would possibly match evolutionary history in another useful way.
But if you want a really interesting thought experiment consider what would happen if other species of humans than sapiens would have survived along us. Would the Declaration of Independence start with “we the people” or “we the sapiens”? Would the myth of Christ be that he died for sins of men or some specific subset of humans?
But really I don’t see much of a problem with race both being a social construct and a biological reality in the sense that we are talking about two related but separate phenomena. Socially, race is a construct. The idea that judging by your skin color or shape of skull we can tell how smart or virtuous you are is bogus. A lot of people have tried to justify science behind it and all of it has not been science. Scientifically we have a number of genetic differences that can be traced between different origins of our genetic trees. Some of these are inconsequential like some people having straight hair and others having curly hair. Others are more impactful like ability to metabolize lactose as adults. Or susceptibility to heart disease or certain cancers. The kicker is that it is easier to tell the public “if you are ethnicity X you might want to get your heart checked out 5 years before another ethnicity because statistically it’s more beneficial that way” than to say the same thing as “if you have genes A, B, and C”. When my doctor tells me that because I am Easter European my cholesterol is more likely to be elevated, I don’t take offense to that.
Having said all that, don’t use “blacks” or “whites” as a damn noun. That isn’t ok.
What is a scientific category vs a non-scientific category?
And I don't think every item needs to fall neatly into a category for that category to be useful.
If I say 86% of african americans have a hypersensitivity to warfarin which means that if they were given the same dose as a white person they'd have a much increased risk of stroke.
Clearly in the previous sentence the distinction of ethnicity is useful and the information makes people safer.
Here's a popular article on the topic. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/11/20/2463933... though there's plenty of research articles available.
The difference is that the test evaluated 25(OH)D concentration, and not 1,25(OH)D which is the useful (metabolized) compound. There is currently no standard test for the latter, which is why they didn't do it. Though I would prefer to see those results, it would be easier at the present time to parameterize the study by racial group to reduce or eliminate this effect.
That said it would be nice if we could all just take a nice cheap vitamin for this. Caveat: I am not in life sciences.
Edit. They do show a figure which breaks out the relationship by race. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure?id=10.1371/... and it is much stronger for African Americans. Perhaps my hypothesis was incorrect.