Re: "Racial" medicine

In message <e3isv0$gi1$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, David Canzi -- non-mailable <dmcanzi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes

John Wilkins said this: "Race is not geographical variation of human subpopulations. It is a social construct based on a social context."

But what he says race isn't -- geographical variation of human subpopulations -- is exactly what I have long understood the word "race" to mean, and it would not have occurred to me that most people who use that word mean something else by it.

So what do most average ordinary people mean when they use the word "race"? What is the nature of this social construct John Wilkins speaks of?


If I recall correctly, the US census categories are white, black, Asian, Hispanic and Native American/Pacific Islander, and this more or less corresponds to the American social construct of race. Black as a category includes both people who have mostly recent African ancestry and people who have mostly recent European ancestry (there's some US celebrities - and UK ones for that matter - who I only know to be "black" because I've been told that they are) - this is a consequence of the "one-drop" rule. Hispanic includes "whites" (Californios, Chileans), "blacks" (Puerto Ricans), Native Americans (Mexicans) and Asians (Filipinos). Native American/Pacific Islander is not a coherent group; genealogically (neglecting Melanesians) they're different offshoots of the east Asian population.

In apartheid South Africa the division was into white, coloured, black and Asian (where Asian here is - mostly - South Asian, not East Asian), and the Japanese were honorary whites.

In Nazi Germany Jews were seen as a racial group.

In Japan Koreans and Burukamin are seen, I am correctly informed, as separate racial groups, even if they're indistinguishable from the majority population.
--
alias Ernest Major


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