"Race is an extended family"

This strikes me as a rather uninformative tautology. For any argument that you might make for or against the usefulness or validity of the "race" concept (especially regarding the extent of inter-"race" variation), the concept of "extremely extended family" seems to bring no new information in one way or the other. All the uncertainties present in one term are still present in the other.

But then I probably missed something.

Another friend, who was of vanilla Anglo origin as most of my classmates were, observed that we were the only two non-whites in the class,

In Europe, "European" is generally used as a euphemism for "white". In the US, apparently, it's the other way round.

Presumably what your Anglo friend really meant was that you were the only two non-Europeans in the class, in which your Philistino-Caledonic friend was classified as socially "non-European" due to the natural preeminence commonly attached to the patrilineal side (i.e. "he got an Arub name, he's Arub").

Your "..some whites view non-whites as objects.." remark rather neatly skewers the Race Relations Industry. In fact I can remember when that Industry in Britain tried to insist that we all refer to South Asian immigrants as "black".

This strikes me as a rather uninformative tautology. For any argument that you might make for or against the usefulness or validity of the "race" concept (especially regarding the extent of inter-"race" variation), the concept of "extremely extended family" seems to bring no new information in one way or the other. All the uncertainties present in one term are still present in the other.

it's an analogy. the key is to map one set of relations from a concept which is well understood to another that is not as well understood. there isn't new information, just a reaffirmation of the mapping.

In Europe, "European" is generally used as a euphemism for "white".

Uh... where? In Finnish, black people ("mustalaiset") traditionally means gypsies and no one else; what white people ("valkolaiset") means is more ambiguous, but often it's understood to mean only Finns. (The local gypsies generally look somewhat South Asian, but many would pass as white in the US.) Europe in non-formal speech often or even usually does not include Finland and many northern countries. What most people call a black is a "neekeri".

European understanding of all of this is generally radically different from English-speaking terminology and, well, from the way any other Europeas would see it.

I remember a few years ago, working in New York, and a bunch of East and South Asian guys were talking about a hot new club in the city. A Nepalese guy said that the women were hot there, but overall the club was too "Euro" for his liking. I thought he meant that it was a European tourist hangout, but in fact he meant that it was too White...

In Ireland, like the US, Black refers to Sub-Saharan African, but to say someone was dark means that they look French or Northern Italian...

Of course in Irish (Gaelic), Sub-Saharan Africans are referred to as "Fir Gorm" - Blue Men?!

PConroy,

I've heard that in Italy they refer to black people as eggplants (well, whatever "eggplants" is in Italian). I don't know if this is a deragatory term or not. My apologies to any blacks living in Italy reading this if so.

Razib,

I recall listening to a radio show about tensions between South Asians and people of black African origin. Several white callers were shocked and outraged, and asserted that such tension and racial antogonism between non-white groups was by definition ludicrous and incoherent.

On a similar note, I recall a friend once expressing shock over the Rwandan genocide with the words, "I can't imagine that black people would DO that to each other!" To which I replied, "Well, whom else are they going to do it to in the middle of Africa? What, are they going to board ships and planes and travel halfway around the world to find non-black ethnic groups to cleanse?" Idiot.

Actually, my goal in defining what a racial group is is to be as "tautological" as possible, since, by definition, the closer I come to tautology, the less chance I have of being wrong. I'm not trying to come up with an analogy, I'm trying to penetrate to the essence of what people are talking about when they talk about race.

I would like to add, though, that my definition of a racial group is not just "an extended family," it's "a partly inbred extended family." It's the inbreeding that gives a racial group more coherence and endurance than a simple non-inbred extended family. In other words, all racial groups are extended families, but not all extended families are racial groups.

Consider Concept #2, as exemplified by all the various peoples from Iceland to the Punjab to the Sahel who have a particular mutation for lactose tolerance. It's perfectly reasonable to point out that they must be all members of an extended family (unless there were two identical spontaneous mutations at some point in the past).

However, it's not a particularly inbred extended family. It's somewhat inbred -- the mutation didn't spread to, say, the Chinese or the Tasmanians. So, all these people can be said to belong to a racial group, but a very vague one, a much less well-defined one than, say, the Irish or Europeans, or Caucasians, or whatever.

However, it's not a particularly inbred extended family. It's somewhat inbred -- the mutation didn't spread to, say, the Chinese or the Tasmanians. So, all these people can be said to belong to a racial group, but a very vague one, a much less well-defined one than, say, the Irish or Europeans, or Caucasians, or whatever.

ok jared ;-)

I don't mind the 'partially inbred extended family' concept so long as people don't draw false inferences from it, for example in relation to Hamilton's Rule. It is worth frequently emphasising (because Hamilton didn't) that relatedness is always relative to a particular population. Within any given population, relatedness between randomly selected members of that population (e.g. an ethnic group), relative to that population, is zero, no matter how many common ancestors they share.

A bit of a tangent - but concerning item #1, genomic similarity: I know that there are many approaches to distance measure when comparing two genomic sequences. Does it appear that a consensus will eventually emerge as to a single best distance measure (at least for phylogenetic reconstruction), or is this a case where some large number of tools will always be necessary because the problem is complicated? It seems to me that if a single distance measure is identified then all of phylogeny becomes just a huge clustering problem (albeit with distortions introduced by selection pressures). But maybe that's just too optimistic...

bbart, i think it will get resolved with the species problem is resolved ;-)