Racial classifications, should they be eliminated?

Never heard of Yow?

Italgato,

Nevermind, you've out-squirmed my desire to get a straight answer.

Mr. Dekere:

"Outsquirmed"???

I am deeply hurt. Don't you have any sensitivity?

Why must you be so cruel?

You are destroying my "self-esteem"!

Seriously, If you don't understand, after all I have written,that I am against Racial Classificationsbecause they lead to quotas and ultimately work against the ideal of selection on merit and merit alone, I don't think anything I write will help.

Sorry

You haven't. Alger wrote novels about poor but plucky boys who succeeded in life because they were in the right place at the right time. Jumping in front of a runaway horse and stopping the carriage, saving the banker's daughter from a sure demise. The banker rewards the lad with a job at this bank, and everyone lives happily ever after.

Nice fairy tales, but not much as a political philosophy. Or is there more to this than meets the eye?

Hello All:

Am I the only one to note Italgato's style. I'll give you a hint ... "gato"!

Need any more hint's??

Anon

"I am against Racial Classificationsbecause they lead to quotas . . ."

Are you against Racial Classifications as they are applied to the study of diseases and human genetic inheritance?

I see where you are going (I think) though I don't actually care who anyone was on any other forum.

I haven't posted a lot in response to italgato, whom I mostly disagree with, but - I see him (her?) as trying to talk within the bylaws here. I think I have even agreed re opinion once or twice, fleetingly.

We are here to communicate.

Genetic inheritance and susceptablility to diseases can be studied and noted without involving race. In fact, race actually obscures things. If you hae two black patients, than based on race alone, you might conclude that they have an equal susceptablility to sickle-cell. But if one has just emmigrated from Western Africa, and the other comes from a family who has lived in the US since the civil war, their chances are going to be dramatically different.

Anon!

Welcome back, hoping you are doing fine!

Aside from basing a conclusion on race alone--and I don't think any legitimate researchers would limit their studies to that factor alone--how would taking "race" into account along with other factors obscure results of a study?

Do you have any data on the differences of occurence of sickle cell anemia between American Blacks and West African blacks?

No, but I know that sickle-cell is a trait that is only supported in parts of Africa where malaria is a definite danger, and not in the US. As a genetic trait, it would tend to get weeded out throughout generations of interbreeding of people who did not come from that area of Africa and do not have that trait.

Not only would race alone be deceptive, but any application thereof would be too. Suppose you had a person who was classified as white but who had a single ancestor who came from West Africa and who was born there later than the ancestor of the second of those two black people. That would make them more susceptible - but any racial generalizations would be completely wrong on that count.

Welll...considering the number of Sickle Cell Crisis patients I saw every weekend in Baltimore, it isn't being "bred out of the population" with any rapididty. In fact, it is more logical to expect the allele for SCA to become more prominent, as more individuals with the mutation meet, mate and produce offspring. Traits tend to become more prominent, not less.
A similar situation exists with Tay-Sachs diseas, which is prominent amongst the Ashkenazi. Tay-Sachs is not decreasing, but increasing.

The gene for sickle-cell naturally dies if not specifically propagated, because it is detrimental to survival (i.e. it causes sickle-cell). Naturally, you would take into account the parents and genetic lineage of a person on both sides of the family, but race does not necessarily translate through genetic inheritance, especially over long periods of time, and there are different areas where people are exposed to malaria and also develope sickle-cell more easily which are not in Wester Africa, and whose inhabitants would not be considered black.

How is Tay-Sachs disease transmitted? I guess I could be considered of Ashkenazi descent, but I've never heard of it except in passing.

Yes, because it has been demonstrated more than once that we (humans) are all one race. There is less difference between this so called white woman sitting here in Massachusetts and a Chinese man sitting in Peking and a so called Black man sitting in Nairobi than there is between a Chihauhau and a Great Dane.

Racial Classifications used to study diseases?

There is no problem there at all.

Racial Classifications can cause great injustices when a person of a certain race can be awarded entry to a job or a school before a person of another race MERELY because that person who gets the job or entry to the school had a great grandfather who was discriminated against.

Again, I will point out undeniable facts.

Afro Americans, on the whole, do not do well on entrance tests to college.

Afro-Americans. on the whole, have shown that their IQ scores are at least 15 points lower than Caucasians.

This does not mean that Afro-Americans cannot do well in University or professions and other employment. There are millions who are stars.

What it does mean is that for a wide variety of reasons, Afro-Americans, do not do well in the labor market, on the whole, and do not have the GPA's and Test scores for admission to good colleges, by and large.

Why?

Some people say because of racism.

Given the fact that De Jure Racism has been outlawed for many years and given the fact that Affirmative Action has been working for at least forty years and given the fact that Billions of dollars of compensatory monies have been poured into inner city schools ever since the Great Society Days( 1968), it is questionable that Afro-Americans need more of a hand-up.

On the other hand, many Asian immigrants, with a lower socio-economic level than the Average Afro-American, have done brilliantly in school and on the job.

Again, My thesis is that the Afro-Americans who adopt the inner city "culture" will never do well.

Afro-Americans would do well to adopt the Asian cultural approach to Education. Come to think of it, so would many Caucasians.

This is incorrect. The SCA mutation will continue to be passed down over time. I agree that its penchant for causing illness would lead to it to literally "die out" of the population if we all lived on the savannah. This is not the situation with modern medicine. SCA crisis is a routinely treated event in most EDs in cities with large AA populations. Thus the population that would die from extremely severe SCA crises survives and reproduces. Therefore the SCA trait tends to spread throughout the AA population. Your reasoning is sound, and is well grounded in population genetics theory, but in humans, population genetics theory is routinely trumped by technological advances.
Now, the assumption that over time and by breeding with a large reproductive pool a trait is "weeded out" is incorrect. I realise this makes intuitive sense, but as with so much in biology, intuitive sense leads to wrong anwers (trust me on this one, the only "C" in my bio career was in general genetics! ). Instead, over time the trait is dispersed into a population. Thus the SCA mutation is now present in people whose ancestors were probably not part of the original population from whence the mutation sprang. Indeed, SCA has been observed to be increasing across all racial types as the silly prohibitions against miscegenation have dissapeared.
Therefore, short of introducing Hitlerian eugenics programs,or withholding care from patients in SCA crisis, the SCA trait is unlikely to ever dissapear from the population.

HI Walter My Dear Friend: :wink:

Glad to see you! I have all kinds of things to share with you ... I'll PM you later today or tomorrow!

Anon