It is a very interesting topic. Now that the racial system of the USA gets re-established by the Ultra-Leftists in my country, this topic is of a more important meaning, because we all get racialized by the media aggressively.
First I should explain how I and my generation grew up and what kind of racial categories where the norm in my region.
Overall we were taught that no human races exists, the typical racial system of the USA is not real.
But the social reality was that people where divided by their ethnic group. For example someone from eastern Germany was not considered native to the place where I lived and treated badly in school. People imitated how they spoke and joked about their physiology. Also people from Russia or Ukraine where treated different, and they also didn’t see themselves equal among themselves. For example Greeks and Turkish people where enemies and there where fights between them.
Ukrainians and Russians where mostly allied to the Germans, but not to each other. The Russians claimed that Ukraine is in fact Russia.
French people where not seen as equal to Germans, Brits where described as “Die Inselaffen” what means island monkeys. Danish people wherenot seen as bad or enemies.
We had one guy in school who was half German and half South African, he was part of the Alpha-Male clique of the class, one of the best scholars overall. He was never described black by someone, but he was “The Bushman”
There was never anyone who thought: “We the Germans, Poles, Russians and Albianians, we are white, and you Bushmen, are black!” such an idea doesn't existed.
There where no people that identified themselves as white.
Being a “Wigger” was the norm for the northern German youth in the late90s/early 2000s and the culture was influenced strongly by American Hip Hop Bands and clothing that was propagated by television stations like MTV or Viva. In many towns shops for Hip Hop clothing opened. There was a neo-nazi guy in our class, that had a picture of Hitler at the backside of his schoolbag, but he also listened to WuTang Clan and had worn a baggy pants and wide T-shirts, had a 2Pack necklace. If you wanted to be a real man, you had to wear a baggypants, necklace, cap: https://img.fotocommunity.com/hip-hop-tsunami-55a43983-cd76-48cb-81d5-80f7fe7c1856.jpg?height=1080
The Bavarians are often not amused about the people outside of Southern Germany, they describe them as “Saupreissn” which means the same as Pig Prussians and think that they where underdeveloped in acultural sense. Some people say that Bavaria has to pay for the rest of Germany and that this is not fair, it should become a separate country. There is a political party in Bavaria that supports this idea the Bayern Partei.
From friends of Bavarian origin I know that they where recognized as foreigners here and people asked them where they are from.
For me it is an impossibility not to ask someone where he or she is from, because it is just normal where I am living. I also sometimes get asked where I am from. But in the USA it is now considered racist.
My grandfather described his personal view of race in this way: “There is Hamburg, then comes Hannover, but under this, the more far you go, it only turns more and more bad”
He considered only Scandinavian people as equal to us.
Overall these patters are also described by anthropologists in terms of tribal alliances and hostility.
Races/Ethnicities are socially constructed, but this kind of construction is rooted inhuman psycho-biology. It is part of genetic determined social behavior to classify people and decide if they are friend or foe.
But this is an animal thing and we should not get controlled by it. If we would accept to follow all our animal like behaviors, we would follow every advertisement, sleight of hand, magical thinking.
Have you ever tried to classify yourself based on facial recognition software? You would be amused, how strange it works. Fat Europeans often get matches with East Asians or Uralics, because fat people have narrow eyes and big cheeks. People generally get matches with people of completely different ethnicities, because of their hair and beard style, or the way they do their makeup. Or the software fixates on a single kind of facial feature that it believes is very important for the match, for example the nose.
From the genetic perspective there is not only one view of racial classification, because there is no ultimate answer to the question how people should be separated. The discussion about this already started in the last century, where anthropologists used different racial classifications and developed many local variants for lumping together the traits of people. They also believed that the traits where linked to a kind of ancestry. For example they believed that a person from Italy and a person from Sweden that posses the traits that described as the Alpinid race, must be of the same eastern origin of small funny people that lived in the mountains.
This idea would not be compatible with the admixture components of today's Swedes and Italians.
There are some ideas of this period that pointed to a kind of ancestry, for example there is maybe a connection to the idea of the Alpine race and the Linear Pottery, but in many cases those classifications cannot be held anymore. Even with the Idea that the Alpine racere presents a neolithic prototype there are much mismatches, for example that many neolithic cultures already carried blonde alleles and blue eye alleles, that they often where not brachycephalic and not had small, flat noses.
But Coon was not able to perform genetic testing and could not determine soft body parts, skin, eye and hair color.
He build his phenotypes on living people, that where already admixed by Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age migration periods. Regions like southern and southeastern Europe already had later migrations from the Caucasus, Middle East and North Africa.
Everybody can define a phenotype and claim it is race because you will always find people somewhere that have similar traits to your combination of traits that you believe has to represent the prototype of a race.
The problem with ancestry components and traits is a one that for me became much more relevant as I searched for trait related SNPs in ancient samples myself.
People that live in the same region many generations can have almost the same admixture, but look different.
Modern ancestry calculators do not use trait SNPs for determining peoples ancestry.
They do not use the genetic features that humans in their everyday life use to classify someone by the sight of eye.
In anthro forums people often strongly identify with their mtDNA and haplogroups or link specific traits to them. But this linkage is a statistically one and not caused by the haplogroups themselves in most cases. The people that carried those haplogroups once, may appeared and behaved completely different as the carriers do now.
Then there is this thing with comparing segment matches. Yes, this can show who is a close relative, but does not say anything about your look, if those matches are not in a gene region that carries optical trait related SNPs. You share similar DNA with a person in a specific region, but the rest can be completely different.
Who is your true relative?
The person from which you chronologically descended, but shows mostly no psychological, physiological and health related traits of you, or the person that is not part of your chronological descent but machtes in most psychological, physiological and health related traits with you?
A problematic question I think. What would you answer?
What matters most in genetic terms: Admixture, segment matches, haplogroup, mtDNA, phenotype? Trait matching? Or do they all matter?
And what about your personal affection to a culture? Does it count, or not?
Other people that are more interested in social sciences would argue that this questions are obsolete and we should classify people the way society does it in the USA now. But this is an intellectual capitulation in my opinion, because it is a downfall to an animal like behavior and a step towards a worldwide racial war like it just happens in the USA.
All people with black skin are of the same race, all people with a beard are men, down syndrome people are east Asians too, all blue eyed people are Aryans, microcephaly makes you a homo erectus, all red haired people are witches.
It is not very intelligent and a cementation of preconceptions that prevents society from developing socially and intellectual. A discussion about the race question must be always possible.
What happens in the USA reminds me of this:https://www.southpark.de/en/episodes/uvp08l/south-park-ginger-kids-season-9-ep-11
You raise some interesting questions. Before responding to them I would just say that I agree with Jovialis and David Reich:
Races are a social construct of a biological reality. Where people get confused is in using the "racial" categories of the late 19th and early 20th century anthropologists. There is no Alpine, or Nordic, or any other "race" in West Eurasia. Europeans, and really all West Eurasians, are the product of the admixture of the "races" which existed far back in pre-history, like the WHG/EHG, the Anatolian farmers, the CHG, etc. The only exception is perhaps that perhaps the Near East has much less WHG/EHG ancestry, so we might say that West Eurasians have two sub-categories, the Europeans and the Near Easterners, with some overlap.
Then there are the East Asians, who overlap a bit with West Eurasians in far north eastern Europe, and the Sub-Saharan Africans whose ancestry has spilled northward most obviously in North Africa. The "indigenous" people of the Americas might be a different race although they are a blend of people generally from Europe and East Asia. Then there are the South Asians and the aboriginals of Australia and parts of South East Asia.
So, what are we looking at? We're looking at 3, maybe 5 or 6 groups.
What qualifies them as races? David Reich pointed it out.
" Present-day human populations, which often but not always are correlated to today’s “race” categories, have in a number of instances been largely isolated from one another for tens of thousands of years."
Over the course of those tens of thousands of years they accumulated enough different mutations to create a small yet significant difference from one another.
One may not be able to tell whether someone comes from Poland or Germany solely by physical appearance but one can tell the difference between a European, an East Asian, and someone from Ghana. To pretend otherwise is silly. The differences go beyond appearance, however. They affect disease propensity, certain types of athletic ability, ability in certain types of arts etc.
As someone else said upthread, if people weren't concerned with actual or perceived superiority between the races, it wouldn't be such a toxic subject.
The ethnic rivalries, divisions, you saw all around you in Germany exist every where. My paternal grandfather, perhaps partly because he grew up in mountain villages isolated from Italians who didn't look like him, was rabidly anti-Southern Italian. Had he been alive when I married my husband there would have been a huge ruckus. In northern Ireland, I defy anyone to physically tell Orangemen from Catholics. However, "The Troubles" took many lives because of history, a difference in religion, a difference in economic opportunities. Or, take Ukrainians and Russians. So, it exists everywhere, as I said, and is part, as you said, of man's tribal nature, and not necessarily based on big physical differences.
The question is at what point that kind of feeling is toxic. In my opinion it is toxic when perceived differences, which may or may not be accurate, are used to take away the civil and human rights of the other.
When I was growing up here, I didn't understand the toxicity of all of this. Perhaps it was that my parents just happened to be sort of "color" blind because we came from a world where "people of color" did not then exist. My mother couldn't drive. There was a dentist's office within walking distance; the idea that we shouldn't go to him because he was black didn't occur to her, as it didn't occur to her to not let me play with his daughter, who went to Catholic school with me. It was the neighbors who told her it wasn't "done", neighbors she ignored, thank goodness. That girl was one of the few with whom I could talk about books rather than dolls. So, the whole drive for equal rights for Black Americans was something I whole heartedly supported and still support today. I really took it to heart and was incredibly moved by Martin Luther King's statement that each person should be judged by the content of his character and not the color of his skin. I also believed and believe that each person, regardless of race, religion, gender, sexual persuasion etc., is entitled to respect, equal treatment in front of the law, and equal opportunity so that each person may achieve the most possible given that person's individual abilities and physical and mental capabilities.
The last part is important. There are average differences across "races" for various traits. Cognitive functioning may be one of those traits to some degree. IF that turns out to be true, what does that mean in terms of what an "individual" can achieve? The answer for me is nothing at all. What should the effect be on how people of different groups are treated in terms of the law, equal opportunity etc. The answer once again is nothing at all, imo.
In the U.S. today that kind of position is anathema. The Marxist/Maoist woke movement insists on three things. There are no differences between the races in terms of cognitive functioning and success in educational attainment as well as other things. Any differences that exist are the result of structural racism and not innate differences. The solution is to impose mandates and proportionality in all areas.
It is complete madness. It has led to the California school system doing away with the College Boards tests not because they fail to predict university performance, but because they do so too well. Public high schools/lyceums which have "magnet" schools in certain areas for high performing students in math and science (and the arts, performing arts) are to proportion places according to race or shut down because there are too many East Asian and white students, often Jews as a matter of fact (that is never raised about the performing arts schools). Again, in California, they will no longer offer algebra in 7th grade, making everyone wait until 9th grade, because the "early" classes don't have enough minorities. I could go on and on.
It is an inconvenient truth that some groups of people are just better at certain things ON AVERAGE than others. The most difficult math course in the country is probably an undergraduate one at Harvard; it teaches four years of math in one year or two years (or something like that). The students are 100% male, 45% Jewish, and 18% Asian. The other 37% are mixed but all male. Should Harvard force a certain number of minorities and females into the course based on national percentages? What the hell would be the point of that when many of those people would be completely out of their depth? Should we close down the course? Have we no responsibility to the students who can sail through such a course and make who knows what contributions to mathematics or science?
Science itself is being held hostage in the debate over trans people, for example. My understanding of science is that it is based on certain verifiable facts. Gender is one of them. That is held to no longer be true. If you "feel" you're a different gender, that's what you are, even if you're a tomboyish girl of five or a boy of seven who is good in the arts. You can "choose" your gender even at that age, and your parents can find doctors who will perform surgery on you to make it more "fitting". All of this can lead to the destruction of things like women's sports, something that some women fought for for a very long time.
To raise such questions socially, on twitter or other social media, is to brand oneself a racist. This is the madness which surrounds us.
