"If person A forms a private country club, and is comfortable only with members of his own race, is he "violating the dignity of individual humans"? Should such behavior be banned??

Mocked and shunned by decent people. Not banned.

"Why do we allow this for the most part but then condemn it as "racism" when it's based on certain physical characteristics, and say that it violates human dignity?"

Because it does when you choose skin color as the demarcation line - not a person's character, abilities or achievements but how that person looks to some other people. You wanna have a private club of all white people, go for it, but then other people gonna ask what's wrong with all the folks who look different who can't be in it.

I liked (parts of, anyway) the quoted article, but I can't fathom why the comment bears repeating.

It's like an alien read an English dictionary and had never heard of slavery.

The U.S. had race-based slavery. So what happens is that as a culture we came to confuse qualities of being a slave: stupid, uncultured, not human, etc- with skin color. Take any group of any race and force them into slavery for a few generations and the race of the slavers will think of themselves as superior to that race for a very long while. Because they are superior by virtue of being in the superior position; not intrinsically, but actually, and those two are very easy to confuse.

On a small scale, one white person not liking all black people or one white person not liking all black a people is not a big deal. On a large scale, all white people considering all black people subhuman is an immensely big deal.

A black man should be free to prefer to marry a black woman. A black man should also be free prefer to choose a white women to marry... without getting lynched. Racism is a cultural disease that, at large scale, can lead to gross loss of life and liberty. That is why it is bad. I really shouldn't have to explain this to any American with at least a third grade education.

That doesn't mean that other characteristics can't fall victim to the same effect. Hitler went after the mentally and physically handicapped too. It just seems that race tends to be a favourite basis for discrimination/mass extermination.

"You wanna have a private club of all white people, go for it, but then other people gonna ask what's wrong with all the folks who look different who can't be in it."

@B1g_Cucky: So, you're going to apply this standard fairly, right? Let's start at the top, with the Congressional Black Caucus that refuses to accept members from any other race. There are plenty of other examples as well.

Heck, blacks even want segregated housing now. That's something their ancestors fought to get rid of, but here they are, demanding to have it back.

Idiots.

The comment bears repeating because of this -- about, say, how some people prefer to marry a person who is racially more like them:

We accept that individuals have preferences about other humans they work, socialize, and live with. Sometimes their preferences are honorable, sometimes they're arbitrary, and other times they're neither ("we just hit it it off"). Why do we allow this for the most part but then condemn it as "racism" when it's based on certain physical characteristics, and say that it violates human dignity?

Are black orphans "allowed" to be adopted by whites? That used to be a no-no for some (non-racist of course) reason.

I've known several couples that adopted out of country kids at significant cost so "race" is what you make of it.

"The U.S. had race-based slavery. So what happens is that as a culture we came to confuse qualities of being a slave:"

It wasn't as *race based* as you imagine. All races have been enslaved, and been the slavers.

The escaped slaves that did the best were the ones that were able to pass as white or Native American. (And there were thousands of them)

But race really is somewhat of an artificial concept.

We know that because classification of race is always based on the phenotype. The overwhelming majority of your genes deal with other things than expression of the superficial outward physical characteristics.

I find that people are much more likely to congregate and divide themselves into groups based on cultural identification, than perceived race.

Get a couple of Japanese and Chinese in a room to find out how little the fact that they are both Asians matters.

The truth is, except for some minor physiological differences, we're really the same. If you took a black child and raised him in a Jewish community, he'd be Jewish in all but skin color. If you raised a Japanese baby in an Arabic community, he'd be Arabic.

Racism and sexism make no sense because they deprive society of the contributions of some segment of society for no reason but fear and prejudice.

Where would the world be without Henry Blair? Without Otis Boykin? Without David Crosthwaite, Jr.? Sitting in cars that won't start and houses without efficient air conditioning.

When we were tribal and each tribe desired the downfall of the other tribes, xenophobia may have made some sense. But we're supposed to be beyond that now, even if some parts of the world are not (yes, I'm lookin' at you Middle East and Africa and American college campuses).

"Heck, blacks even want segregated housing now. That's something their ancestors fought to get rid of, but here they are, demanding to have it back."

Given college student antipathy toward basic rights these days I'm not surprised; that the request comes from a historically oppressed group doesn't make it right or a good idea. A handful of college kids does not a persuasive case make.

"I find that when someone calls someone else racist, it's usually because they're trying to shut them up."

I'd also add that those are some of the same people who claim that they don't notice race; as if they are claiming some sort of moral superiority by pretending to be "color-blind."

People are able to accept blacks as the best athletes and musicians in the world for some reason, but insist that in all other respects the impact of slavery is keeping them from ever achieving. This is simple racism, the belief that black people can never overcome their past slave experience (of, what 160 years ago?). It would be like insisting that the jews kept in European ghettos and in poverty until after WWII could never recover from that experience and need to be on welfare forever--and yet everyone knows that isn't what happened. To admit that jews overcame their attempted genocide and ghettoization but that blacks never can...I just don't buy it and neither should anyone else. As an example, Thomas Sowell is, I believe, one of the great historians/economists/social analysts--and from his books you would not even know he was black.
As an ironic note, those who show their total lack of racism by marrying across racial lines are treated poorly (white marrying asian has "yellow fever" whatever that means) by the minority community. What greater proof could you have that a person is not a bigot?
Finally, no man can judge the love or hate in another man's heart and we should not try. One of the points of To Kill a Mockingbird was that Atticus, the lawyer, was not a loving man but he did the right thing. Cries of racism are simple bullying unless you can point to specific actions by the government that are keeping minorities down -- and I would argue that the $15/hr min wage will do exactly that.

I could marry a blond blue eyed Colombian and we would not consider each other different races. My friends and family would see us as as the same race. I do the same with a white American male and we are an inter-racial couple. See how subjective marrying within your own race is?

Is sickle cell a "black" disease? Or is it a geographic disease that follows the exact path of malaria?

Sub Saharan Africans have the most genetic diversity, including when it comes to phenotypes. However human beings are poor at recognizing anything other than the obvious so we use the artificial creation of race. Just because this is the case does not mean race is real. It isn't.

Plus Americans cling to a bizarre definition of race in the first place. It gives people in this country the illusion that if slave masters had been more egalitarian on race.... slavery would have not existed.

cell a "black" disease? Or is it a geographic disease that follows the exact path of malaria?

Sickle cell exists in the Asian population as well. Totally seperate mutation driven by the same adaptation to living in malaria infested places.

People want to use race as the short cut to actually doing the heavy lifting of learning about culture or genetics.

Same way they want to use Islam as a short cut to thinking about terrorists.

Lazy thinking and non existent analysis.

One reason slavery was considered morally (and economically) acceptable for so many centuries was that it was just a matter of who had the bigger army and not so much anyone's lineage. Therefore, your people could be the slaves in one century but the masters in the next century, so it all "evened out."

But once people started arguing that people who LOOKED a certain way were subhuman, no better than cattle, and forbidden to rise in social status, global revolution became inevitable.

Trouble is, of course, ILLEGAL slavery still exists practically everywhere.

From "The Family Nobody Wanted," chapter 13:

Reverend Carl Doss is talking to his (very) racist neighbor - Doss and his wife, Helen, are trying to adopt a half-black German girl, Gretchen (in the early 1950s). They eventually adopted 12 children in all.

"Back in the Roman days, slaves were of all colors and races, according to the fortunes of war. The American slave owners had more sensitive consciences than the old Romans, and they sensed that slavery was morally wrong. Something had to be said to answer their critics - and their own uneasy consciences as well. So it was rationalized that it wasn't a sin to buy and sell blacks for work horses, since they were an inferior race, a sort of subhuman group, and therefore couldn't be considered as fellow human beings. This nonsense was repeated so constantly that people came to believe it."

As it happens, though, given the times, they were not allowed to adopt Gretchen - and that seemed to be because of the U.S. authorities, not the Germans! (She went to a black American family eventually - pretty important in her case because she already knew, at four, that she was different from all the kids in the German orphanage
and she kept begging for white stockings so her legs would look white.) The other kids were mainly mixes of Asian, Latino, Anglo and Native American. They also had one foster child (in 1947?) whom no one would foster because he was Japanese-Filipino.

It's a good thing they TRIED to adopt her, though, or it would have looked suspicious, nowadays, that none of the mixed-race kids was part black. (On top of that, plenty of people, beforehand, were horrified at the idea that they would even THINK of adopting a black child. That racist neighbor I mentioned actually said: "Really, Carl, you can't be serious!...The good Lord made them to be slaves, and not on the same level with us.")

BTW, here's a map of modern day slavery. Somehow, I didn't know that Russia was worse than China - or even that India was worse than either one.

https://geographyeducation.org/courses/regional-geography-geog-400/modern-slavery/

From the Washington Post:

“This is not some softened, by-modern-standards definition of slavery. These 30 million people are living as forced laborers, forced prostitutes, child soldiers, child brides in forced marriages and, in all ways that matter, as pieces of property, chattel in the servitude of absolute ownership.”

It certainly will make me think twice about buying anything from India. But then, most of my stuff comes from yard sales anyway.

"The truth is, except for some minor physiological differences, we're really the same."

Where do you get that?

Despite decades of benefits and other programs desperately trying to elevate black Americans, they still struggle by any measure - even in cities, counties and schools with black administrations. Testing doesn't show they're equal? Rather than believe the test, it MUST be thrown out - even if the test asks nothing whatsoever about societal issues, only things like STEM subjects. In an incredible flood of sewage, poor scores are excused by claiming there is a different way of thinking. Not about physics, nitwit. It only works one way.

The mayor of Baltimore even said go ahead and riot, we know you can't help it.

Some of this is the schools.

Some is not.

"It is curious that blacks, the least educated thirteen percent of the population, the least productive, most criminal, and most dependent on governmental charity, should dominate national politics. Yet they do. Virtually everything revolves around what blacks want, demand, do, or can’t do. Their power seems without limit.

Courses of instruction in the schools, academic rigor, codes of dress, rules regarding unceasing obscenity, all must be set to suit them, as must be examinations for promotion in fire departments, the military, and police forces. Blacks must be admitted to universities for which they are not remotely qualified, where departments of Black Studies must be established to please them. Corporate work forces, federal departments, and elite high-schools must be judged not on whether they perform their functions but on whether they have the right number of blacks.

Do laws requiring identification to vote threaten to end multiple voting? The laws must go. Do blacks not like Confederate flags? Adieu, flags. Does Huckleberry Finn go down the Mississippi with the Nigger Jim, or Conrad write The Nigger of the Narcissus? These must be banned or expurgated to please blacks who haven’t read them or, usually, heard of them. Do we want to prevent people coming from regions infested with Ebola from entering the United States? We cannot. It would offend blacks."

Well, not quite. It would offend those who make a living telling them they can't succeed without help.

"Where do you get that?"

Science.

Black Americans fail because of culture. Once you remove culture and add an expectation of success you get a group like Nigerian Americans.

"decades of benefits and other programs desperately trying to elevate black Americans"...

have failed to completely compensate for the scars of centuries of chattel slavery, a century of laws making blacks de jure second class citizens, and a criminal justice system that incarcerates blacks for 60% longer than whites convicted of the same crimes.

Not sure there's an interpretation of Rebwaste's take other than that blacks are inferior, but maybe there's a non-racist interpretation, or maybe he legitimately thinks blacks are inferior. Murray got plenty of mileage out of that for sure.

Lenona,

That map is a bit out of date. The ISIS areas should be much darker. ISIS very much runs on chattel slavery. (Otherwise quite accurate)

Radwaste,

As Ppen said, culture fully explains the difference. And that culture is driven by 'white' american guilt. Probably the best thing Obama has done for race relations is reduce white guilt.

"Black Americans fail because of culture. Once you remove culture and add an expectation of success you get a group like Nigerian Americans."

I've heard the "selected-audience" hypothesis, that says that when the slavers raided African villages, the smarter and more capable ones escaped, leaving the less able to be captured. Not sure I buy it, though. From most of what I've read, by 1950 American blacks as a class had made substantial progress and were approaching where they would become middle class as soon as they had full rights. It's after that that everything went to hell. I do claim that today, American blacks don't fail in spite of government programs; they fail because of those programs. Welfare made education and self-sufficiency something to be mocked; racial preferences spread the Dunning-Kruger effect, and a venial leadership class encouraged blacks to think of themselves as black first and Americans second. Drugs being thrown into the mix didn't help either.

Some broke out anyway; there is such a thing as a black middle class, or rather, blacks who are among the middle class. But a lot have been held back, and of the ones who made it, they are constantly nagged about "giving back to the ghetto". Why should they have to "give back" to the ghetto? What did it ever do for them?

There are real biological differences is academic aptitude and athletic ability among people of different ethnicities. However, these differences are totally overwhelmed by the differences between individuals.

Because of this, trying to classify someone by skin color or eye shape is just stupid.

Unfortunately it was in the governments best interest to Balkanize America by encouraging Academic institutions to classify people by these physical characteristics and pit them against each other in a giant *victim compensation* spoils system.

"...have failed to completely compensate for the scars of centuries of chattel slavery, a century of laws making blacks de jure second class citizens, and a criminal justice system that incarcerates blacks for 60% longer than whites convicted of the same crimes."

Nope.

Nor is anything excused by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

But it's nice of you to note, though indirectly, that your position basically says Affirmative Action is unwarranted beyong presenting equal access to education.

Ah, yes, culture. Disregarding the fact that psychologists test people all over the globe, not just in the blighted-by-the-welfare-state projects of St. Louis, MO, the DNA people, busy showing how environmental effects cause changes in the human genome, would like a word with you...

...which I doubt you will hear, because gross physical attributes have never been a clue to you that internal differences exist, also.

It's vitally important to pretend that all people are the same, because singing Kumbaya is far more pleasant than admitting that we still live in a jungle; it just has buildings in it.

It is not Kumbaya hand holding Rad.

We can manipulate intelligence quite well by modifying food availability, childhood stressors and exposure to parasites within 1 generation. Sapolsky does great work showing just how much childhood stress and culture can affect your propensity for crime, something that appears to only happen to males and NOT females.

Human beings are incredibly inbred and have not been separated long enough to have any meaningful differences. If the race based link were as real as people believed we should be seeing Native Americans on par with Asians in all those STEM tests that are supposedly the hallmark of a persons "real" worth. They are the same race afterall.

The truth is the individual is worth more than the group but being monkeys we like to latch onto the idea that we do better because we are the inherently better group. Truth is if you have a loving mother married to a loving father that is it---you are officially set for life. Not anymore complicated than that. Even the mentally ill do amazingly well when they have loving parents.

And btw Sub Saharan Africans are the most genetically diverse, even when it comes to the expression of phenotypes. So all those outward physical attributes used for race are are pretty much junk when it comes to analyzing humans and catagorizing them.

It isn't that all people are the same Rad. As Isab points out individual difference are significantly larger than those expressed between 'races'. Quite frankly the color of your skin is only a rough clue to ancestry or genetics. You may as well classify materials by color. Sorry, brushed steel and aluminum are quite different even though they appear the same to the human eye.

I don't buy that selected hypothesis Cousin Dave. Just for the simple reason far more black came to America willingly than in bondage. I don't remember the exact number but what I recall was over 10 to 1 (roughly 100 to 1 if memory serves). If it was anything it was (and still is) welfare and victim politics.

It's vitally important to pretend that all people are the same,"

It's vitally important to understand basic maths and probability. That even if that means of two Gaussian distributions are shifted a little bit, both of those distributions still overlap significantly, your case can be conceited, and still not be persuasive.