That seems a very straightforward example of the Fallacy of the Gray.
It isn't. I am not saying "The existence of a spectrum makes it impossible to tell where someone is on the spectrum between white and black". I am saying the notion of race is cultural rather than referring to anything like an innate property; I recall a documentary in which an American black man went to Africa to investigate farming techniques, and was made fun of for calling himself "black" when he was clearly white. http://lesswrong.com/lw/o0/where_to_draw_the_boundary/
Really, just can't be sorted? That's a silly position.
I've given explicit reasons. try some.
That categorization is strongly correlated with your genes. Black people, for example, have strikingly different prevalence of certain diseases compared to white people. And East Asians have yet another prevalence. You think it's just because of a "cultural historical accident"?
Some black people do. Other black people don't. Where did this black person's ancestors grow up in Africa? After all, there's far greater genetic diversity among Africans than among, say, Europeans.
You seem to be hung up on the word "race". Replace it with "gene pool", see if it helps.
You'll notice I refer several times to genetic clusters, which is a more accurate description than gene pool. But once you notice that there are multiple clusters for "black", and also multiple clusters for "white", and all of the clusters overlap, the idea of race starts dissolving. If you notice furthermore that clusters exist for other things - eye color, for example, or hair color, or jaw structure, or dental crown formations - the whole idea of classifying people by skin color becomes... well, ridiculous. The fact that I have an unusual crown formation says -far- more about my genes than my skin color, in point of fact, because there is only one island in the world where the particular formation originates - whereas there are dozens of genetic clusters which have roughly similar skin color.
I am saying the notion of race is cultural rather than referring to anything like an innate property;
That is a definitional argument -- it's all about how one would define the word "race".
But once you notice that there are multiple clusters for "black", and also multiple clusters for "white", and all of the clusters overlap, the idea of race starts dissolving.
I don't think so. You can look at genetic clusters at different levels of aggregation. At some level each person is unique. At another level a family is similar. O...
This sort of thinking seems bad:
This sort of thinking seems socially frowned upon, but accurate:
Similar points could be made by replacing a/b with [group of people]. I think it's terrible to say something like:
But to me, it doesn't seem wrong to say something like:
Credit and accountability seem like good things to me, and so I want to live in a world where people/groups receive credit for good qualities, and are held accountable for bad qualities.
I'm not sure though. I could see that there are unintended consequences of such a world. For example, such "score keeping" could lead to contentiousness. And perhaps it's just something that we as a society (to generalize) can't handle, and thus shouldn't keep score.