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. One level higher inhabitants of a certain region are similar. Going up, just before the level of "all humans are similar" you encounter race.
the whole idea of classifying people by skin color becomes... well, ridiculous.
That's why I'm suggesting classifying people not by their skin colour, but by the genetic pool / cluster their ancestors belonged to. Of course it's an imprecise, statistical classification that talks mostly about population averages and priors. That classification, however, is correlated with skin colour.
Speaking generally, the usefulness of classifications is determined by their intended use. It all depends on what do you want to do with your classification, so unless you specify the point of the exercise, the whole thing kinda hangs in the air...
That is a definitional argument -- it's all about how one would define the word "race".
Very much so, yes.
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. One level higher inhabitants of a certain region are similar. Going up, just before the level of "all humans are similar" you encounter race.
I'd argue, as our culture defines race, you really encounter a large number of different and distinct ways of classifying group...
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.