Are you racist?

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by blueerica

Interesting thoughts going on in here. I've had to do a great deal of thinking on this in my ethnic lit class, and I suppose that I've never really liked the term race, nor the idea that DNA has anything to do with anything.

That's another interesting line of discussion to begin. I persoanally don't see how genetics can't be a contributor to behavior. I have little doubt that identical twins, for instance, will have more in common with each other behaviorally than even fraternal twins do.

That being said (and I've made this argument several times in the past), that's only part of the equation. I believe there's a range of degrees one can be genetically predisposed to certain traits. Some traits a person will exhibit no matter what their environment. Some will only be triggered if they're raised in a certain environment. And others will never show up no matter the environment. So while I think it's being a bit blind to say, "Behavioral differentiation between 'races' based on genetics is bogus", I think it's equally blind to think that one can separate the genetics from the environment.

It's all a matter of macro vs. micro. On the macro level, from a statistcal perspective, one can show that a wide sampling of people of X 'race' will be affected differently by some environmental factor than a similar sampling f people of Y 'race'. But on the micro level, everyone's an individual and while you can make some educated guesses, it's a falacy to assume things about an individual based on those broader statistical analyses.