oliver@unc.UUCP (Bill Oliver) (08/24/85)
In article <2529@pegasus.UUCP> avi@pegasus.UUCP (60545451-Avi E. Gross;LZ 3C-314;201-576-6241) writes: >In article <597@hou2b.UUCP> halle@hou2b.UUCP (J.HALLE) writes: > >One interesting sidelight is that Jews (as a whole) can be shown genetically >to be quite diverse, and not a "race". I am still puzzled how anybody can >refer to orientals, blacks and others as being of a different "race", when >we can clearly interbreed. Perhaps they would just prefer that we didn't! I >wonder if some of the creationists in net.originds would now jump in and >tell me that actually orientals and blacks are just different "kinds" :-) >-- >-=> Avi E. Gross @ AT&T Information Systems Laboratories (201) 576-6241 > suggested paths: [ihnp4, allegra, cbosg, ahuta, ...]!pegasus!avi I guess I just hate to see a good word die, but "race" as I use the term professionally is simply to indicate a generally well recognized constellation of phenotypic expressons which can be used conveniently to describe a given person. Generally speaking, when two organisms are genetically incapable of reproduction, they are of different species, not simply different races. I suppose that I could use "subspecies" or "strain" instead of race, but "kind" is just simply too meaningless an expression. When I attempt to reconstruct a person from a skeleton, it is important to the police and to possible family members that I be able to make specific (or at least as specific as possible) statements about the decedent. By looking at a skull, it is frequently possible to draw good conclusions as to the age, sex, race, and various health and environmental features of the decedent. It would be unfortunate, as has become fashionable in other areas of medicine, if I did not draw those conclusions because of some vague feeling that making simple descriptive statements was bigoted. Am I being sexist when I state that a decedent was male or female. Am "discriminating" against the old or young when I say the decedent was between 30 and 60 years of age? Am I being "racist" when I say the decedent was black or white or amerindian? I don`t think so, but now I have seen two postings telling me I am being just that. Should I simply let a body go undescribed and unidentified because people are afraid of describing diversity? It has become habit in some medical schools to not describe race in a medical workup, since administrators fear accusations of being racist. Unfortunately, there are diseases more prominent in one race than another and to ignore this is to provide poorer health care (and to provide inadequate records should foul play lead to an untimely end). I suggest again that "race" is by no means a perjorative. It is, as it always has been, a description of a constellation of features that needs to be called something, at least. To simply describe each feature individually and let the reader gather what he or she can is to deny the reader the benefit of your experience and to assume that the reader is just as good a forensic anthropologist as you are. I have found that there really aren`t bunches of people out there who could make heads or tails out of one of my reports if I didn`t draw some conclusions along the way. Racial and ethnic diversity is not something to be ignored for fear of appearing a bigot. It is something that should be celebrated as a link to a given person`s unique heritage. Bill Oliver