Come Oh Ye Rational Thinkers...and explain race theory to me

[tantric]

There are gene lines, yes, and the East Asian Blush is true, but they don't track with 'races' at all. And, generally, they are mixed and mixed again, so that it'd be impossible to make neat categories.

What do you mean when you say gene lines don't track with races?

I'm just confused because I don't know what you mean by track with, and I don't know how you can find that something doesn't track with something you believe is non existent anyway.

I always thought race basically was genetic lines, different breeds of people. Obviously pretty much every different breed of human is cross bred because there's very few groups of people who are isolated totally from other groups of humans, there are no neat dividing lines but there are groups of people with different characteristics.

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Julial wrote

Race is a leftover cultural concept from the age of expansion of the English/French/Spanish/Dutch/Portugese used to rationalize the subjugation of pretty much everyone they met outside Europe. Other folks, like the Japanese, had similar xenophobic concepts, but were less effective in implementing their empires.

I disagree with this just because it seems like an over simplified too specific to be historically accurate to say that the concept of race if leftover from one specific era by one group of people for one specific purpose.

Ancient civilizations all over the world before many of the countries you mentioned even existed had concepts of race, egyptians and greeks for example.

The genetic maps of human groupings are wildly complicated. This is the easiest one to follow I've found, based on Y-DNA. It's also grossly simplified, particularly in the Americas. When you track mitochrondrial DNA, you get something else.

I actually had a plan for fixing the system - making new terms. I barely started before I noticed the extreme similarity to NewSpeak. If I'd finished it I'd be a namerigens weseurotype englang cosmamericult. Born in North America, of the western European YDNA group, english speaking, cosmopolitan american culture. Still, that tells you something.

Every country does have a concept of race, and all of them are different. Racism in alive and well in Zimbabwe, and it's not about the Rhodesians. It's conflict between the Shona and Ndebele.

Masiye, is one example. Masiye is today in his mid-thirties. His
late father was a Moyo, but his mother is a Khumalo. According to
the principle of patrilineality, he inherited his father's isibongo. He has
married an Nguni wife, however, and both he and his mother are very
proud of his wife's aristocratic status:

"My mum is extremely excited about it. She is very hard-core Nguni, and I
am sure she might have feared that I had married one of these lesser groups.
It is actually always in her speech. What kind of person are you talkkig
about? She actually says: Wumuntumuntu? 'Is it a real person?' [literally: 'Is
it a person person?']."

These three men all first presented themselves with pride as Ndebele;
however when tracing their ancestors' first names and izibongo back
in time, they revealed that they were of Shona origin. They first
over-communicated Ndebele ethnic identity and under-communicated
Shona origin, but when it became apparent that that they could not
pass as 'pure' Ndebele any longer they started to talk about their
Shona origin.

But to Americans, that's not racism cause both groups are 'black'.