<p>If that’s how you define it, sure. But that only proves my point; race is a made-up abstract idea that is extremely subjective to interpretation. There is nothing concrete in the human genome, which has been entirely decoded, that determines “race.”</p>
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<p>Most people include consideration of skin color in their concept of race. Don’t be facetious.</p>
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<p>Extremely? That’s hyperbole. Race might not be as clearcut as the difference between red and blue, but that doesn’t mean it’s “extremely subjective to interpretation.” </p>
<p>(all ideas are made-up and abstract; also, the word is ‘subject’)</p>
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<p>Race is derived from phenotype and heritage, not gene analysis. Pointing out that races aren’t hard subspecies doesn’t make race an invalid concept. It just means that race isn’t directly genetically based.</p>
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<p>Choose whichever makes you more comfortable, white or asian, it will not make much of a difference in admission, since neither is a URM (under represented minority).</p>
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<p>Ask your mom what she considers herself and you. This will be a good starting point, no?</p>
<p>Remember that you can also decline self-identification.</p>
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<p>In my experience, Pakistani mothers will usually not have highly developed notions of racial identity. This is why poster is probably asking the question, in the first place. Race is a European/ western social construct. In Pakistani society, divisions are along linguistic, religious and tribal lines more than physical features. The concept of race as we understand it in the west does not exist. </p>
<p>regards,</p>
<p><a href=“%5Burl=http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/15458811-post543.html]#543[/url]”>quote</a> …Race is derived from phenotype and heritage, not gene analysis. Pointing out that races aren’t hard subspecies doesn’t make race an invalid concept. It just means that race isn’t directly genetically based.
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<p>To be more precise (for the benefit of college-bound and hopefully future critical thinkers), research is revealing that the notion of ‘race’ is a “byproduct of cognitive machinery that evolved to detect coalitional alliances.” What’s important about this research is the temporal dynamic ‘race’ is a part of.</p>
<p>From Proceedings of the National Academy of Science: [Can</a> race be erased? Coalitional computation and social categorization](<a href=“http://www.pnas.org/content/98/26/15387.full]Can”>http://www.pnas.org/content/98/26/15387.full):</p>
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<p>More here: [The</a> (Mis)Conception of Race is Literally in the Mind](<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/7724978-post39.html]The”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/7724978-post39.html)</p>
<p>If we could eliminate coalitions and alliances…</p>
<p>This argument, in my mind, leans in favor of affirmative action, because it is an attempt to blur some of those lines of coalition and alliance. If you take an elite institution that is all while and male, and introduce some non-white members, and female members, it is no longer exclusive. But it has to be done to such a degree that those new members are not just tokens - that there presence alters the perception of what a member “looks like.” You need a critical mass.</p>
<p>The idea is to move the whole of society to a point where not only doesn’t race matter, but there is no perception that race matters. We’ve just not there yet. There is still a great deal of “us” and “them” within American society. There are many that would argue that race doesn’t matter, but that flies in the face of those who experience subtle instances of racism on a regular basis. The young black male who is met with looks or surprise when he walks into an AP class, as if to suggest he doesn’t belong. Not much different from the experience of women in some technical fields, and student-athletes with rigorous majors, or even in some cases, young men entering traditionally “female” fields such as nursing.</p>
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<p>You mean a quota?</p>
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<p>And we will never get there so long as we continue to categorize people by racial classification.</p>
<p>I’m with fabrizio. It seems strange to claim that we must continue to focus on race in order to reach a point where we stop caring about race.</p>
<p>An article from a recent issue of The Economist: </p>
<p>[The</a> census: Some other race | The Economist](<a href=“The Economist | World News, Economics, Politics, Business & Finance”>Some other race)</p>
<p>some people want to do away with capital punishment because it focuses on killing as a remedy for murder. As, I can understand that, I can understand those who do not want to see a race based remedy for race based crimes.</p>
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<p>First, the Supreme Court has never held that racial preferences can be motivated as a form of reparations. This goes all way the back to Bakke in 1978. But let’s suppose that racial preferences are to be used as reparations for black Americans. How will you ensure that it is the descendants of slaves who benefit and not, say, the children of immigrants such as yourself but who emigrated from Nigeria instead of Pakistan?</p>
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<p>None of it proves that Supreme Court does not sanction death for murder, which was my point.</p>
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<p>It’s really not that complicated. Even if we as individuals stop caring about race, the system, in a sense, will not. Blacks will still be disadvantaged compared to other groups and dominate the underclass in general. They will continue to have worse opportunities even at the same income levels, and they will continue to be disproportionately jailed and otherwise vilified.</p>
<p>What people mean by “stop caring about race” is that we should just ignore these issues altogether. But just like ignoring economic problems doesn’t solve income inequality, it seems strange to claim that ignoring issues of race will somehow solve them. :/</p>
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<p>Right, so let’s try critically thinking about the things the NAS says since that is not what the thing says.</p>
<p>Well, that’s kind of…tautological at best. Of course our division of people by race is the result of cognitive machinery and doesn’t have to happen. Everyone knows that. It’s the same for most of our moral values, and our tastes for food, and so forth. </p>
<p>That doesn’t change the fact that our categorization of people by race is senseless and lacking basis in reality (i.e., based on phenotype and heritage) like cooties.</p>
<p>The article is misnamed. What you quote discusses whether our detection of race is inborn or not, not whether race is a misconception or all in our heads.</p>
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<p>At the heart of Racism exists an idea that Blacks are genetically inferior than Whites. This idea is the basis of Racial discrimination. It does not matter whether they are descendants of slaves or not, if they are Blacks they are victims of Racism in a society where Whites have these ideas.</p>
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<p>I thought your “point” was that “race based crimes” deserve “race based remedies.”</p>
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<li>Why are blacks disadvantaged?</li>
<li>Why would blacks continue to have worse opportunities?</li>
<li>Why would blacks be vilified as a group if we as individuals stopped caring about racial classification? And how much of that disproportionate jailing is due to the war on drugs, which perhaps isn’t a kosher topic for this thread?</li>
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<p>Oh, so when you referred to “race based crimes,” you weren’t referring to slavery and Jim Crow. You’re referring to…well, what are you referring to? Racism still exists, no question, but we have nothing in our country that remotely resembles slavery and Jim Crow in terms of institutionalized racism.</p>
<p>That Barack Obama is now a two-term President of the United States does not prove that we are “post-racial” or that racism is extinct. I am not making and have never made that claim. But your persistent problem is your refusal to accept that we have moved past 1963. When a half-white, half-black individual can become (and is) President of the United States, it is clear that on a national level, racism is not the problem it once was.</p>