Can computers cope with human races? (1989)
I love this as an exploration, but I think it doesn&#x27;t go quite far enough. Are (socially defined) racial categories ridiculous from a biological lens? Sure. Does that mean they are not real? No.<p>Humans are primates for whom social power structures are deeply important. (And not the only ones; see de Waal&#x27;s &quot;Chimpanzee Politics&quot; for how it plays out in our nearest relatives.) As a species we are extremely good at building eusocial power systems, and we use that to get a lot done. But those can depend on a lot of effectively arbitrary markers to do that. Look at the British class system. What outsiders would call slight shifts in accent, clothing, and manners mark major division in social power.<p>The US wasn&#x27;t nearly as classist, but it undeniably started out as a racialized and gendered power system. (E.g., 1700+ members of congress owned slaves [1], with slaveholders being in the majority for the first 30 years. It wasn&#x27;t until 1870 we saw a black person in a federal elected seat, and the first woman was in 1917.) So it&#x27;s not a shock that state and federal bureaucracies would be <i>extremely</i> interested in which box a person fits into.<p>These categories aren&#x27;t biological, they&#x27;re social, standing waves in our interactions. As a white man, there are many, many situations in the US where I get treated better just because of that. It&#x27;s that lasting differential in social power that is what really defines racial categories. If we want to eliminate the categories, we <i>first</i> have to eliminate the power differential.  Then the categories will go away on their own, the same way a lot of ancestry questions have become moot among white people (e.g., having ancestors of English vs German vs Irish vs Italian ancestry used to matter a fair bit). But as with the English class system, that power differential will not go away on its own; it has to be studied, recognized, and actively dismantled.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;history&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2022&#x2F;congress-slaveowners-names-list&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;history&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2022&#x2F;cong...</a>