When the meaning of a word has legal effects, it has to be defined as precisely as possible, and that needs to be very precise. If it can't, then the idea of linking legal considerations to very undefinable words is a big mistake and should be avoided at all costs.

That should be the take away re ethnicity (and many other things), to remove it from "protected classes" (in the law, and in forum moderation) unless the vast majority of adults can agree it obviously mean the same thing for all of them.

Or, you want the law to be this extremely uncertain set of rules determined by a clerical class to which you basically want to give the keys of the kingdom.

It's not a problem if me an al-jalfrezi disagree on the meaning of ethnicity. It becomes a problem when people want to "protect" ethnicity without having a clear, objective, transparent, shared definition of it.

I was pretty unhappy one time when I ordered a "mushroom burger" at a restaurant and didn't get the hamburger with mushrooms that I have been served at every other restaurant at which I have ordered one. Instead I was served a huge cooked mushroom on a bun. I do love mushrooms so I went ahead and ate it, but I still thought it was false advertising. That wasn't a burger! I mean, even when something says "veggie burger", they don't just serve you some random vegetables on a bun! They give you a burger patty of which the primary ingredient is vegetables. So I should have at least expected to receive a burger patty made of ground mushroom.

I thought the classic edge case about sandwiches was a hot dog (on bun) - sandwich or not?

So, wait. Are you saying Buddy wasn't an elf despite Papa Elf being his adoptive father? What about after he, Buddy Jr. and Jovie move to the North Pole?

This argument has been debunked now and it’s accepted that Palestinians are an ethnicity and therefore protected from the sort of racism that some might want to make against them.

It might have been funny the first time but after many repetitions it becomes abuse.

Weren't you just basically making the argument that ethnicity has nothing to do with race?

Jfc. Race doesn’t exist as a bunch of genes. It’s a social construct.

You wouldn’t say a native of southern Spain was black yet his skin is often darker than Africans who would be regarded as black.

"Or similar"


If I were to make an objection based on the definition this would be it though.

So you think that ethnicity is real, but race isn't? Then shouldn't you come up with a different word than 'racism'?

I certainly never said anything about defining race by skin color or by anything else in particular. But obviously race means something to most people, and it has nothing to do with where someone lives or what religion they practice. I would have previously considered ethnicity to be related to race, but you just came very close to proving to me that it is not (I'm still not certain what to think about that relationship).

The definition including that phrase was not introduced here until after your comment about ravioli (and I hadn't read it before making that post).

But I don't think pasta is that similar to bread.

Yeah I agree the word racism is unhelpful but it and its predecessor racialism predate our understanding of genetics and it’s too late to replace it with something less confusing.

Race is one form of ethnicity and the one most people conflate with it but as per the definitions posted there are others too.

I don’t think it would be reasonable to say that one African tribe with a set of customs are the same ethnicity as another tribe with different customs.

I had never heard the term 'racism' be confusing or misleading until the past 15 years or so, when some people suddenly decided that being against many common practices of followers of Islam is a form of racism. Even when most of those practices would seem to be hated by those same people.

They also decided that any criticism of any behaviour by any ethnic group not predicated on oppression is racism. Even implying it might be possible that some ethnic groups have worse outcomes for reasons linked to their own agency (=choices) is racism for some people.

it hasn't been debunked, and anyway any claim about residents of gaza not extended to residents of the west bank isn't a claim about palestinians so it isn't a claim about an ethnicity even if you want to believe palestinian to be an ethnicity.

Or is "gazean" an ethnicity as well?

I don't know enough about each group to say.

But I do know that if you start calling Palestinians or Gazeans abusive names like "animals" or "savages" it will be racism.

A not actually dark african won't be regarded as black in Spain (or in Italy for that matter).

Even Obama didn't look very black to us here and Berlusconi famously said he was just a little tanned. We correctly identified him as half black which is what he is. Same as our italian 100m sprint champion Marcell Jacob: doesn't look actually black, because he is half black, and italians broadly correctly identify him as such.

And this is 100% because of genetics for both: one actually black parent (a person whose ancestors were almost all actually black) and a non black, light-color skinned other parent.

Why would it be racism to call gazeans abusive names but not to do the same for , say , Naples (italy) residents?

I'm sure the people you cite are delighted to be called half something.

Yes because they are also different races lol. There are more differences among sub saharian african races than among the average black and the average white (which is what you might have misunderstood when you claimed something similar, but among whites). African races have both the tallest and the shortest human populations for example.

But ofc "race doesn't exist in the genetical sense" even if the average height of adult men pigmies is 155cm, and the average height of Dinkas adult men is 182cm.

Which is normal because genetic biodiversity for every species is stronger in the area the species originated (it had more time to differentiate).

Naples contains several different ethnicities (or did when I was there) . No one ever calls a white Italian a savage (that pejorative seems to be reserved for black, or at least non-white people) so we all know exactly what it is you want to say and you're not fooling anyone.

skin color is salient but there are many objectively measurable inheritable traits that define races far better like average height, or specific diseases propensity or protection from diseases or traits like milk digestion (or lack thereof).

According to Jalfrezi races don't exist, yet 99% of south koreans can't digest lactose when adult while 90%+ of white finnish people can. What is that if not a common genetic trait differentiation predicated on different common ancestors?

Northern italians often use words toward Naepolitan residents that are as bad as those american white supremacists use for blacks.

It is less common now that the Lega party tried to become a national party but just to give an example, "vesuvio pensaci tu" was common (Vesuvio is the big vulcan near Naples, pensaci tu is like "take care of it").

Or "senti che puzza, scappano i cani, stanno arrivando i napoletani" : feel the smell, even the dogs flee, naepolitans are coming. Or "napoli merda, napoli colera, sei la vergogna dell'italia intera" : Napoli is ****, Napoli is Cholera, the shame of the entire (rest of) Italy.

But no "savage" afaik.

So is this ethnicity or not?

The only Italian I know is figa seca nulla I picked up from someone of Tuscan origin I worked with.

"Races" doesn't mean anything specific and concrete. and was initially coined because Western people thought that superficial variations in skin tone, hair colour etc was in some way significant of deeper differences, mainly because it suited their purposes to depict people they'd brutalised as biologically inferior.

The point about genes, which you continue to fail to get, is that humans are mostly African genes and the few European genes that exist are highly diverse.

You can argue all you like about the science but you are factually wrong, and no matter how much you hate this you have more genes in common with a random African than you do with a random Italian, and this has been established through testing.

The point that you fail to understand is that we share 96% of DNA with chimpazees yet we are quite different overall, wouldn't you say? so even a 0.1% difference among human groups can determine massive outcome differences. Such as lactose digestion which has incredible cultural repercussion in the sense of what you end up doing as a society, even. Having access to different food sources can mean a whole lot of differences in how society is structured, all because of a 0.005% genetic difference between 2 groups.

Protection from thalassemia is literally one gene, and that determines which areas you can live in decently as a group before the invention of modern medicine.