{"id":4500,"date":"2017-04-16T11:42:11","date_gmt":"2017-04-16T11:42:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=4500"},"modified":"2017-04-16T11:42:11","modified_gmt":"2017-04-16T11:42:11","slug":"the-myth-of-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=4500","title":{"rendered":"The Myth Of Race"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I am a racist.<\/p>\n<p>I am prejudiced in favour of the\u00a0<em>human<\/em> race.<\/p>\n<p>Of course it is more common to find people who use the word\u00a0<em>race<\/em> in reference to sub-divisions of humans, but you usually find that that as you look closer at each sub-division, it has less and less meaning. For instance, &#8220;white&#8221; in Europe is sub-divided into French, German, Italian, Scandinavian, Birtish, English, Irish, Welsh, &#8230; And as you look closer at those sub-sub-divisions, they are also divided up. At the lowest level, there is &#8220;family&#8221; and &#8220;not family&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>The imperative to categorise people into &#8220;races&#8221; comes from a useful trait for problem solving, but if it doesn&#8217;t tell you anything useful, why categorise &#8220;race&#8221;? There are plenty of more useful categories to put people into.<\/p>\n<p>This was kicked off by a sudden surge in the number of YouTube videos on DNA results that show up for me. Which of course showed the entirely predictable result that almost everyone is a mixture of different ancestors. And people are shocked, distressed, or annoyed about the fact that that their perceived racial identity is smaller than expected.<\/p>\n<p>A DNA test for me will show no shocking results &#8211; I know with certainty that all my ancestors for well over 10,000 years were human. As a rough guess, 75% of my ancestors were from somewhere in northwest Europe, with 25% from all sorts of surprising places. The proportions may change, and the higher the proportion of surprising places, the more interesting a story some of my ancestors have to tell.<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-4502\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/really.zonky.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014-05-10-square-tower-selfie-half-inverted.jpg?resize=695%2C883&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"695\" height=\"883\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/really.zonky.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014-05-10-square-tower-selfie-half-inverted.jpg?resize=806%2C1024&amp;ssl=1 806w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/really.zonky.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014-05-10-square-tower-selfie-half-inverted.jpg?resize=236%2C300&amp;ssl=1 236w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/really.zonky.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014-05-10-square-tower-selfie-half-inverted.jpg?resize=768%2C976&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/really.zonky.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014-05-10-square-tower-selfie-half-inverted.jpg?w=980&amp;ssl=1 980w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 695px) 100vw, 695px\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I am a racist. I am prejudiced in favour of the\u00a0human race. Of course it is more common to find people who use the word\u00a0race in reference to sub-divisions of humans, but you usually find that that as you look closer at each sub-division, it has less and less meaning. For instance, &#8220;white&#8221; in Europe <a href='https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=4500' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[7,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-history","category-7-id","category-6-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1f2KI-1aA","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4500"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4500\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4503,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4500\/revisions\/4503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}