CMV: Race as a biological term has no sense

The scale of racial interactions changed.

Hundreds of years ago, local populations mostly interacted with their neighbours without considering the rest of the world. They identified groupings on a smaller scale because that was more relevant to them. When it became common to interact with more distant races, the bigger differences made their local differences seem small by comparison, so they started caring more about the big ones like white vs black. Germans and Irish are still genetically different, but those differences pale in comparison to their differences with Blacks and Asians, which of course have their own subgroups too. Race has always been about genetically-caused differences, and can refer to differences at multiple scales.

You are familiar with subsets, aren't you?

/r/changemyview Thread Parent