monty wrote:
But how do you create race? To a westerner that has little experience with the Orient, the Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese all look pretty much alike - we could clump them together into a regional race we call Asian. To people from Asia, there are obvious distinctions, so they distinguish based on national/ethnic divides. And even within a nation, (like China), there are regional differences between say, the Han and people from and the western autonomous regions. And within any given western autonomous region, there are differences between villages, and within villages, there are differences between different families.
So do we lump all Asians together as 1 race, and then do a comparison? If so, then the variance (differences) between people we classified as Asians is far greater than any differences between "Asians" and other large groups like "European" and "African." At that level, things like skin color, hair, eye color, etc really are the distinguishing features. The same holds true when dealing with ethnic races. Maybe when we get down to the village or family line there are highly significant differences between races (and millions of races). Leading to a conclusion: race is far less important than individual variation.
Yes, and you can take that all the way down to every single individual person if you chose. That said its left being a broad concept and I think the way it usually tends to be treated its by cultures who are defined as sharply different - so you would say that Chinese and Japanese or Persian and Arabic would have their own separations enough to put it that way (you have both differences in physical features and in culture).
As far as its importance though, you do see one thing - people are willing to mingle and get to know others on the level without putting that way out front. However, a person *usually* does spend more time with their own race just because when they are surrounded by their race and cultural group they can be themselves, they don't have to front or strain to modify how they do things, so its really something more like a home base - nothing wrong with that either just because people do need to recharge. The only time it does get to be a problem though is when cultures don't assimilate, frictions are allowed to grow just because interactions decrease, reality checks on people's imaginations decrease, and the end result ends up being something like race conflict (I think about one example with Europe - they've had more problems with race riots than we have, far more, and part of that is because we do a good job of keeping people linked rather than secluded).
28 Nov 2007, 8:03 pm
