Race as part of a story

[SimonDoom]

I'm a broken record on this subject, but so is everybody else on their subjects, so I'll say my two cents. It's important to keep in mind that "race" in the fantasy space of erotic literature has no more to do with race in the real world than incest, BDSM, noncon, or anything else. It's fair to say that there are some genetic differences between different groups of people that have been geographically isolated from other groups for long periods of time, like, say the Japanese and the native Australians. But to an alien scientist visiting Earth the differences would probably appear no more significant than the differences in population groups of, say, a particular dolphin species appear to our eyes.

But the fantasy space is not constrained by the real world. Fantasies are propelled more by cultural kinks and values than they are by scientific reality. And that's OK.

There's an elephant in the living room that I think a surprising number of contributors to this forum routinely don't want to face. People have interracial fantasies, just like they have incest fantasies and rape fantasies and mind control fantasies. Whether you approve or not is totally unimportant, and shaming people for their fantasies, OR for their desire to find ways to explore those fantasies in fiction, seems totally silly to me.

 

[Cagivagurl]

There is only one race.....
The Human race. We all inhabit the same planet... We breathe to survive....
Like it or not, we are one.

 

[Seadog777]

There's an elephant in the living room that I think a surprising number of contributors to this forum routinely don't want to face. People have interracial fantasies, just like they have incest fantasies and rape fantasies and mind control fantasies. Whether you approve or not is totally unimportant, and shaming people for their fantasies, OR for their desire to find ways to explore those fantasies in fiction, seems totally silly to me.

I have no problem "facing" my "interracial fantasy" at all.
Give me a shot at Tamara Taylor, Rosario Dawson, or Emmanuell Chriqui, and they'll never want to leave.

 

[PastMaster]

I have no problem "facing" my "interracial fantasy" at all.
Give me a shot at Tamara Taylor, Rosario Dawson, or Emmanuell Chriqui, and they'll never want to leave.

You mean you wont let them out???

There is a difference...

 

[Seadog777]

You mean you wont let them out???

There is a difference...

Ha ha, but, NO.

 

[jehoram]

Come to think of it, I used "race" in my story "The Stud," but it was mostly a commentary on how irrelevant that distinction became as society changed. After a very few men were able to inseminate a woman, it was a given that the guy raising the kid wasn't the kid's biological father. So color didn't matter anymore.

There's also a scene where a woman is entertaining three men, of different ethnic backgrounds. But their "race" played no part in the story except as a brief description of what they looked like.

 

[LupusDei]

I live in environment where's everyone blond to the point I caught myself having a racist comment on a girl having brown eyes (as opposed to blue-green as normal for "us") identifying her as likely having different ethnic background, and was right. I could easily imagine such being part of a story, and important to plot. Up to point, it could be a (near) deal breaker in a romance to be overcome.

Then, different skin colors generally are just interesting visual differences, and visualizations are very important in erotica and porn.

Like I'm (not) writing a thing where a guy periodically visit an environment where he has opportunities to fuck randomly selected for him partners. He starts out from a place that's already foreign and way more diverse than his home country, and he does notice all the colors, new and exotic to him. He finds language barriers with quite few of his random partners, but mostly they aren't terribly interested to talk anyway. But then one night there's a girl with Venus Violet skin and amber eyes in his room, and that's the first truly undismissable ringer that there's something very interesting is going on.

While, yes, that's a very decorative and shorthand use of race, and obvious metaphor for otherness, I think it's efficient. Because, once you accept that the person you meet may be from anywhere on Earth, half of them could as well be from different human populated worlds or parallel dimensions for a long time and you wouldn't even notice before the purple, deep blue, or demon red people start showing up.

 

[tenyari]

Yesterday on a whim I interrupted my in progress story to write out 10,000 words of a new one - set in an elite private university on Native American Reservation land in Southern California just outside of Los Angeles. And my protagonist is a Mexican woman who's a quarter 'Space Alien'.

So "race" is going to be all over this story. But I'm determined to stick to making a more upbeat story in line with my desire to keep my 'Alien Girl' series silly and happy in tone.

Of course it's less race than it is about cultures, ethnic groups, and historic tensions from past conflicts / invasions.

This is, IMO, an example of where a topic like 'race' should not be ignored. When you have a longer story that is a full on 'story' and not just a sex scene. Once you are building full characters, putting their lives and relationships together, you need to address relevant aspects of that. If the story happens to be set somewhere where multiple ethnic groups come together is a mix of ways that are sometimes friendly and sometimes tense - you do your story an injustice if you ignore it.

You can completely ignore the topic of ethnicity in a short stroke story. Of course this is also where, if it does comes up, it's most likely as a fetish story. But in a long form plot and character driven story - it's relevant to who the characters are, how they live, and how they relate to others around them.



For any CMNF fans - I'm writing a Blanke Schande story, but set 100 years into the future - I've not really moved the college, it's just that past writers who placed it where it is did so without looking at the map or knowing anything about California, whereas I actually partly grew up in area and happen to know what's really over there.

Now I've got to get back to writing, because I'm super close to having an actual chapter ready... though it will need editing first.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Like it or not, a person's ethnicity affects how they look and the visualization of a character is important in erotica. There's a whole school of thought that says you shouldn't start a story with 'She was six foot tall, blonde and had 46DD breasts' but work these details (maybe without the cup size) more subtly into the the story. (and obviously in the above example we're all trained to read 'default white').

There's also a school of thought that says you should mention as little concrete as possible about a character. However unless your dedicated to this principle so much that your not going to mention basic things like his/her hair colour, height etc why wouldn't you mention basic ethnicity signifiers at appropriate points during the story?

I'm not a visually-oriented person, and my normal writing style goes very light on physical description. But I do take an interest in characterisation, and ethnicity is likely to come out there even without any overt physical descriptors.

For instance, this is how I introduced the love interest in one of my stories:

Rafi and I had been friends for years, but there were still a few things I hadn't figured out about her. I knew she was a fellow nerd—we'd been playing Dungeons and Dragons together for five years—and I knew she liked cats and sci-fi, and worked for an architectural firm.

I knew "Rafi" was short for Rafeeqa, and that her family had come from Iraq as refugees when she was eight, after her mother died. I knew she was Muslim and wore hijab and drank lemonade on D&D nights when the rest of us had cider, and that our party of heroes had to get by without her wizard for a month every time Ramadan came around. (She assures me that this is why Gandalf and Dumbledore kept disappearing at inconvenient moments. I am unconvinced.)

Not a word of physical description as such, but I think most readers could make a strong guess at her ethnicity from her name and her background. I mentioned those things because they are important to how the following romance plays out. Rafi's background affects who she is and how she approaches a relationship.

But I don't think you need to dance around it or you risk ending up in a silly 'oh by the way, Dumbledore was gay' kind of situation.

...or indeed the "I never said Hermione was white" situation.

(Rowling never explicitly stated Hermione to be white, but there are several passages which would make little sense if she wasn't.)

 

[tenyari]

Not a word of physical description as such, but I think most readers could make a strong guess at her ethnicity from her name and her background.

Sometimes I will intentionally throw in a character who's name is radically off from their actual ethnicity to highlight them and / or where they are from.

I just gave a character who appears to be mixed 'Asian - Anglo' a Yoruba (Nigeria) name and Polish surname for example, to denote that California is very diverse. It was done to contrast that character with my protagonist who's from Mexico as has different impressions than the reality she is going to be facing as the story unfolds.

I didn't get to do that trick as much in my 'just published' stories, and the 4th chapter that is inwork, as they were set with a pretty small cast in a smaller area. However I did play around with appearance. In that last story - most of the 'Human' cast were in and from Mexico City. I stuck to Mexican names, but the descriptions of them highlighted 3 very different ethnic groups that were from that area, then threw in an Indigenous Canadian who, despite looking 'more Mexican' than half of the others, had no ties to the place other than her 'Black Mexican' boyfriend.


ps: "Raffi Musiker" is the name of a main cast Black character in Star Trek Picard. They really need to give us more of her backstory as she's supposed to have been very close with Picard during the 'off screen years', but that show has generally done a poor job with that sort of thing. But when I saw your 'Rafi' my mental image was of the character from Star Trek.

 

[Lovecraft_Lore]

Yes, race matters a whole lot. Like if the story is Orcs vs Humans. Knowing which race your POV character is going to be matters.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

Most of my stories are set in modern London. So a sauna crowd has to have various shades of brown skin as well as different types of beige. A small company of professionals? Unlikely to be all white and English. Sometimes I've needed a minor character and looked around me for inspiration. Newsagent? Use my local one. Second-generation Bangladeshi, I believe. Wife of 38-yo civil servant? Any contenders in the room? My boss, renamed! Result: "Julie's another determined up-and-coming civil servant. She's lovely, but you don't cross her. I should put a fiver on her becoming the first black Permanent Secretary." (turns out we got a black Perm Sec about when the story was set in 2013, at the Treasury)

I remember when the Harry Potter films came out and people online (Americans) complained Angelina and Dean Thomas were black and it had never been mentioned. And all the Brits were going 'she's got a daft name like Angelina, and she's got *braids*. She's black.' Braids is only used to describe the dozens of tiny plaits on Afro hair - one or two like Wednesday Addams would always be called plaits, never braids. Similarly he's called Dean, he's from East London, he supports West Ham - at least 98% chance he's black. Conversely while Hermione had 'bushy hair' so might have been white or black or in between, she goes on to be described as the epitome of middle England with parents who are respectable middle-class dentists. I'm sure there's a black dentist somewhere in England, and there's certainly some middle-class black people in medium-size towns - but it's really not at all likely. Without mentioning Grandma coming over with the Windrush Generation? Really, really, no.

ps: "Raffi Musiker" is the name of a main cast Black character in Star Trek Picard.

Interesting you call her Black. We'd assumed Raffi was short for Raphaela or similar and she was meant to have Mexican or other Hispanic ancestry. I know Hispanic and Black aren't mutually exclusive, but checking Google Images, the woman is white-suntan colour (typical Floridian?) with often-blonde hair! 'Black' wouldn't be one of the top 20 words I'd use to describe her (most of which would be 'phwoar' and 'when will Raffi and Seven get their spin-off show being badass vigilantes?').

 

[tenyari]

Interesting you call her Black. We'd assumed Raffi was short for Raphaela or similar and she was meant to have Mexican or other Hispanic ancestry. I know Hispanic and Black aren't mutually exclusive, but checking Google Images, the woman is white-suntan colour (typical Floridian?) with often-blonde hair! 'Black' wouldn't be one of the top 20 words I'd use to describe her (most of which would be 'phwoar' and 'when will Raffi and Seven get their spin-off show being badass vigilantes?').

Well, Michelle Hurd, the actress, is the daughter of Hugh Hurd - an African American Actor and Civil Rights activist. She's on Wikipedia's list of African American Actresses. Her mother is White.

Due to the history of forced sexual exploitation during slavery, African Americans are 25% Anglo in DNA. So Blond is not as impossible as people are inclined to believe. While unusual I have seen her particular shade of hair before on other people. While people outside the states might see her as mixed, as she is, in the US and it appears in terms of her own identity she's African American.

As for the character she plays on Picard, Musiker is most commonly found as a surname in the US and South Africa, but appears to come from England or Russia. Two historic jazz musicians have the last name but I found no photos of them. Raffi appears to be an Armenian or Arabic male name so is likely a nickname for the Picard character.

 

[GrushaVashnadze]

But the fantasy space is not constrained by the real world. Fantasies are propelled more by cultural kinks and values than they are by scientific reality. And that's OK.

There's an elephant in the living room that I think a surprising number of contributors to this forum routinely don't want to face. People have interracial fantasies, just like they have incest fantasies and rape fantasies and mind control fantasies. Whether you approve or not is totally unimportant, and shaming people for their fantasies, OR for their desire to find ways to explore those fantasies in fiction, seems totally silly to me.

Yes.

I am of mixed race, and have been subjected to racial abuse in every country I have ever lived in, i.e. all my life. Racism is shit. But racism is complicated. Not talking about it honestly, or reducing it to a glib PC one-liner, merely sweeps it under the carpet where it can thrive.

My novel Alison Goes to London contains a lot of discussion of racism. Fiction - even smut fiction - is a good place to raise some of these important and thorny issues.

 

[JaxRhapsody]

The idea that present-day humans could be classified into subspecies (usually aligned with "race") was popular for a while, but AFAIK the general consensus in modern biology is that there's only one living subspecies of homo sapiens. Yes, we can find genes that are more common in some groups of humans than others, but those genetic differences are small compared to those between animals that we'd consider different "subspecies".

As a species, we're relatively new on the scene and we interbreed too much to form separate subspecies the way some animals have done.

https://askabiologist.asu.edu/questions/human-races

Yes, some people have dark skin and some have white skin, and that's tied in with genetics, but calling those divisions "subspecies" is unscientific.

Yeah, I faintly remember being taught the first and only day of a class I had in high school, where the teacher was going on about how people were classified as mongoloid, caucazoid, etc. Was told by somebody somewhere these were based in prejudice, but I didn't have enough memory, or the incentive to see if it were true.

I wants defining people by their skin color - but by their medical predispositions according to their 'race'

For instance those with African descent often have a predisposition to a certain kind of cardiac bradyrrhytmia and as I mentioned before sickle cell anaema.

We need a way of classifying those differences, so that people can be treated appropriately.

I don't think species and/or breeds is the answer, though, chief. Maybe it makes sense in your head, and maybe there's some merit to it, but I think I'd be just as bothered as being called African American, to be called Americanis Africanus, by some leftwing "expert" ally..

 

[JaxRhapsody]

Most of my stories are set in modern London. So a sauna crowd has to have various shades of brown skin as well as different types of beige. A small company of professionals? Unlikely to be all white and English. Sometimes I've needed a minor character and looked around me for inspiration. Newsagent? Use my local one. Second-generation Bangladeshi, I believe. Wife of 38-yo civil servant? Any contenders in the room? My boss, renamed! Result: "Julie's another determined up-and-coming civil servant. She's lovely, but you don't cross her. I should put a fiver on her becoming the first black Permanent Secretary." (turns out we got a black Perm Sec about when the story was set in 2013, at the Treasury)

I remember when the Harry Potter films came out and people online (Americans) complained Angelina and Dean Thomas were black and it had never been mentioned. And all the Brits were going 'she's got a daft name like Angelina, and she's got *braids*. She's black.' Braids is only used to describe the dozens of tiny plaits on Afro hair - one or two like Wednesday Addams would always be called plaits, never braids. Similarly he's called Dean, he's from East London, he supports West Ham - at least 98% chance he's black. Conversely while Hermione had 'bushy hair' so might have been white or black or in between, she goes on to be described as the epitome of middle England with parents who are respectable middle-class dentists. I'm sure there's a black dentist somewhere in England, and there's certainly some middle-class black people in medium-size towns - but it's really not at all likely. Without mentioning Grandma coming over with the Windrush Generation? Really, really, no.


Interesting you call her Black. We'd assumed Raffi was short for Raphaela or similar and she was meant to have Mexican or other Hispanic ancestry. I know Hispanic and Black aren't mutually exclusive, but checking Google Images, the woman is white-suntan colour (typical Floridian?) with often-blonde hair! 'Black' wouldn't be one of the top 20 words I'd use to describe her (most of which would be 'phwoar' and 'when will Raffi and Seven get their spin-off show being badass vigilantes?').

I'm no expert on hairstyle designations, but braids are generally any braided style hair. The "tiny plaits(TDIL how to spell that) all over a black persons hair, like what was big in the 90s, are "not braids"- technically they are, seeing braids are any braided hair style, and is a rational and technical umbrella term, but we called them plaits, to distenguish the difference from cornrows, which are commonly just called braids by the everyday person, unless somebody is trying to be specific, like when a white is "appropriating" them. Weirdly... they're also called braids if they extend a certain length, it seems, even back then, though it seems the term "plait" may have fallen out of favor. Thanks for reading this confusing ass ted talk.

 

[JaxRhapsody]

i don't see an issue with race being mentionrd, or being used as a fetish. Especially if it gets me laid... sometimes it's less work for me. I do have a theory that's shared with some people, that if race isn't mentioned, especially without certain descriptive features, some people just automatically assume the characters are white.

 

[PastMaster]

Yeah, I faintly remember being taught the first and only day of a class I had in high school, where the teacher was going on about how people were classified as mongoloid, caucazoid, etc. Was told by somebody somewhere these were based in prejudice, but I didn't have enough memory, or the incentive to see if it were true.

I don't think species and/or breeds is the answer, though, chief. Maybe it makes sense in your head, and maybe there's some merit to it, but I think I'd be just as bothered as being called African American, to be called Americanis Africanus, by some leftwing "expert" ally..

Which is why i said African Descent. African american I think can't work -because a good number of those who would be labelled that in the US have never been to Africa in their lives - they are simply american.

Medically we need a way to document the origins for the reasons I've outlined. It has nothing to do with prejudice or wanting to label people but it has everything to do with Occams Razor.

When a doctor is presented with a set of symptoms, often those symptoms can fit a number of different problems. They will choose - at first instance the most common one. and treat that. If doesnt work they may order further investigations to try and get more information.

When a doctor is presented with a white man with a set of symptoms, and a black man with an identical set of symptoms, the diagnosis may differ because white people have certain diseases more commonly and black people have other diseases more commonly.

So woke culture has not done us any favours - we need to know the genetic background of the patient and document it. But every time we do so - we get called racist because we may use a term, such as white or black - or african American (even in the uk go figure) or some other term that is currently not infavour of the woke crowd.

And dont get me started on classification of sex.....

 

[JaxRhapsody]

Which is why i said African Descent. African american I think can't work -because a good number of those who would be labelled that in the US have never been to Africa in their lives - they are simply american.

Medically we need a way to document the origins for the reasons I've outlined. It has nothing to do with prejudice or wanting to label people but it has everything to do with Occams Razor.

When a doctor is presented with a set of symptoms, often those symptoms can fit a number of different problems. They will choose - at first instance the most common one. and treat that. If doesnt work they may order further investigations to try and get more information.

When a doctor is presented with a white man with a set of symptoms, and a black man with an identical set of symptoms, the diagnosis may differ because white people have certain diseases more commonly and black people have other diseases more commonly.

So woke culture has not done us any favours - we need to know the genetic background of the patient and document it. But every time we do so - we get called racist because we may use a term, such as white or black - or african American (even in the uk go figure) or some other term that is currently not infavour of the woke crowd.

And dont get me started on classification of sex.....

We're called African Americans because we're decendant of them. It only bothers me, because like you said; we're not from there, but we're so disconnected from Africans, the only thing we share is skin color. Generally we don't even look alike, since we often have more variations than they do, but that's not a stone truth, sometimes we can't be told apart, either. Aba from Aba & Preach is African, and so is Agent from Playback, but nothing about them screams African. Preach is Haitian, all three of them look as "regular black" as Playback is. These are Youtubers btw.

There's really nothing distinctive to call us, though, and this has been a thing, a contention, in the community for a long time now. There's even folks rejecting being called POC, now. I like the idea of Subnative American, since unlike other races of people, we were literally made in this country, and despite even being descendants of Africans, that's about as much geanology as we got- if you can call it that. My friend is Scotts/irish, he can track back to there, and I think he found his family crest, me... maybe I could go back to 1893 Alabama, or something. Having no real history bothers me more than whatever somebody wants to call me, even a god damned pigeon can be traced back to a damn t-rex.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I wants defining people by their skin color - but by their medical predispositions according to their 'race'

For instance those with African descent often have a predisposition to a certain kind of cardiac bradyrrhytmia and as I mentioned before sickle cell anaema.

Sickle cell disease (SCD) is a good example of where reifying "race" into a pseudoscientific concept can be medically harmful. Racial classification systems encourage people to think of "black" as one homogenous group historically associated with "Africa" (and "Africa" as one big homogenous zone full of lions, famines, and black people). But if you're interested in risks of sickle cell, that's not a very helpful way to categorise people.

Sickle cell is caused by the allele HbS. It's recessive, meaning that you only manifest the disease if you get two copies of that allele, one from each parent. Here's a map of the historical frequency of HbS (source):



(Technical notes: since sickle cell is a recessive trait, the actual frequency of sickle cell disease will be approximately the square of that frequency: if the allele frequency in a given region is 10% = 0.1, then about 0.1^2 = 1% of people will have sickle cell disease, and so on. But the heat-map still gives a feel for the frequency of the disease. "Historical frequency" meaning that based on people whose ancestors have been living in that region for a while, not recent arrivals.)

As you can see, there are large parts of Africa which have virtually zero historical frequency for sickle cell (and places outside Africa which have significant levels of it). Somebody whose ancestry is from Somalia or Lesotho might be "black" and "African", but their risk of sickle cell disease would be very low - somewhere under 0.003%.

If that person walks into a doctor's office with symptoms of anemia, and the doctor starts by categorising them as "black African", that's likely to misdirect the doctor to focussing on sickle cell cell as a probable cause - which it isn't. That error may have serious consequences, especially if it delays diagnosis of something that requires prompt treatment.

HbS is famous in genetics because it's a textbook example of a thing called "heterozygous advantage". If you get two copies of HbS, you get sickle-cell disease, which is very bad for you - but if you only get one copy, you get substantial protection against malaria. As a result, regional frequencies of HbS are very strongly affected by local malaria prevalence, which creates a selection pressure on that specific allele which is pretty much unrelated to what happens to any other allele.

So - yes, you can define a population who have high risk for SCD, but it's not going to line up nicely with the risk populations for anything else except malaria. In particular, it won't line up nicely with the high-risk population for bradyarrhythmia, and it won't line up nicely with "black" or "African".

We need a way of classifying those differences, so that people can be treated appropriately.

Perhaps we do - but as I hope the SCD example shows, "race" is not a good way to do it. People use that system because it's what they inherited from their slave-trading great-great-something-grandparents, not because it's the most medically helpful way of categorising humans.

 

[PastMaster]

@Bramblethorn

I dont know if my forbears kept used or profited from slaves. I can trace my lineage all the way back to my grandfather, before that - who knows.
I dont know your lineage, but I suspect that being from australia you are not of african descent. Since there are so few people of african descent there. You could and probably will claim that its because they were never brought there as slaves, but slavery ended a long time ago - and yet there are still so few. Perhaps your immigration laws have something to do with it? And while we're talking about forebears and slavery - how sure are you that your forebears didnt benefit from the slavery of the convicts transported from England whom were then taken into slavery once they arrived? You may not have benefited from african slaves, but what about the other races that were brought there as slaves from the pacific islands -blackbinding I believe it was called.

If you are going to trace everyone's lineage back to the primodial ooze, and hold them responsible for every misdemenour their forbears perpetrated then I think we're all in the shit. And lets not forget while there are many white people whose forbears engaged in slavery - there are also many many black people also whose forbears were involved, since it was often rival tribe leaders that sold defeated tribes into slavery in the first place, prior to which they would just kill them.

All I know, is that I never have, or will, keep or condone slavery of any peoples. I work with the knowledge and the information I have, and those woke people who are trying to suppress or distort history to 'cleanse' it are doing everyone a disservice. We need to remember that history - so we dont make the same mistakes again.

People use that system because it's what they inherited from their slave-trading great-great-something-grandparents,

People use that system, because it's what they have. Yes we could do genetic scans on everyone at first contact, and maybe when the medical tricorder from startrek becomes reality we will be able to do that. But now we need something, a 'rule of thumb' where we can simply LOOK at someone and narrow down the possibilities of all the diseases or problems that they might have to a manageable and appropriate few, and treat them. Maybe sickle cell trait was a bad example - but it was the first thing that sprang to mind. There are others.

Lets not forget our goals here, Were not looking to see if we are going to admit this person to our country club - or allow them to move in next door. This is not the reason for racial classification. It's so we can help them, heal them, and in some cases keep them alive.

 

[Bramblethorn]

@Bramblethorn

I dont know if my forbears kept used or profited from slaves. I can trace my lineage all the way back to my grandfather, before that - who knows.
I dont know your lineage, but I suspect that being from australia you are not of african descent. Since there are so few people of african descent there.

100% of people in Australia are of African descent. If what you're suggesting is that I'm not of recent African descent, or that I'm white, then you'd be correct, but that's not something I've made any secret of.

(Whether I'm "from" Australia is a question of semantics; I wasn't born here, but I've lived here most of my life.)

You could and probably will claim that its because they were never brought there as slaves, but slavery ended a long time ago - and yet there are still so few.

If you want to know my opinion on something you have only to ask for it, and I'll probably be forthcoming.

If you'd prefer to make up an opinion for me that isn't mine, so you can beat up a strawman, that's a quick road to a "fuck off". The choice is yours.

I'm really not sure what triggered you to go off on this rant about slavery, which mostly seems to have very little to do with anything I've said in this discussion. I mentioned slavery in the context of how the popular categorisation into black-white-etc. became entrenched, but I don't believe I went near all the other stuff you're getting worked up about here.

Stuff like this, for instance:

If you are going to trace everyone's lineage back to the primodial ooze, and hold them responsible for every misdemenour their forbears perpetrated then I think we're all in the shit.

At no point did I ever suggest that people are responsible for their forebears' misdeeds. If you got the idea that I did, then I would suggest walking away from the keyboard for a while, having a nice cup of tea or whatever you do to relax, then coming back and rereading to see what I actually wrote.

(We are, however, responsible for not perpetuating them...)

People use that system, because it's what they have. Yes we could do genetic scans on everyone at first contact, and maybe when the medical tricorder from startrek becomes reality we will be able to do that.

...or we could ask them "where were you born, and where are your recent ancestors from?" and look at the HbS frequencies for that region/s. Is that really so hard?

But now we need something, a 'rule of thumb' where we can simply LOOK at someone and narrow down the possibilities of all the diseases or problems that they might have to a manageable and appropriate few, and treat them.

No, we don't. It is a normal part of the diagnostic process that doctors talk to their patients instead of trying to diagnose them by looks alone. Once the doctor takes a few seconds to ask that question, they have more specific and useful information about the patient's genetic risk of SCD than they could ever glean by looking at their skin colour, measuring their skulls, or however it is people are pretending "race" can be scientifically quantified these days.

Maybe sickle cell trait was a bad example - but it was the first thing that sprang to mind. There are others.

It was a great example of how treating "race" as if it was a scientific thing leads doctors into the kind of sloppy thinking that kills patients.

Lets not forget our goals here, Were not looking to see if we are going to admit this person to our country club - or allow them to move in next door. This is not the reason for racial classification. It's so we can help them, heal them, and in some cases keep them alive.

I am not clear what you're saying here.

Are you suggesting here that the standard historical categorisation of people into "black"/"white"/"Asian"/etc. was originally invented for therapeutic purposes?

Or are you acknowledging that it was originally invented for other purposes, but suggesting that by coincidence a system developed hundreds of years ago for non-medical purposes just happens to also be the best way of categorising people for medical purposes in the 21st century?

Or is there some other interpretation I've missed?

 

[PastMaster]

I'm really not sure what triggered you to go off on this rant about slavery

Oh i dont know maybe

People use that system because it's what they inherited from their slave-trading great-great-something-grandparents,

you think that might have somethign to do with it?

Are you suggesting here that the standard historical categorisation of people into "black"/"white"/"Asian"/etc. was originally invented for therapeutic purposes?

nope - i dont think it was 'invented' at all - when people describe other people they describe what they see, skin color and racial characteristics are often the first thing noticed about a person. It's only because of people's attitudes following that classification that it has become problematic.

It is a normal part of the diagnostic process that doctors talk to their patients instead of trying to diagnose them by looks alone.

Talking to patients is not always possible. They may be unconscious, or irrational, unable to communicate for various reasons. Also asking someone their racial heritage these days seems to be seen as racism in and of itself.

 

[jehoram]

Yeah, I faintly remember being taught the first and only day of a class I had in high school, where the teacher was going on about how people were classified as mongoloid, caucazoid, etc.

And paranoid, a large subset of the human race.

There was a show on TV that said that just about every human on Earth had from 2% to 3% DNA from Neanderthals, except for modern sub-Saharan Africans (whose ancestors had no contact with that family of modern man). So I wouldn't worry about categorizing people by "race" alone. True, there are certain genetic components that go with certain ancestries, and it makes sense to identify those for medical purposes so people can get the right treatment. But that's as far as it should go. Anything else is unscientific and damaging to people's prospects for a good life.

 

[PandemicReader8]

is race important to that story.

If the story lingers with you because it was "The One Where I Almost Had An Interracial Threesome", then it's important. And for that reason it might be important to a whole set of readers.