A number of people are attempting to change their race by watching certain videos, hoping to manifest physical change. “They have convinced themselves it works because there’s other people who have convinced themselves, as well,” says a media professor.

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[–]weavilsatemyface 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Race, or at least what humans call race

What human beings call "race" is an incoherent, undefinable mess that covers arbitrary physical features, ethnic and cultural groupings, tribalism, and only occasionally, by accident, correlates to actual genetic groupings. And even then, those groups don't make any sort of consistent family tree.

Try defining the word "race" in a meaningful way. You can't. You can't even decide how many races there are.

Please don't embarrass yourself by including "Whites" and "Blacks" as two races, that's the sort of nonsense that leads Americans to call Australian Aboriginals visiting the States "African-Americans" because they have black skin. Australian Aboriginals have been genetically separated from Africans for longer than so-called "Whites" or Europeans have even existed.

The so-called "Black Race", Africans, contains more distinct ethnic groups, with more genetic diversity, than the rest of the world combined.

During the height of the Victorian Era "scientific racism" period, when biologists last took the concept of human races seriously, anatomists got to the point of dividing people into as many as sixty fundamental races, at which point they realised the absurdity and gave it up as a bad idea. And that was before they discovered genetics, which makes the concept of human races even less viable. All the so-called "races" have been madly fucking every other race in sight, spreading their DNA all over the place, for tens of thousands of years. We're all mongrels and the idea of "pure races" is 100% unadulterated bullshit of the first degree.

East Asians (previously 'Orientals')

East Asians (the peoples of China, Japan, Korean, Taiwan) are incredibly diverse. The idea that there is one "Oriental" or "East Asian" so-called race is pure pseudo-scientific nonsense. Here are just a handful of "East Asians" or "Orientals". Notice that these Asians run the full gamut from extremely pale white skin to dark brown. They vary from having full facial hair to very little tendency to grow beards, and even the presence of epicanthic folds (slanted eyes) varies greatly.

That is just the tip of the iceberg of genetic diversity in just one so-called "race". China alone is home to at least 55 ethnic groups.

Japan, which prides itself on being a single ethnic state, is delusional: not only are the Ainu and Ryukyuan peoples genetically distinct from the Yamato ("Japanese-Japanese"), but there has been plenty of genetic intermingling between them too.

smaller frames

Body size is significantly determined by environment. The height of Japanese people increased by an average of an inch per decade after WW2.

[–]LtGreenCo 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I think you're a little too far into the weeds.

Race is not a scientifically accurate category by any means, but it doesn't need to be. That's not really what we use it for.

Humans are pattern-matching machines and we've evolved to group people by inherited commonalities. With one look we have learned to deduce (with some wildly varying margin of error) the rough ethnicity and geographic ancestry of a person and we've found it to be a useful attribute for narrowing down identity. That's really all it is.

But just because it's not science doesn't mean there isn't a strong correlation between genetic traits and certain racial markers. So to say that race isn't genetic is, at best, disingenuous, and at worst, purposely deceitful. The people who say that are typically just trying to dismiss valid arguments out of hand.

[–]Alienhunter糞大名 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The concept of race gets far less narrow as well as you move away from the culture that is defining it and their neighbors. Wanna lump in all the white people together as one race? That's fine for a Chinese person, but they will be able to see the racial differences between them and their neighbors, same as an Italian and a German tend to look a bit different.

None of it is an exact science of course.