Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Not Rick had a great answer, but I wanted to try to contribute simple examples:
True, skin color is a trait that can be traced by DNA, but so is eye color, or hair color. We could easily create "races" based on "Brown hair vs blonde hair", "brown eyes vs green eyes", "people who need glasses vs people that don't", "shorties and tall-os", "those who can roll their tongue, and the inferior swine that were never blessed by the Great tongue father."
All traceable in the same way as skin color, but we consider them "features", and not race defining traits.
Who decided that? And why?
Yeah that's clear. As to the why, I suppose it's because our brains are wired to categorize things and find patterns everywhere. It is useful to have labels for groups with common traits, although I do recognize the issues with that when it comes to systemic discrimination.
Edit: thanks for the answer!
The thing is, hair is equally as heritable, and immediately visible. As humans, we can see and categorise skin equally with hair.
The fact that we don't use hair as a major defining trait though is arbitrary. That's just social norms, nothing more.
We kind of do though. There's nothing official about hair types, but there's all kinds of stereotypes about people with certain hair colors, like blondes, or redheads. There's even some scientific evidence that people with red hair have higher pain thresholds.
Those are not major defining traits. They could be, but they're not.