Silent Acorns

The first time through I got 3, but I didn't realize I could get a bigger picture by clicking on the photos. When I went back and looked at the bigger pics a number of my picks were obviously wrong. With bigger pics (and trying to forget the results from before - e.g. "there's no way I would have called THAT guy black ...") I got 13/20.

My first results:

My Amer Ind picks were actually: Asian, white, black, and Amer Indian
My Asian picks were actaully: Asian, and three Amer Indian
My Black picks were actually: One Latino and three whites
My Latino picks were actually: Latino, asian, and two blacks
My White picks were actually: Asian, Black, and two Latinos

It was much easier with the bigger pics, but many of mine were guesses like, "none of those remaining look black but I still have two black slots left so ...".

Obviously, the pictures were stacked with borderline examples, but that was their point: race classes not distinct but fuzzy.

Being Canadian, I also have a gripe with the "Latino" catagory. I've always considered them to be a sub-group of whites. I don't see how anyone could consider them a distinct "race". Ethnic group, yes, but not a race.

echidna

Yes, but pariah is right that even as an unscientific test, it's still deliberately misleading & not very well done. Racial groupings are generally not as difficult as this in reality & mixed race can be identifed as often as not (if that doesn't contractict what I said earlier ) Of course the classifications that a person must be one race OR the other is a false dichotomy, but at the same time, racial appearance is something which can be achieved better than this test would indicate.

Wyz_sub10

To what end? I think it was very well done in trying to demonstrate the unreliability of visual cues re: race.

You both seem to be saying that, more often than not, racial groupings based on visual indicators are much easier to construct.

I agree, in so far that "black" people and "white" people are not usually as difficult to identify.

But as the population becomes increasingly heterogenous, the concept of race becomes fuzzier. (I feel strongly that race is meaningless. Population groups are all that matter in terms of grouping traits or for epidemiological purposes).

The point of the test is that 1) race is not a defined line, 2) visual cues are not always helpful in defining the line.

The test would have been pretty lame with 10 southern Nigerians and 10 Norwegians. Then you are going on obvious pigmentation alone. (Is pigmentation synonymous with race?)

echidna

I largely agree with your conclusion, however I think that as the test is structured, it is a strawman argument.

pariah

huh?? it depends on the country i think. argentina for example....a lot of people there are white. lots of german and italian blood. mexico on the other hand...mexicans are mostly native american, with some spanish in them.

anyway...i think they still could have gotten the point across without having to be deliberatly misleading.

pariah

what i wonder is....it says you can identify yourself. does this mean i can label myself (IRL i am a cracker) on my college application as african american and benefit from affirmitive action? i mean wtf can the college do? i may have blonde hair and blue eyes, and milky white skin, but as this little gem has taught us, that means nothing!!

ps418

The definition of race assumed are folk races, not race as phenotype/genotype clustering due to geographic ancestry that you can distinguish objectively using genetic and morphological data. For instance, there is no "white" race, no "black" race, and no "latino" or "hispanic" race. Africans do tend to be darker than Caucasoids, but this is a generalization. A person can have a large proportion of African ancestry and be "white," and a small proprtion and be"black." In studies that compare skin color to genetic markers, skin color is a surprisingly weak predictor of the degree of African ancestry, with a correlation of about 0.16-0.20 in Shriver et al., 2003. And hispanic ethnic populations are genetically heterogenous, characterized by various admixtures of African, Native American and Caucasian ancestry. In genetic studies that look for clustering in genetic data, a "hispanic" cluster is never detected (e.g. Stephens et al, 2001), while European, African, Native American clusters are consistently detected. Obviously, there are clusters within these clusters as well.

The folk race concepts based on skin color alone, we can agree, are indeed not very useful or objective. Race categorization based on ancestry on the other hand, is objective.

Stephens et al, 2001. Haplotype variation and linkage disequilibrium in 313 human genes. Science 2001, 293:489-493.

Shriver et al, 2003. Skin pigmentation, biogeographical ancestry and admixture mapping. Human Genetics 112, 387-99.

Patrick