Race Fraud

[Thermal]

Originally Posted by theprestige

Rather than tossing the application, they'd probably just not give any weight to that particular bullet point.

Dunno. At one bald faced lie, I'd toss it. Especially of that nature. How could you believe anything the person says?

[theprestige]

Originally Posted by Thermal

Dunno. At one bald faced lie, I'd toss it. Especially of that nature. How could you believe anything the person says?

They're not going to be interrogating applicants about this checkbox. They're going to look at the claim, look at the provenance, conclude that data point may be true but isn't reliable, and look for other more reliable criteria of interest in the application.

[zooterkin]

Originally Posted by Thermal

Dunno. At one bald faced lie, I'd toss it. Especially of that nature. How could you believe anything the person says?

How would you know it was a lie?

[Stout]

Originally Posted by theprestige

Rather than tossing the application, they'd probably just not give any weight to that particular bullet point.

Why would they not give any weight to the bullet point, if there is indeed some sort of racial quota system in place. There's no formal interview before or along with submitting an application so the only people who would see it are the paper pushers in the back office. We're still waiting to hear if claimed indigenous ancestry is something that would appear on his high school transcript. The school doesn't know the answer to this question yet.

[Stout]

Originally Posted by d4m10n

Here in Oklahoma, each federally recognized tribe has their own process and ancestral requirements for "enrollment" therein. My kids are descended from Miami and Delaware tribesmen, but only enrolled in the latter tribe because that is the tribe that their documented ancestress was in on the Dawes Rolls^WP. (It's actually somewhat more complicated than that, but I'm going for the short version here.)

My question is this: Don't you folks have any sort of system like this up in the great white north?

That's the way I thought it worked around here too. This self-ID just came in out of the blue. This might just be worthless outside public school.

[Stout]

Originally Posted by theprestige

They're not going to be interrogating applicants about this checkbox. They're going to look at the claim, look at the provenance, conclude that data point may be true but isn't reliable, and look for other more reliable criteria of interest in the application.

Mostly it seems to be about GPA. Short of registering an account and going through the application process myself I can't see any references to things other than GPA. Nothing on the surface about past work history, community involvement, student clubs, sports etc.

[theprestige]

Originally Posted by Stout

Why would they not give any weight to the bullet point, if there is indeed some sort of racial quota system in place. There's no formal interview before or along with submitting an application so the only people who would see it are the paper pushers in the back office. We're still waiting to hear if claimed indigenous ancestry is something that would appear on his high school transcript. The school doesn't know the answer to this question yet.

We're bouncing around between a few different hypotheticals here.

[Stout]

Originally Posted by theprestige

We're bouncing around between a few different hypotheticals here.

Yes I know. I/we don't have anything concrete. Point is, of course, a government agency has opened the door to allowing race fraud.

Will race go down the same road as gender? Will people be able to identify as non-race if they so choose and put their racial pronouns in their bios? Time will tell.

[Dr. Keith]

Originally Posted by Rolfe

I remember a German friend telling me she met an American who said, on learning that she was German, "Oh, I'm German too!" Sabine asked him which part of Germany he was from. The answer was something about a great-grandmother from some unspecified part of what is now Germany.

Sabine said (her words), "That doesn't make you German, that makes you American."

We get the same thing with people claiming to be Scottish, and not only (though probably mainly) Americans. I've had Americans on this forum insisting they were Scottish because reasons, apparently only having been to Scotland once or twice on holiday, if that.

It does raise the question though, at what point does a great grandparent cease to be relevant? Or how many great grandparents do you need of a particular nationality to be able to claim some sort of ethnic descent? Legal nationality is one thing, but claims based on someone who contributed only one-eighth of your DNA (maybe)? I don't know.

A grandparent of mine was born in Ireland. Apparently that is enough to qualify for an Irish passport. I’ve never been to Ireland. My grandparent was only born there because great grand parents were home visiting family. My great grandparents had already moved to Amerika (I think the k is required when referring to The California Region).

My wife’s grandmother moved to a town with strong German roots in Texas. Her second husband didn’t speak any English until he was sent to school. When I met him he was in his seventies and would weave German words and phrases into conversation without thinking about it. Everyone he grew up with was bilingual. He was third or fourth generation Texan, but the German families kept their language and heritage alive in their families.

He was far more German than I am Irish. Both just Texans, though. Which is a much cooler flag to sew onto your backpack while traveling.

[Dr. Keith]

Originally Posted by Stout

Yes I know. I/we don't have anything concrete. Point is, of course, a government agency has opened the door to allowing race fraud.

Will race go down the same road as gender? Will people be able to identify as non-race if they so choose and put their racial pronouns in their bios? Time will tell.

I feel like people are already able to do so. What is stopping them?

In the meantime, I look forward to a day when the phrase “racial pronouns” has a coherent meaning beyond “my butt hurts”. Oh to dream.

[Rolfe]

Quote:

A grandparent of mine was born in Ireland. Apparently that is enough to qualify for an Irish passport. I’ve never been to Ireland. My grandparent was only born there because great grand parents were home visiting family. My great grandparents had already moved to Amerika (I think the k is required when referring to The California Region).

My wife’s grandmother moved to a town with strong German roots in Texas. Her second husband didn’t speak any English until he was sent to school. When I met him he was in his seventies and would weave German words and phrases into conversation without thinking about it. Everyone he grew up with was bilingual. He was third or fourth generation Texan, but the German families kept their language and heritage alive in their families.

He was far more German than I am Irish. Both just Texans, though. Which is a much cooler flag to sew onto your backpack while traveling.

Ireland seems to have made a decision to encourage as many people as possible to come back, following on from the diaspora which I think was even worse than the clearances in Scotland (though of course as an independent country they have control over citizenship, which Scotland does not). It's noticeable that Ireland's population has recovered significantly over the past century and a bit while Scotland's, depleted by the clearances, has remained static.

Lots and lots of people living in Britain have been able to get Irish (EU) passports post Brexit that way. They also offer an Irish passport to anyone living in Northern Ireland, pretty much no questions asked. I've sometimes wondered whether, if I moved to Northern Ireland, I could get an Irish passport that way.

So in a way, having Irish citizenship and an Irish passport and actually being Irish aren't quite the same thing. The Irish government would like you to come and be Irish, and offers incentives, but not everyone takes it the whole way.

The wife in the family that lived next door to me in England was American. But she was born in Germany - the family emigrated to America when she was about five. She said she'd more or less lost her German, and she had become an American citizen. She was also obviously coloured, part African heritage I think, but I don't know where that came in. She met her English husband while he was doing a stint working in a children's summer camp in America. She said she only agreed to come to England if it was temporary and they'd go back to America in due course.

Well, 35 years later I'm still sending them Christmas cards to an address in Sussex. But she took her two daughters to the American embassy when they were quite small to get them American citizenship, just in case it might come in handy. So they got that on the basis of their mother simply having lived there as a child and young woman.

One of my classmates at school had American citizenship because she'd been born there accidentally - a premature birth on holiday I think. She's completely Scottish. She said at one point (this was in the 1960s) that if she'd been a boy her parents would have taken steps to have the citizenship revoked because otherwise she'd have been in danger of being called up to fight in Vietnam. But as she was a girl they just let it stand.

So it's all quite complicated. I don't think Ireland is going to give me an Irish passport on the basis of an Ancestry test that varies between 7% and 1% Irish depending on how their algorithms are running that month. All my grandparents and great grandparents were born in Scotland. Dammit.

[theprestige]

Originally Posted by Stout

Yes I know. I/we don't have anything concrete. Point is, of course, a government agency has opened the door to allowing race fraud.

I can't really get worked up about "fraud" if no substantial benefit is realized by the claimant. If there's no scarce or valuable resource being reserved for people who tick the box, what fraud of any consequence can there be?

Also, it's hard for me to take "fraud" seriously, when the person or agency soliciting the claim makes no meaningful provision for vetting it. If you ask me if I'm Spider-Man, I say yes, and you accept that at face value, have I really defrauded you? Only if you're a colossal idiot.

[Stout]

Originally Posted by theprestige

I can't really get worked up about "fraud" if no substantial benefit is realized by the claimant. If there's no scarce or valuable resource being reserved for people who tick the box, what fraud of any consequence can there be?

Also, it's hard for me to take "fraud" seriously, when the person or agency soliciting the claim makes no meaningful provision for vetting it. If you ask me if I'm Spider-Man, I say yes, and you accept that at face value, have I really defrauded you? Only if you're a colossal idiot.

There may be no real. tangible benefits however should some hapless White person be overcome with their share of collective guilt declaring oneself on "the race spectrum" might help with their mental health and escaping that overwhelming, crushing guilt. Dunno, just spitballing here.

[theprestige]

Originally Posted by Stout

There may be no real. tangible benefits however should some hapless White person be overcome with their share of collective guilt declaring oneself on "the race spectrum" might help with their mental health and escaping that overwhelming, crushing guilt. Dunno, just spitballing here.

Yeah, that's a little too much baggage for me to carry. You'll need to find a bellhop to help you with this conversation.

[HansMustermann]

I'm still not sure how it works, though. I mean, I though the rule was that if you identify as X, you are X, genetics be damned? Pretty sure that the genetic differences between races are FAR more minor than *ahem* other stuff where they're to be glossed over.

I mean, seriously, the human species as a whole actually has far lesser genetic diversity than some breeds of other animals. In fact, pretty much the only ones who have less are some of the fancy cat or dog breeds which are all inbred from the descendants of the same two or three individuals. (Like, literally, all Ragdoll cats can trace their Adam and Eve, so to speak, to as recently as the 60's.)

So, really, by how many percent of the genetic code would a black guy be off if he identified as an Irish redhead?

[Stout]

Originally Posted by theprestige

Yeah, that's a little too much baggage for me to carry. You'll need to find a bellhop to help you with this conversation.

Agreed, it is pretty heavy. Let's leave it at we'll meet back here in 10 years and see if this ever became "a thing". In the meantime, I'm going to fire up my Tumblr and start designing some not-identifying-as-any-race flags, just in case.

[d4m10n]

Originally Posted by Stout

In the meantime, I'm going to fire up my Tumblr and start designing some not-identifying-as-any-race flags, just in case.

I think Thomas Chatterton Williams and Kmele Foster may've beaten you to the punch.

[ahhell]

Originally Posted by d4m10n

Happened across "indigenous" scholar Andrea Smith recently, and it lead me down a wiki rabbit hole of people who pretended to be an ethnicity/race other than the one they were raised in, for various reasons. Probably the most famous examples are Ward Churchill^WP and Rachel Dolezal^WP and Elizabeth Warren^WP although I'd say that last one is iffy at best, because DNA. One of my personal favorites is Hilaria Baldwin^WP who faked being Hispanic to a level which is rarely seen even in Hollywood.

Since I hate to start a thread without a question, my question is this: Why?

(Also, which interesting cases did I fail to mention?)

The short answer is some social cachet. Its just cooler to be say, black than white. There's no easily quantifiable metric for that but there is clearly a perceived benefit. Its also not unique to the US or even the modern era. There was a long standing tendency of Romans to claim ancestry that was odd. Folks would proudly claim to be descended from the defeated enemies of Roman. Except Carthagianian or Gauls. But lots of prominent Romans would claim they were descended from Samnites, Etruscans, other Latins and later Germans.

That's especially true of Native American ancestry, it was a not uncommon claim when I was a kid for people to say something to the effect of "I'm 1/8th ????? tribe on my mom's side." It was always a famous tribe by the way, never the local tribe that you never say in a move. It was never I'm 1/8th Maidu, it was always Cherokee or Apache or what not.

Originally Posted by lomiller

Ethnicity is primarily a matter of what culture you identify with. DNA plays only a small role mostly in the form of largely irrelevant traits that may or may not result in a distinctly identifiable facial features.

Frequently, however, common appearance features result in groupings that make absolutely no sense at a genetic leave. Eg it's common in the US to think of African American as a group based on shared physical features even if they are much farther apart wrt to DNA that white Americans are. What ties African Americans together isn't DNA or even physical appearance it's cultural ties, shared experience and treatment within American society.

IMO anyone can be part of that ethno-cultural group so long as they have lived within that culture and shared the experience of people within that culture. If you grew up in a Scottish community and shared the same experiences as all the Scottish people around you, you should be considered Scottish regardless of your DNA. Conversely someone who hasn't lived that life an hasn't shared those experiences should probably refrain from claiming that culture, even if they share DNA with it, because genetic differences between groups of humans is to small to be relevant.

This is largely true except that most words for ethnicity also have an alternative definition that is also a....genetic thing. You can be Scottish culturally and/or Scottish genetically.

Originally Posted by Rolfe

Not arguing with that. My newsagent is Scottish, despite having 100% Pakistani genetics.

Donald Trump isn't. So there. (Although the comedy sketch on BBC Alba in which the Donald is a Gaelic speaker - he could have been, as his mother was - is in touch with a couson in the Outer Hebrides and phones him - in Gaelic - for advice every week is however hilarious.)

I am moderately amused by this as He's the first president that I can't remember taking the trip to his ancestral homeland in Ireland.

Originally Posted by Rolfe

I did an Ancestry test a couple of years ago. They revise their estimates slightly from time to time but I'm currently standing at 98% Scottish, 1% Irish and 1% Basque. The Basque part has only just appeared and I'm doubtful. Basically boring as hell and I was really hoping for something interesting, too.

Basques fished far and wide, its common for the Irish to have some Basque ancestry and I wouldn't be surprised if it it was sow with the Scots aswell.

[d4m10n]

Came across someone I'd not heard of until today: Jimmie Durham

Quote:

Durham claimed to be quarter-blood Cherokee and to have grown up in a Cherokee-speaking community. He was raised in Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, as his father traveled looking for work. According to Cherokee lawyer, justice and law professor Steve Russell, Durham was among the "professional posers" who masquerade as Cherokee and Native American for the purposes of career advancement. Durham is described as having "made a career of being Cherokee with no known ties to any Cherokee community, although he has claimed to be Wolf Clan and to have been raised with Cherokee as a first language."

(Internal citations omitted)

[Venom]

Originally Posted by HansMustermann

I'm still not sure how it works, though. I mean, I though the rule was that if you identify as X, you are X, genetics be damned? Pretty sure that the genetic differences between races are FAR more minor than *ahem* other stuff where they're to be glossed over.

I mean, seriously, the human species as a whole actually has far lesser genetic diversity than some breeds of other animals. In fact, pretty much the only ones who have less are some of the fancy cat or dog breeds which are all inbred from the descendants of the same two or three individuals. (Like, literally, all Ragdoll cats can trace their Adam and Eve, so to speak, to as recently as the 60's.)

So, really, by how many percent of the genetic code would a black guy be off if he identified as an Irish redhead?

Human genetic variation accounts for less than one percent of the billions of base pairs of the genome, so I'm sure nobody's hung up on the possibility of any of us being 20 percent orangutan or something extreme.

I don't think the Look! we're 99.9% similar! line is all that reassuring or relevant.

[d4m10n]

One more, and it's a doozy:
https://twitter.com/elissawashuta/st...89622525300736

Quote:

Like any mystery, it started with a death. On July 31, scientists on Twitter heard the news that one of their own, a queer Hopi woman who taught at Arizona State University and went by the handle @Sciencing_BI, had died from Covid-19.

The time lapse from tragedy to farce is much shorter than usual here.

ETA: More coverage at NYT.

[lomiller]

Originally Posted by ahhell

This is largely true except that most words for ethnicity also have an alternative definition that is also a....genetic thing. You can be Scottish culturally and/or Scottish genetically.

Only in a vague hand-wavy sort of way. There are no uniquely Scottish genetic traits. What there is, is a cluster of mostly insignificant market traits that tend to occur together more often in people who identify culturally as Scottish. None of the personality or cultural traits we tend to associate with Scots (if these even exist) have any basis in their genetics.

[ahhell]

Originally Posted by Rolfe

Ireland seems to have made a decision to encourage as many people as possible to come back, following on from the diaspora which I think was even worse than the clearances in Scotland (though of course as an independent country they have control over citizenship, which Scotland does not). It's noticeable that Ireland's population has recovered significantly over the past century and a bit while Scotland's, depleted by the clearances, has remained static.

Lots and lots of people living in Britain have been able to get Irish (EU) passports post Brexit that way. They also offer an Irish passport to anyone living in Northern Ireland, pretty much no questions asked. I've sometimes wondered whether, if I moved to Northern Ireland, I could get an Irish passport that way.

So in a way, having Irish citizenship and an Irish passport and actually being Irish aren't quite the same thing. The Irish government would like you to come and be Irish, and offers incentives, but not everyone takes it the whole way.

The wife in the family that lived next door to me in England was American. But she was born in Germany - the family emigrated to America when she was about five. She said she'd more or less lost her German, and she had become an American citizen. She was also obviously coloured, part African heritage I think, but I don't know where that came in. She met her English husband while he was doing a stint working in a children's summer camp in America. She said she only agreed to come to England if it was temporary and they'd go back to America in due course.

Well, 35 years later I'm still sending them Christmas cards to an address in Sussex. But she took her two daughters to the American embassy when they were quite small to get them American citizenship, just in case it might come in handy. So they got that on the basis of their mother simply having lived there as a child and young woman.

One of my classmates at school had American citizenship because she'd been born there accidentally - a premature birth on holiday I think. She's completely Scottish. She said at one point (this was in the 1960s) that if she'd been a boy her parents would have taken steps to have the citizenship revoked because otherwise she'd have been in danger of being called up to fight in Vietnam. But as she was a girl they just let it stand.

So it's all quite complicated. I don't think Ireland is going to give me an Irish passport on the basis of an Ancestry test that varies between 7% and 1% Irish depending on how their algorithms are running that month. All my grandparents and great grandparents were born in Scotland. Dammit.

I'm going to quibble a bit. Most of Europe and the old world in general gives you citizenship based on heritage. Its not just Ireland. Ireland is perhaps unique in that there are literally more people born outsize of Ireland than inside that qualify though. 200 years of a **** economy will do that.

Most of the America's count citizen ship by virtue of being born there rather than just ancestry.

Of course most countries have a mix of both but generally in the old world is mostly blood and in the new world its mostly birth. The latin/legal phrases are jus sanguinus and jus soli. Law of blood or law of soil.

[ahhell]

Originally Posted by lomiller

Only in a vague hand-wavy sort of way. There are no uniquely Scottish genetic traits. What there is, is a cluster of mostly insignificant market traits that tend to occur together more often in people who identify culturally as Scottish. None of the personality or cultural traits we tend to associate with Scots (if these even exist) have any basis in their genetics.

I have no quibbles with that. Perhaps I should have said descent rather than genetics.

I will rephrase, most nationalities/ethnicities have both a shared culture and shared ancestry. Ethnonyms can be applied to either or both of those things.

[lomiller]

Originally Posted by HansMustermann

I'm still not sure how it works, though. I mean, I though the rule was that if you identify as X, you are X, genetics be damned? Pretty sure that the genetic differences between races are FAR more minor than *ahem* other stuff where they're to be glossed over.

I mean, seriously, the human species as a whole actually has far lesser genetic diversity than some breeds of other animals. In fact, pretty much the only ones who have less are some of the fancy cat or dog breeds which are all inbred from the descendants of the same two or three individuals. (Like, literally, all Ragdoll cats can trace their Adam and Eve, so to speak, to as recently as the 60's.)

So, really, by how many percent of the genetic code would a black guy be off if he identified as an Irish redhead?

Very little.

In fact Western Hunter Gatherers who populated NW Europe, including Ireland frequently had dark or black skin and are nonetheless one of the major contributors to the genetics of modern Europeans. the other 2(?) groups that contributed to modern European ancestry had lighter skin than the Western Hunter Gatherers, but they still had darker skin than today's NW European populations.

All in all, current skin tones in NW Europe are probably a very recent innovation probably not much more than ~4000 years old. There would have been very little vitamin D in the diet of early farmers in the region so the adoption of agriculture would have created a very strong selective pressure for lighter skin tones.

[lomiller]

Originally Posted by Venom

Human genetic variation accounts for less than one percent of the billions of base pairs of the genome, so I'm sure nobody's hung up on the possibility of any of us being 20 percent orangutan or something extreme.

I don't think the Look! we're 99.9% similar! line is all that reassuring or relevant.

It certainly is relevant. It means the differences between individuals of various population groups are much larger than the differences between the groups themselves. The result is that any alleles that impact behavior or capability vary much more within any group than they do between groups.

IOW humans ethno-culture is very different than something like a dog breed where genetics can have a meaningful difference on personality and behavior from one breed to another. In humans all ethno-cultural groups are identical in terms of the range behaviors individuals within that can learn and adopt. If Germans act different than Koreans the differences are entirely learned behaviors and don't depend on any difference in genetic predisposition between the groups.

[Venom]

Originally Posted by lomiller

Very little.

In fact Western Hunter Gatherers who populated NW Europe, including Ireland frequently had dark or black skin and are nonetheless one of the major contributors to the genetics of modern Europeans. the other 2(?) groups that contributed to modern European ancestry had lighter skin than the Western Hunter Gatherers, but they still had darker skin than today's NW European populations.

All in all, current skin tones in NW Europe are probably a very recent innovation probably not much more than ~4000 years old. There would have been very little vitamin D in the diet of early farmers in the region so the adoption of agriculture would have created a very strong selective pressure for lighter skin tones.

Pigmentation is one thing. What about skeletal proportions and configuration, particularly of the face?

You can make the African in this example as lightskinned as an Englishman, but the differences will be noticeable from a distance. On the other hand there are Middle Easterners and even Indians who, with a quick change of clothing, could reasonably pass as a local, or at least a European tourist.

I mention this in the context of "race fraud". HansMustermann says the genetic variation isn't that great. True but I'm afraid that only tells us we are all human.

[arthwollipot]

Is there any evidence that this so-called "race fraud" is occurring in more than a handful of edge cases?

[theprestige]

Originally Posted by arthwollipot

Is there any evidence that this so-called "race fraud" is occurring in more than a handful of edge cases?

I wouldn't call any of the documented frauds mentioned here "edge cases". They all seem to be playing right down the middle of the fairway and straight onto the green.

A lot of these seem to involve institutions that have established a system with a perverse incentive to commit race fraud, and also not made any serious effort to safeguard that system against the abuse thus incentivized. So while I doubt anyone has done any serious, peer-reviewed research into just how many academics (for example) are misrepresenting their race to gain professional advantages, the structure of the abuses that have been documented strongly suggests to me that there are likely many more that have not.

[arthwollipot]

Originally Posted by theprestige

I wouldn't call any of the documented frauds mentioned here "edge cases". They all seem to be playing right down the middle of the fairway and straight onto the green.

Of course they're edge cases. Until someone can demonstrate that "race fraud" is as widespread as, say, transgender identity, the entire phenomenon can be attributed to a small number of isolated cases.

[d4m10n]

Originally Posted by arthwollipot

Is there any evidence that this so-called "race fraud" is occurring in more than a handful of edge cases?

I doubt it, but then it's widely considered taboo.

[kookbreaker]

Originally Posted by Rolfe

I remember a German friend telling me she met an American who said, on learning that she was German, "Oh, I'm German too!" Sabine asked him which part of Germany he was from. The answer was something about a great-grandmother from some unspecified part of what is now Germany.

Sabine said (her words), "That doesn't make you German, that makes you American."
.

Adjacent to that is that when I visited Germany they had no idea how the melting pot works. They honestly thought that immigrants to the US just married within their own ethnicity forever. That might have been true for a hundred years or so, actually.

This came up because the Germans in question were stunned I had a Germanic last name (I’m 1/2 PA Dutch) but do not look German at all. I had to explain to them that my Mother was of Scottish ancestry.

[ahhell]

Originally Posted by arthwollipot

Is there any evidence that this so-called "race fraud" is occurring in more than a handful of edge cases?

Probably depends, the cases that make the news are likely extraordinary but that's true of pretty much all news coverage.

The cases like I knew as a kid, are likely wide spread. The number of folks out there that occasionally tell the story of their ancestry that is slightly cooler than WASP but has no real impact on anything, probably countless.

[Ziggurat]

Originally Posted by theprestige

A lot of these seem to involve institutions that have established a system with a perverse incentive to commit race fraud, and also not made any serious effort to safeguard that system against the abuse thus incentivized.

Originally Posted by arthwollipot

Of course they're edge cases. Until someone can demonstrate that "race fraud" is as widespread as, say, transgender identity, the entire phenomenon can be attributed to a small number of isolated cases.

When you provide an incentive to fraud, and you simultaneously provide an incentive to not uncover fraud (because none of these institutions actually want to police any of these policies they implement, and it makes them look bad when cases are discovered), then the default expectation should be that it occurs far more frequently than you hear of.

[lomiller]

Originally Posted by Venom

Pigmentation is one thing.

Skin pigmentation is (or was until ~100 years ago) subject to such strong selective pressure that it only takes a few hundred years for significant changes to occur. It's almost entirely driven by UV levels where that population group lived in preindustrial times.

It's irrelevant for pretty much anything else and certainly has no relevance to behavior.

Originally Posted by Venom

What about skeletal proportions and configuration, particularly of the face?

You can make the African in this example as lightskinned as an Englishman, but the differences will be noticeable from a distance.

Founder effects readily create noticeable but irrelevant differences in facial features. So what? Go back 1000 years in Europe and people could generally tell just by looking at you if you were local or had traveled there from as little as a few hundred miles away. In many cases you can still do that today.

Also, why compare an African and Englishman when two Africans are often just as distantly Two African populations are frequently more distantly related to each other than an Englishman is to a Malaysian.

[theprestige]

Originally Posted by arthwollipot

Of course they're edge cases. Until someone can demonstrate that "race fraud" is as widespread as, say, transgender identity, the entire phenomenon can be attributed to a small number of isolated cases.

Sorry. I take edge cases to be cases of unusual circumstance, around the edges of likelihood. None of the cases we've seen in this thread seem to be of that nature. The scenarios all seem to arise from commonplace circumstances: as I said, institutions that create an incentive to commit fraud, and don't make an effort to hedge against people choosing fraud. That's not an "edge" scenario. That's a right-in-the-bullseye scenario.

Because of that, I think there's no reason to assume a priori that they're isolated cases at all. Fraud isn't the kind of thing that only exists when it is discovered. There's lots of undiscovered fraud. All the cases we've seen so far went for some time without being discovered. Given the non-edginess of the nature of the fraud, it's likely there are more out there that have yet to be discovered, including some that will never be discovered.

And of course this puts the lie to your trans-identity analogy. People are increasingly encouraged to admit to trans-identity. But people are very much discouraged from admitting to fraud. Therefore we would never expect race fraud to appear as widespread as trans identity, even if it is actually as widespread, or even wider.

So no, I don't think you can assume ahead of time that these are isolated cases. Everything we know about fraud and about human nature says we should expect the opposite.

What reason do you have to believe they are isolated, other than the relatively small number of reports that have reached you? Are you looking at these reports and seriously telling yourself, "gee, that looks like a very unlikely and rare combination of circumstances, to lead to such a result!"?

[Thermal]

Originally Posted by arthwollipot

Of course they're edge cases. Until someone can demonstrate that "race fraud" is as widespread as, say, transgender identity, the entire phenomenon can be attributed to a small number of isolated cases.

Or you could say that in the new age of unreality we live in, a new form of deception and delusion is brewing on the horizon, and maybe it would be a good idea to call attention to it and make provisions, even if it's not widespread this minute? Kind of like we do with vaccines and the flu.

[d4m10n]

Originally Posted by Thermal

Or you could say that in the new age of unreality we live in, a new form of deception and delusion is brewing on the horizon, and maybe it would be a good idea to call attention to it and make provisions...

Another approach would be to simply affirm their personal sense of identity, whatever its source might be.

[ahhell]

Originally Posted by Thermal

Or you could say that in the new age of unreality we live in, a new form of deception and delusion is brewing on the horizon, and maybe it would be a good idea to call attention to it and make provisions, even if it's not widespread this minute? Kind of like we do with vaccines and the flu.

Not all that new really, passing has been a thing for a long time. The only thing sorta of new is that some folks of the majority group are trying to pass for being members of the minority group.

[theprestige]

Originally Posted by ahhell

Not all that new really, passing has been a thing for a long time. The only thing sorta of new is that some folks of the majority group are trying to pass for being members of the minority group.

Colonizers gonna colonize.