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sundin13 on 22 February 2018
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John2290 said:
sundin13 said:

Whether or not you agree the positions of some of the posters in this thread, which are largely based on an ongoing scientific debate, the fact is, this "change" is functionally meaningless. No one has yet to explain any way in which being able to self-report race will result in any negative consequences within these school districts. There is nothing scary about this. It is a mundane change to make some paperwork easier.

I think the only thing scary about it is the fact that some people are so desperate to cling to divisions of race, even when those divisions are so functionally meaningless. 

They are not meaningless on paper which is the issue here, they may be meaningless socially and I totally agree on that but saying they are meaningless when gathering statistics is like saying blood type is meaningless. It has real world implications as many have mentioned above, medically and legally and as I said in my last post someone choosing to identify as another race because they feel that way instead of the reality of it ignores years of research and scientific progress. I'm no biologist, statistician or a frigging genius polymath as many in this thread seem to believe they are because they have google at hand but it doesn't take one to see how badly ignoring fact and reality can go wrong, not only for the students of Delaware but society as a whole. We are supposed to be progressing, not regressing and this seems to be no different than burning books in the same way civilizations have destroyed themselves before, albeit more subtle, especially when lumping this in with the general social view on most other things these days. You can't have fact and opinion coincide to your liking, it just doesn't work, it's either or.

And how is maintaining the idea of race, when it lacks a solid genetic footing (see: http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=8731357 ) "progression". The idea of race is pretty fundamentally regressive. It is a relic from the pre-genetics era, which poorly establishes divisions in the species. There is no benefit to clinging to race in the context of a school system. If a person wishes to put "Black" despite being fair skinned and of European decent, this changes nothing, as in the context of this school system, race is a non-factor. 

Functionally, all this change does is make paperwork easier. Ideologically, all this change does is reduce the importance of an outdated concept which is poorly supported by science.