Black and white are not races. They are racial discrimination categories. People with black skin are not one identifiable group except "black skin". Which is a heritable trait that affects pigmentation used to create a social discrimination category. It does not make a single meaningfully identifiable group in any other sense. (It's not even consistently the same trait, on a biological level)

You are talking about sociopolitical race discrimination and suggesting it has absolute, immutable biological mappings. It does not. This actually is quite close to real racism.

I make no claim to be smart and calling a high school diploma an education is a stretch. That said, human sex overwhelmingly clusters around two categories, albeit with some intersex outliers. Additionally, Bimodal sex has endured for as long as recorded history, so it appears to be an immutable trait insofar as the species is a stable species and not taking into account that somewhere along the timeline we share a lineage with single-celled organisms.

Race on the other hand, does not neatly cluster into discreet categories that any responsible person would define, draw boundaries around and count. Furthermore, race has not remained stable over recorded history. Populations mix, join and split. Which race were the Old Kingdom Egyptians? Our modern notions of Asian, Caucasian, etc. probably did not even exist during their era.

Using "Race" like this is really bad in Germany and Sweden. As is pointed out in this thread [1] how we use words differs. TIL race has a different meaning in English and Swedish. I use it in both but I've never thought about the difference in how I use it in different languages.

Categories are not fixed between cultures, even colours and numbers are hard to get right. So when you hear a word you can not be clear it is used in your broad meaning, or the narrow meaning.

This was actually my favourite way of nerd sniping back when I was young.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48816222

Colors are a a continuous spectrum, yet we put them in a bunch of categories.

The genders have always been bi-modal, but the well has been poisoned by people calling it "a binary" (hence "non-binary" people). A sad state of affairs.

The implication of what you say — that white and black are races — is that indigenous Australians and African Americans are the same "race", because they both have black skin?

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skin color does not equal race. The US is really weird to me in that regard.

Sorry, but most Europeans don't use the term anymore since the Nazis tried to impose a catastrophic societal order based on their race ideology.

White people were only white if they could show bloodlines reaching back generations. One jewish great-grandfather would make you intelligible for the Arian race. They would laugh at your notion of white vs black.

I'm no expert on haplogroups either, but cursory googling seems to indicate they are far more numerous and nuanced than the late victorian, scientific-racism derived classifications used today - i.e.: black, white, asian etc.

But we don't need to be specialists in population genetics to observe that human cultures interbreed. We can't reliably correlate visible biomarkers with genetic origin, especially in contemporary multicultural societies or any of the places where numerous land invasions over thousands of years have ensured continual group mixing. For example Indian subcontinent, Afghanistan, Mongolian steppe etc. My nephew is half 'Irish', half 'Indian'. But what does that mean exactly? His ancestry is likely to contain contributions from hundreds of subgroups and linguistic populations across South East India, as well as Ireland and the UK more broadly. Visibly he looks 'Indian', but what does that mean for a determinant of race?

These concepts were engineered in the colonial era. Only the names have changed. In college my friends and I picked up a cut price set of colonial era British encyclopedia. They had lots to say on racial groups, with detailed descriptions of the personality types, intelligence and appearance of groups like 'negroids' and 'hibernians'. Of course none of this was based on what we'd today term scientific reasoning or measurement - and yet the conclusions and stereotypes persist in our culture. Irrespective of powerful counterexamples demonstrating that culture and economics determine an enormous amount of educational and attainment potential. e.g.: Nigerian American economic success [1], the explosive boom and continual exceptional economic performance of Ireland [2], or the absurd difference in educational outcomes of countries which are ethnically homogenous but politically divided - e.g.: North and South Korea, Haiti and Dominican Republic etc.

Remember interindividual differences radically outpace intergroup differences. Which is not to suggest that highly homogenous ethnic groups (e.g.: askinazi jews, or certain West African populations) can't have significant differences in athletic ability. But such differences are on population levels much smaller than observable 'races' per say.

[1] https://medium.com/@joecarleton/why-nigerian-immigrants-are-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_Tiger

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these conversations are always incredibly frustrating.

On one extreme are people who believe that white people are inherently better than black people because of some genetic inheritance. This is obvious nonsense.

On the other extreme are the people like the one you are arguing with who claim that race does not exist because all humans are biologically identical. This is also nonsense as any black person in the US will tell you.

What you seem to be arguing is that ethnicity, and the genetic effects of ethnicity, are real. They are. Race as biological construct, with consequent societal effects is also not real. White people are not inherently more intelligent that Black people.

The other person is technically right, but is one of those people who seem to believe that biological differences do not matter in society, one of those "i don't see colour" types. Race as a social construct is very much real.

In what ways are white people meaningfully different from black people?

You keep talking about white people and black people as if you think these are two separable races with internal characteristic differences.

They just aren't.