Needs Help: Race Lift

The first sentence of this article clearly lists it as being about race and ethnicity... but then deals almost entirely with race for the rest of the page. Ethnic lifts are present (and there were many more before a troper purged them a few months ago) but they don't really fit into the page as constructed. Should we split the current trope into Race Lift and Ethnicity Lift?

Oppose a split. The boundaries between race and ethnicity are vague and poorly defined, and in terms of works, they're frequently treated exactly the same way. It makes more sense to tweak the definition to make that more clear.

Yes, tweaking the definition to make it clear it can be race or ethnicity is preferable. I can't think of a good reason to split this, a Race Lift and an Ethnicity Lift (which should be a redirect after we're through) are used the same way for the same reasons. Plus the ambiguity issues brought up above.

edited 20th Sep '12 2:39:45 PM by ccoa

While we're at it, it might be good to move some of that Wall of Text to the analysis tab. The description should...describe the trope.

The boundaries between race and ethnicity are nonexistent. Neither has any biological basis whatsoever. They're only separate to the degree that people in some cultures think there's a difference between them.

I think the difference is that race is for obvious physical, phenotypical differences, ethnicity is for anything subtler. Though I often have the impression that "ethnicity" is just a different word to get away from the connotations of "race".

So yes, no point in splitting.

Opposing a split, and also agreeing with .

In many western countries, race is supposed to be based on skin color and nose shape and so on. But not so in Japan.

edited 15th Oct '12 1:59:05 PM by ArcadesSabboth

Actually, "race" has a biological basis: it's basically the equivalent of "breed" or "strain", but we don't like using the latter terms for humans for some silly reason, which is too bad, because it would make the implications of inbreeding and hybrid vigor more obvious. "Pure" races are a terrible idea from a scientific point-of-view. :)

However, the distinction between "race" and "ethnicity" is not-so-biological. The word "ethnicity" blurs the boundaries between "breed" and "culture", and stems more from sociology than biology. For our purposes, they're more-or-less equivalent.

Scientists (biologists and anthropologists) have done a lot of research into race, and found no biological basis for it.

"Race" has a biological basis only in that the common Western categories are supposedly based on physical features. But those physical features aren't distributed in anything resembling the supposed racial categories, and neither are any other forms of genetic diversity in humans. It's literally only skin-deep.

There are no genetic groupings of humans that can be compared to breeds or subspecies. Genetic diversity is distributed rather "sloppily," and not in any consistent categories.

Then there's the part where genetic diversity within the supposed racial categories is markedly greater than the few genetic differences (almost entirely in apperance) that are between those categories.

The only genetic evidence for dividing humans into biological categories is that non-Africans are (very slightly) part-Neanderthal. But Since Africans are far more genetically diverse than non-Africans, that doesn't make for reasonable way to divide the species. Not to mention that we have crossbreed constantly for millennia.

edited 15th Oct '12 1:57:43 PM by ArcadesSabboth

Why are we discussing the meaning of race and ethnicity in Real Life?

Also, from the description and examples, I understand that this trope is much about visuals - and in terms of visuals, the visual appearance of an ethnicity is fundamentally the same thing as the race of said ethnicity, making the distinction between these pointless.

Because I said I think race and ethnicity are the same thing, and others disagree.

Does this trope apply when the original race/ethnicity in question is totally fictional, and the only concrete thing you can say about them is "skin color: X changed to skin color: Y" ? There are examples like that, I see (including the page image).

edited 19th Oct '12 3:27:02 PM by ArcadesSabboth

If a character is changed from (say) being Irish and white to being American and white (like Banshee in X Men First Class) then that is clearly a substantial change even if the character is still the same race (in this case white.) So perhaps we should add an 'Ethnicity into a differenent Ethnicity' category to the page?

edited 19th Oct '12 2:55:47 PM by RossN

I'd still call that the same. I'd also call those different races (for as much as "American" can qualify as a race...)

If you're proposing a soft-split, I definitely oppose that. The boundaries between "race" and "ethnicity" are not that well defined. In fact, they're both extremely fuzzy terms (and to that extent I agree with Arcades Sabboth that the terms have no scientific basis). One person might say that "white" is a race; another might insist that the Celts are different race from the Teutonics, even though both are "white". Others might claim those are ethnicities, but some may say that Irish Celts are a different ethnicity from Scottish Celts. Still others might call those different races.

And of course, "Irish" and "American" are nationalities, which is something else completely.

I say we make it clear that this covers races or ethnicities, and don't, please god, try to define either term, as there's no correct way to do so, and it will only make things worse. Don't even suggest they have different meanings. Just say "race or ethnicity", and let people interpret that in whatever insane ways they might want.

I'd suggest calling it Strain Lift except that nobody in the world would have any idea what that meant! :D

So no split, keep the name. Is that what I'm hearing? If so I agree with all the above.

Agreeing with Xiftr.

The boundaries between ethnicity and race are a can of worms we do not want to open. Putting a clock on the thread. If there's nothing else to do, I will lock in three days.

I do think the description could use some clarification to make it more clear that races and ethnicities are both covered; something that several people have asked for.

I'd volunteer, but I kind of want to replace the whole description, which seems to me to be a bit wall-of-text-ish as it stands, but that's a bit more work that I really want to get into at the moment, especially since I recently provided new descriptions for several other repair-shop tropes, and I'm a tiny bit burnt out on rewrites just now. Some simple edits might suffice, but my eyes glaze over every time I try to read the description to see how it might be edited.

eta: it's possible that a simple search-and-replace of "race" with "race or ethnicity" might solve the problem, but I haven't really tried—see "My Eyes Glaze Over" above. :)

edited 25th Oct '12 3:06:57 PM by Xtifr

Uh, its hardly some taboo society that cannot be discussed on the internet. The fact is that even if you can get two people to agree on how many races there are(you can't) the idea of race and ethnicity becomes outright contradictory across cultural lines.

I suppose most people accept a "black" race. But who is black? Do you accept the "one drop" idea and if so, in which direction do you think it works in? Is there one black race or are there several of them?

How many different Asian races are there or are those just cases ethnicity too? What about Polynesians? Whites? What about Filipinos? Are they Asian, Polynesian or neither? But stepping away from different cultures, the same culture's definition of race tends to vary overtime. Irish and English people are not considered separate races by as many people now as they once were.

How does all that matter, with respect to this trope repair?

I guess it doesn't, besides reaffirming that removing ethnicity out of the equation is kind of pointless and pointing out why invoking the Rule Of Cautious Editing Judgment is completely unnecessary in this case, as explaining why there is a difference explains why the page does not need splitting.

Nobody said to remove ethnicity out of the equation. We said that soft splitting is a bad idea.

edited 25th Oct '12 3:58:54 PM by lu127

Actually, OP was suggesting a hard split, which would take ethnicity out of the equation for Race Lift. But that suggestion got zero support, and I think we can safely consider it dead.

There was also a mention that some unnamed troper purged a bunch of examples because they were about ethnicity rather than race, so we may want to check the history and recover some of those. (Undoing the ethic cleansing, as it were.)

But tweaking the definition so we don't get a repeat of that misguided attempt at "cleaning" seems like the highest priority.

It looks like the ethnicity bit is accounted for in the trope description, so I'll lock this up.