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Good. We finally agree on something: ancestry and skin complexion are different variables. Two people of completely different ancestry can have the same measured complexion.
Now you still have to solve your boundary problem.
You say:
white → olive → brown
Fine.
You have not discovered boundaries. You have created three labels instead of two.
Where does white become olive?
Where does olive become brown?
Saying “olive is the skin tone between white and brown” doesn't answer either question. It defines olive using the two categories whose boundaries you still haven't defined.
Imagine pigmentation numbered continuously from 0 to 100.
You can call 0–30 “white,” 31–60 “olive,” and 61–100 “brown” if you want. Those categories can be useful and consistently applied.
But why 30 and 60?
Nature didn't write those numbers onto human skin.
Someone else could choose 25 and 65 while measuring exactly the same physical continuum.
That's what “conventional boundary” means. It does not mean pigmentation isn't real. It means the physical measurement doesn't contain the names of your categories.
And Michael Jackson doesn't rescue the argument either. If you're using “white” strictly to mean a sufficiently light current complexion, then you're defining a complexion category—not demonstrating a natural racial category.
So you've now agreed that:
ancestry ≠ complexion;
complexion varies by degree;
“olive” occupies an intermediate region;
people with different ancestry can occupy the same point on that continuum.
You're describing my model now.
The only thing you're still refusing to explain is who put the boundary lines there.
Stop and examine what you just said.
“If 5°C is cold then it is naturally cold.”
Why?
Imagine water at 5°C. You call it cold.
Now imagine Antarctica at −40°C. Is 5°C still “cold,” or is it comparatively warm?
Put your hand in 1°C water and then into 5°C water. The 5°C water feels warmer.
Put your hand in 30°C water and then into 5°C water. The exact same 5°C water feels colder.
The physical temperature never changed. Your judgment did.
Descartes would immediately ask: if your senses can produce different judgments about the same physical value depending upon context, why are you treating the judgment as an intrinsic property of the object?
Socrates would ask you to define “cold.”
You answer: “5°C is cold.”
Why?
“Because it feels cold.”
To whom? Under what conditions? Compared with what?
You have again substituted perception for definition.
And now you've made the exact same mistake with pigmentation:
“You determine it by being darker or lighter than the next around.”
Excellent. You have just defined a relative comparison.
If A is lighter than B, that does not make A objectively “white.” It establishes only:
A is lighter than B.
Put an even lighter person C beside A. A is now darker than C.
Did A's pigmentation change?
No.
Only the comparison changed.
And your claim that skin color isn't measurable is simply false. Skin pigmentation can be quantified instrumentally through methods including reflectance measurements and melanin indices. Your eyes are not some magical measurement system that becomes more objective by refusing to use numbers.
So strip away every label and ask the Socratic question:
What do you actually observe?
Different amounts and patterns of reflected light.
What can you objectively establish?
A is lighter than B. B is lighter than C. Their reflectance can be measured.
Then your mind adds:
“white.”
“olive.”
“brown.”
“black.”
Those words can be useful. Nobody is banning the words.
But usefulness does not make their boundaries intrinsic properties of nature.
You've now accidentally demonstrated this yourself twice:
“The lighter it is, the whiter it is.”
“You determine it by being darker or lighter than the next around.”
Both statements describe relative positions on a continuum.
That's what I've been explaining to you.
You keep observing the continuum correctly and then assuming the names your mind places on portions of it must have been hiding inside nature all along.
The observation is not the category. The comparison is not the boundary. The word is not the thing.
Socrates would still be asking you the same question:
Define “white” without using “white,” “looks white,” “not brown,” or another undefined color category.
That's the question you've been avoiding this entire conversation.
No. Observing something does not define the category you assign to what you observed.
I can observe a person's exact height. That observation does not tell me where “tall” begins.
I can observe an exact temperature. That observation does not tell me where “hot” begins.
I can observe an exact skin reflectance. That observation does not tell me where “white” begins.
You keep answering “How do you observe skin pigmentation?” when I'm asking “What objective rule converts that observation into your category called white?”
Those are different questions.
And you've now said “the lighter it is, the whiter it is.” Great. “Lighter” and “darker” are comparative positions on the very continuum I've been describing.
So one last time:
What is the first measurable pigmentation value that is “white,” and what objectively changes in nature between that value and the immediately adjacent non-white value?
“I look at it” is not an answer.
“It looks white” is not an answer.
“White is lighter” is not an answer.
Those are all different ways of repeating the label you're supposed to be defining.
Stop describing the gradient I gave you and identify the boundary you claim nature put inside it.
“The more light it is, the more white it is.”
Congratulations. You finally described a continuum.
“More” and “less” are degrees.
If one complexion can be more white than another, then “white” is no longer the discrete natural boundary you've spent five hours claiming exists.
Now we're back to the question:
At what exact degree of your “more white” continuum does someone become white?
You have accidentally arrived at my argument.
Welcome. We've been waiting for you. 😂
You're repeating the conclusion instead of establishing it.
You say “the lightening or darkening is the boundary.” No. Lightening and darkening describe change along the continuum.
If I arrange 10 people from darker to lighter, you choose 4 and 5.
If I insert 100 intermediate complexions between 4 and 5, where is the boundary now?
If you choose two of those, I'll insert another 100 between them.
We can repeat this indefinitely.
At no point does nature suddenly announce:
BROWN | WHITE
You have to choose where to draw that line.
And your statement about Scandinavians and Mediterraneans actually makes my point stronger. Different people and societies have historically disagreed about who counts as “white.” You call those other classifications “biased” because they don't match your classification—but you still haven't supplied an observer-independent rule demonstrating why yours is objectively correct.
You cannot prove your boundary by saying:
“My boundary is correct because people who choose another boundary are wrong.”
Give me the physical criterion that makes yours uniquely correct.
Not “I can see it.”
Not “4 and 5.”
Not “when it gets lighter.”
Not “white is white.”
What property of nature changes at your boundary?
If nothing discontinuous changes, then you've selected a threshold on a continuum.
That's the entire argument.
You have now given me another circular definition.
Q: When does non-white become white?
A: “When it isn't brown.”
Okay. When does it stop being brown?
A: “When it's becoming lighter.”
How much lighter?
Every step in a continuous gradient is becoming lighter than the step before it. That tells us the direction of change, not where one category ends and another begins.
And you still haven't answered the 1,000-gradations test.
Put 1,000 evenly spaced pigmentation values between faces 4 and 5. There will be no magical jump between adjacent values. Now identify the exact first value that is white and explain what physical discontinuity occurred between that value and the one immediately before it.
If you choose one anyway, congratulations: you have defined a boundary. Nature didn't.
Saying “you can clearly see the boundary” is not identifying the boundary. It's just saying “it's obvious” instead of explaining why.
You keep defining:
white = not brown
brown = not white
That's not an objective measurement. That's two labels holding hands in a circle.
You just conceded my argument while trying to refute it.
You said 4 and 5 are “in-between.”
Exactly. If intermediate pigmentation exists, we're dealing with a continuum.
Calling the intermediate region “olive” doesn't magically create objective boundaries. It creates another category.
Now answer:
Where exactly does white → olive occur?
And where exactly does olive → brown/black occur?
Put 1,000 evenly graduated pigmentation values between #3 and #4. Which exact value is the first “olive” one? Why that value instead of the virtually identical value immediately before it?
Then do the same between #5 and #6.
You cannot solve a continuum-boundary problem by giving the middle of the continuum another name.
You haven't discovered nature's boundary. You've drawn two more boundaries and named the space between them.
You also don't seem to understand what relative means.
Imagine the universe contains one object at one temperature. Is it “hot” or “cold”? Relative to what?
Now add a second object at a lower temperature. Suddenly you can objectively say the first object is hotter than the second and the second is colder than the first.
Add a third temperature between them. Which one is “hot”? Which is “cold”? You now have objectively measurable differences, but you still need to choose where the categories “hot” and “cold” begin.
That's the distinction you're missing:
Hotter/colder = objective comparison.
Hot/cold = classification requiring a reference or threshold.
Exactly the same problem occurs when you say “low melanin = white.”
Lower than what? How low? Where is the cutoff?
Nature gives you the measurable differences. The existence of those differences does not automatically give you categorical boundaries.
You keep pointing at the ruler and insisting that because the ruler is objective, the line you drew on it must have been put there by nature. It wasn't.
You're almost there. Read your own sentence carefully:
“80 degrees Fahrenheit is hot because it is hot.”
That's circular reasoning again.
80°F is an objective measurement of temperature. “Hot” is not a unit of temperature. The thermometer does not display:
79°F = NOT HOT
80°F = HOT
Nature gives us temperature. Humans decide what range they describe as “hot,” and that judgment changes with context.
80°F outside might be called hot.
80°F bathwater would probably be called cool.
80°F coffee would be called cold.
Same objective measurement. Different category.
Now apply your own logic to melanin.
You say: “If you have low melanin you are white.”
Fine. Define low.
Is a melanin index of 20 white? 25? 30? 35?
At exactly what measured value does “low” stop and “not low” begin?
The melanin measurement can be objective. “Low” is already a classification of that measurement, and “white” is another classification you're attaching to it.
You keep proving that temperature and pigmentation are measurable.
Nobody disagrees.
You still haven't shown that nature itself supplies the boundaries for the words “hot” or “white.”
In fact, your thermometer example just demonstrated that it doesn't.
A $20 bill does not contain twenty times as much physical “money substance” as a $1 bill.
A 6-foot man does not contain a physical substance called “tall.”
A thermometer reading 90°F does not contain a substance called “hot.”
Physical measurements can be objective while the categories and meanings humans assign to them are constructed.
That's the entire point.
You're misunderstanding the analogy again.
The dollar bill is physically real. Its paper, ink, dimensions and serial number are observable physical properties.
But there is nothing in the molecules of that paper that physically equals one dollar of economic value. Humans created the monetary system that gives the object that status.
Destroy the monetary system tomorrow and the physical paper still exists. Its socially assigned monetary value does not.
Skin pigmentation works differently physically, but the logical distinction is the same:
Melanin and skin reflectance are physical properties.
The words “white,” “brown” and “black” are categories humans apply to ranges of those physical properties.
If those category words disappeared tomorrow, everyone's pigmentation would remain exactly the same.
You keep proving that skin pigmentation exists. Nobody disagrees with you.
What you have never demonstrated is that nature itself divides that continuous pigmentation into objectively bounded categories called “white,” “brown” and “black.”
And saying “you can see who's white” for the twentieth time still doesn't do that.
You can see the physical trait.
You're naming the category.
Those are two different operations.
No. You just made the same error again.
Average height is objectively calculable. It is not nature's objective boundary between “short” and “tall.”
If the average male height in a population were 5'9", nature does not suddenly transform a 5'8.999" man into “short” and a 5'9.001" man into “tall.” You chose the average as your classification rule.
And “you are white if you look white” is literally circular:
Who is white? People who look white.
What does looking white mean? Looking like a white person.
You still haven't defined anything.
You now say skin tone is what we measure. Great. Give me the measured skin-tone value at which “white” begins.
If there isn't one, then the measurement is objective while your classification of its values is not an objectively supplied boundary in nature.
You've spent this entire conversation pointing to an objective continuum as though its existence proves your categories are objective. It doesn't.
The ruler is objective. The line you draw on the ruler is yours.
You just walked directly into the point.
First, Michael Jackson didn't simply “have surgery to become white.” He had vitiligo, which destroys pigment-producing melanocytes, and used depigmentation treatment as his vitiligo became extensive.
More importantly, you now say Prince is “in between.” Between what, exactly?
You have spent this entire conversation claiming white and brown are objective natural categories that require no defined boundary because “you can just see them.” Now you've encountered an intermediate case and placed him between your categories.
That's a continuum.
So we're right back to my original question: where on that continuum does white end and brown begin?
If two people have the same objectively measured skin reflectance, does your system classify them as the same color regardless of ancestry? If yes, then you're discussing pigmentation, not race. If no, then pigmentation was never actually your definition.
“4&5” doesn't solve the boundary problem. It demonstrates it.
@BrainIesspeople Wow. Trying to show off for what? It's like Hubris isn't taught over there at all. We have idiots who do this and everyone calls them a jackass. In India it seems to be a thing.