Is tagging by race for ML purposes itself a racist practice, by definition? ML = machine learning if you didn't know. In my subculture, that's a given. ML has taken off in recent years, refueling the dream of RI (real intelligence) ultimately emerging from AI (artificial, phony or mock intelligence).
I'd say in the neural nets of real humans, tagging by race was caught up in self fulfilling prophesy (or poetry -- Paine) of a religious nature, regarding the "place of each race" in some cosmological caste system. Without mechanized agriculture or quarrying, the vast resources had been commanded under threat of a whip in many cases. Cosmologies (background programs) needed to support that status quo.
Per the book Caste, India's social engineers and Jim Crow have a lot to talk about, in terms of comparing notes. May the civil rights movement in India continue on an enlightening path. Obsolete stereotyping is the root of almost all evil (falling behind), whereas sensitive discernment of relevant traits is by definition not obsolete. The advantage is in having the right models.
The Tower of Babel was the anchor for many civil warriors, up to the "confusion in tongues" part, which people tended to misinterpret from their bully pulpits. God used extra- and/or epigenetic (outside chromosomal) reprogramming techniques to fix a major bug of the Noah Era. The bottleneck of Noah's Arc had given rise to groupthink and monoculture, and to an idiocracy expecting its reward in heaven based on some taller-is-better ideology-architecture. God again saw a need to intervene. Humans were still in fine tuning phase in the Book of Genesis.
Thinking in language runs "a miracle a minute" compared to the miraculous mutant-based morphing associated with geological time DNA coding -- unless you're a bacterium or other such simple-tiny self propagator.
Humans were split asunder not along genetic lines, but into their philological flows, which helped create the impetus, the mutually frustrating pressure, to wander far afield and start fresh, creating new versions of everything: New York, Nova Scotia, New South Wales...
The student body diaspora would eventually spread around the world and finally get that the campus was spherical. A self conscious humanity would become a university of the meek, humble in its obvious ignorance. Score one for God then. The jealous angels could not say "I told you so" that quickly.
The whole US Civil War mentality started falling apart with the continued evolution of mechanized sea, bus, rail, and air travel. Spaceship Earth became a nomad land, as its next generations of people, with their light-to-dark sun-blocking skin tones, resettled the Americas.
The newer neural nets started coping with "world around" tourism, with some traveling themselves, others staying put. Either way, people coped with a shocking future, and continuing waves of migration.
The race tag was proving less and less a predictor of whether that stranger sitting next to you was conversant with quantum physics, knew English, had a gun. Hard to know.
The race-based language games were about making things simple, a truly uphill battle where human complexity is concerned.
The corollary to ML models drifting off course, perhaps thanks to "foundations of sand" tagging schemes built around race, is the emergence of tagging looking at authentic ethnic attributes (e.g. philological) versus these pseudo-biological ones.
Nothing in biology precisely maps to the old civil warrior "races" idea because the race concept was forged in the wake of reading Genesis, not in the study of genetics. "Critical race theory" has morphed into "critical of race" theory.
In the evolutionary marketplace of ideas (extra-genetic in large degree, unless you're deliberately inbreeding some royal dead end) race-based ML is going to suffer the slings and arrows of strongly countering intelligence services.
Their PR will be along the lines of "only the slow think in terms of race" which is condescending I realize. Condescension is more effective when disguised. Lets call it "mock pity for those who believe in breeding a master race" i.e. "too bad y'all will never be ruling class, not with crazy beliefs like that".
