- never signed up for anything like this,
- never donated to or signed up for emails from the DNC, et al.,
- political texts like this come all the time, and
- I hesitate to reply “stop” because I don’t want them to know this is a live number (is my instinct here outdated/inapplicable?)
THAT is not a race. That is treatment of a race. That is 100% a social construct.
Race itself is a real biological thing that exists. Not a pure social construct.
Stop conflating them.
I really don’t think most people use this definition. Like, would you say “what race are you” is a grammatically incorrect question, then? And what about “hispanic” as a racial descriptor? How do you be hispanic-er than someone else?
No? That question is totally in line with the definition of race I gave.
The census says “hispanic” is an ethnicity rather than a race. I disagree; I think that’s splitting hairs.
I’m 1/4 Hispanic. My mom was half Hispanic (Mexican mother, European father…not saying the country = race before you get your panties in a twist, it’s just a fucking shorthand, everyone knows that most Mexicans are Hispanic and most Europeans are not). My mom is more Hispanic than me. Fairly simple concept.
Right, so what’s the Hispanic phenotype? As far as anyone can tell it’s a language, which isn’t a phenotype, and until someone brown opens their mouth they could just as easily be an Arab or a particularly tawny Italian. Or are Arabs Hispanic, too?
Phenotypically? Yes, they’re very close. The whole Mediterranean is which shouldn’t be terribly surprising. I guess the reason USians use “Hispanic” and not “Greek” is because Mexico speaks Spanish.
The reason Europeans can reliably tell Sicilians and Arabs apart is not because of phenotype, but because Arabs tend to look like they visit the barber five times a day. Probably because they do.
Yeah, but to be a phenotype, and not just a social construct based partially on a phenotype, it has to go the other way. If having the phenotype isn’t enough on it’s own to guarantee a race, it’s not just about phenotypes. Kind of like how having wheels doesn’t make a suitcase a car.
(Also, FWIW Spaniards are mostly pale-skinned - I know because I’ve actually been there. The brown in Latin America comes from admixture with other local and imported populations)
No category is absolute. By your logic, it’s impossible to call anything a car, because cars have wheels but suitcases ALSO have wheels, therefore the entire idea that cars exist is just a made up social construct.
Or for a less ridiculous example: is a battery-powered bicycle actually an electric moped? Or the ever classic, is a hotdog a sandwich? We can discuss these questions without questioning the validity of concepts such as bicycles, mopeds, hotdogs and sandwiches. Categories exist. They are useful descriptors despite the existence of edge cases and blurry boundaries.
And we’re back!
Yes, categories are useful but (outside of mathematics) imprecise. A car needs to be motorised and able to carry at least one passenger. Arguably, it also needs at least 4 wheels or to be 3-wheeled and enclosed, to include Reliant Robins. There’s still probably edge cases, but it’s fair to say it’s a subset of wheeled objects that generally applies and is needed both in economics and engineering, as well as everyday life.
Racial categories aren’t useful for science, though. Did you know, for example, that most human genetic variety occurs within Africa, because of the common out-of-Africa ancestry everyone else has? Phenotypically, I have less information, but you have tiny pygmies as well as the Maasi (with an average male height of 6’4), and every skin colour from Sudanese literal black to Egyptian/Berber olive, so I’m guessing it’s the same.
Maybe that’s the point of contention here. They’re relevant socially, but biology has moved on.
Au contraire
https://www.healthline.com/health/sickle-cell-anemia-black-people
That’s just off the top of my head, I’m sure there’s many other examples. Health care for Black vs white vs Asian etc is slightly different. And it’s not due to social conditions alone - the same mechanisms that made people whose predominant ancestry is sub-Saharan African have darker skin, also caused this decreased resistance to sickle cell anemia.
Another one that just came to me was lactose intolerance. White people have higher tolerance for lactose, so a milk-heavy diet is worse for other races.
Ignoring race is not only problematic societally, but is bad science.
…if all brown people look the same to you, you might need to start meeting more people from different races.
Hmm. How good is your eye for heritage? Can you pick apart Telugu from Hindi, for example? Mongol from Chinese?
It’s a total continuum so there is no perfect, but mine might be relatively bad, that’s true. I have an uncle with mixed ancestry, and I didn’t pick up on it until someone told me, lol.
Re-edit: Aaand federation broke. My apologies to this user for the misaimed accusation. I’ve apologised in private messages, which hopefully go through normally.
I think I actually can pick Mongol from (Han) Chinese, actually.
Agreed.
As for your edit, you responded to me, dude. I didn’t jump over here.
Ah sorry, I replied to the wrong user with that edit. How embarrassing. Deepest apologies for that.
No worries, it happens.