- 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- I hesitate to reply “stop” because I don’t want them to know this is a live number (is my instinct here outdated/inapplicable?)
It’s a pretty relevant distinction within American life. I’m no strategist, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable.
The only people who think race don’t matter is people who exclusively interact within the same race.
It’s a social construct that didn’t exist until the 1600s, but it’s a real social construct.
Outside America and other former plantation economies it can be a bit different, and less in-your-face, but it’s almost always still there.
It’s not purely a social construct, I hate this stupid idea. It’s a phenotype. Babies do not have a randomized skin color at birth, it depends on their ancestry. Calling that a “social construct” is arguably racist in itself.
Skin colour is a complete continuum, and one which doesn’t very in any uniform way based on geography, aside from the darkest people coming recently from Africa.
By this logic, ear size is a race.
Yes! You’re getting it. Ear size is an aspect of race. As is hair texture and height and all the other inheritable phenotypes. Skin color is just the most visibly obvious one.
So you’re saying race == phenotype? Then you also have to say that race is a continuum, and, therefore, any arbitrary line on that continuum a social construct.
Which is btw blindingly obvious to Europeans, Harris is white in my book: There’s plenty of Italians with darker skin. Funny how perception changes if you actually consider skin colour to be skin colour and not some grand overarching signifier for an in reality culturally defined group.
Well by that definition fucking everything is a social construct. Which, sure, there’s a decent philosophical argument that even reality is a social construct, but it makes it impossible to discuss anything if you get hung up on that.
I’ve got a secret to let you in on: aside from mathematics and some physics, literally everything is categorized based on arbitrary lines on a continuum. Taxonomic classification. Whether an object is a planet or not. “Ocean” vs “sea”. Macro vs micro economics. Every single thing that is classified, a person or group of persons had to make a decision and in some cases that decision was not very clear or easy.
That doesn’t mean it’s a pure social construct, and it definitely doesn’t mean the categories are invalid. It means they’re blurry at the boundaries, like all things are. It means they’re part of a continuum, like all things are. It does NOT mean or imply that the categories are invalid.
Nope. That humans generally have five fingers is not a social construct, it’s an (emergent) property of our genome.
Whether Harris is sorted into “white” or “black” OTOH is based on a social construct: The US’s conception of race is not based on physical traits but social realities. It harkens back to the one drop rule which is complete BS when it comes to biology, what matters in her being sorted into “black” is not her phenotype (quite light skin, temperate climate nose, …), but that a portion, at least a drop, of her ancestry comes from black slaves. That’s a social context, not a biological one.
Even more obvious is Obama, actually: He’s not a descendant of slaves. So it’s not even heritage which dictates whether you’re black in the US, but whether your phenotype looks like you possibly could be.
Let me end with Epictetus:
Well, words can mean whatever you want, but usually race refers to the discrete-ish social categories that have been constructed based roughly on specific phenotypes. For example Black people were a discrete legal category for most of America’s history, and were nominally 3/5 of a person and treated as much less. Now, they have equal legal rights on paper, but the category remains informally.
That’s an academic ivory tower definition that they invented and no one else uses. Even the blatant racists who sorted races into these social categories did so based on physical appearance. You didn’t see any dark skin people allowed to use facilities that said “whites only”.
It’s based on physical appearance, which is based on phenotype.
That’s what I said!