- 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- I hesitate to reply “stop” because I don’t want them to know this is a live number (is my instinct here outdated/inapplicable?)
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:
This is the fucking bullshit that makes me want to bitch slap all you academic morons who keep insisting that race is a social construct. It’s so goddamn fucking annoying. YOU JUST FUCKING ASSERT THIS. FUCKING A PRIORI. And then you use that bullshit assertion to build the world’s biggest fucking straw man.
It’s so goddamn stupid and also so smug at the same time, which is a rage-inducing combination coming from anyone. But especially from Kaeieghlyyn who somehow spent 4 years in college studying racial inequality without ever stepping foot in a ghetto.
No one ever gave a shit about the “one drop law”, not even in the racist South where it existed, unless someone needed an excuse to exercise power over someone else. If you pass as white you are, for all intents and purposes, white.
How does one get to the situation where they pass as white?
Their parents could pass as white! At least one of them. It’s an inherited characteristic, which is what race is. That’s it, that’s the whole thing. Race is a bundle of inherited physical characteristics sorted by commonalities.
But some humans have different numbers of fingers! Some have four, some have six! Some humans are born without hands! Therefore your entire system of categorization is invalid! You cannot classify things in any way, because exceptions might exist! Literally everything is a social construct!!!
Or, you know. Alternatively. Categorizations are valid despite the fact that exceptions exist.
Don’t “end with” a fucking quote from a fucking philosopher. It’s the bitch icing on a giant cake of smugness. I’m happy to debate this with you but for the love of christ at least pretend to be fucking humble. Also your quote is stupid, because it’s referring to the type of straw in your straw man. You’re trying to explain some shit that doesn’t matter, because your entire premise is wrong.
No. Case in point: I mentioned how Harris has lighter skin than many a Sicilian, and also very much has a temperate climate nose. These are not, in the slightest, phenotype traits typical of sub-saharan Africa mostly Nigeria thereabouts where most of the slaves trafficked during the Atlantic slave trade where from.
If you can’t see that then I suggest you visit an optometrist.
Then why is Harris considered black? What does “passing” mean, here? Does it really have anything to do with phenotype, or is it cultural?
That’s a misexpression, the genome codes for five. And even then: Having six fingers is a physical, objective, trait. Harris being black isn’t, phenotypically she could just as well be Italian.
As I have said, picking individual outliers does not invalidate a category. I think you’ve got it backwards. We interpret racial characteristics through a social lense. But the characteristics do, themselves, exist. And they are easily grouped (not exclusively, but generally) into the categories we call “race”. And we’re not randomly picking traits. They’re inherited via a common ancestry. As you said, physical, observable traits.
Could Harris pass as Sicilian? Probably not, but even if she could, she doesn’t have any Sicilian ancestry to my knowledge, so it would be inaccurate to call her Sicilian. Or Indian or Korean or whatever. She could call herself Nordic and we would laugh at her.
I didn’t say anything about validity.
So it would be inaccurate to call Obama African American because he has no slave ancestry?
“African American” is a subculture identified with people freed from slavery. It is not a thing of ancestry, or Obama wouldn’t be part of it. It is not a matter of phenotype, or Harris wouldn’t be part of it. And both aren’t outliers, they’re simply prominent examples. At the same time, you have more recent African immigrants to the US who very much insist that they are not part of that group identity. Dunno how Obama’s father identified but he had that kind of heritage.
Noone, at least no American, is questioning Harris’ and Obama’s identity as African American, and that’s precisely because it’s neither about ancestry nor phenotype but subcultural belonging. They’re African American because they stay vibing that way.
Plenty of people with much darker skin in the Nordics. If she had gone to school and studied in Norway or something Nordic would be absolutely accurate. See here on the other side of the Atlantic we don’t sort ethnicities by phenotype because phenotype has nothing to do with ethnicity. Correlation, yes, causation, fuck no. Double triple fuck no. This man is Oldenburger. How could I claim otherwise his Low Saxon is better than mine! …and Harris is African American, even she doesn’t fit the phenotype, because it’s only correlation, and Obama is African American, he fits the phenotype and chose to vibe that way, but also might’ve chosen otherwise. Which probably would not have exactly been the path of least resistance because America, overall, is racist AF with their subcultural identifications.
Phenotype has nothing to do with nationality. Nationality =/= ethnicity.
You force migrant Africans to drown in the Mediterranean, get off your high horse dude.
It would be debatable. That’s the point I’ve been trying to make. You take a set of physical characteristics and common heritage and you classify people based on that. Some people won’t neatly fall into those classifications and that’s okay, but the classifications are still valid.
That’s the whole point of the phrase “race is a social construct”. Attacking the validity of race as a concept.
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!
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?
…if all brown people look the same to you, you might need to start meeting more people from different races.
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.