5 ms·

Given that "race" is a social construct... https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-genetics-science-africa/?beta=true https://www.nationalgeog

• oh_sigh 8y ago
  Could an alien with no human social constructions differentiate between Bantu people and historically native Irish people?
  • dagw 8y ago
    They could also easily differentiate between brown eyed and blue eyed people. The social construct part comes in when you try to explain why one differentiation is more 'important' than the other.
    • googlryas 8y ago
      "eye color is a social construct" and "the importance of eye color is a social construct" are two completely separate ideas. OP clearly states '"race" is a social construct'.
      • pjc50 8y ago
        Eye color is a social construct because color is a social construct. The presence of the genes for coloration is the only unambiguous thing, and even then it's vulnerable to all sorts of anomalies in gene expression (heterochromia, chimericism etc)
        • googlryas 8y ago
          Color is not a social construct.
          • pdkl95 8y ago
            Yes, it is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg
            • googlryas 8y ago
              I thought you might be going there with that. That is how our learning teaches us to classify colors into finite groups(/names). That does not mean that color itself is a social construct.
              • Turing_Machine 8y ago
                Right. Not having specific names for two colors is an entirely different thing from being unable to recognize that one color is different to the other.
      • monadgonad 8y ago
        > "eye color is a social construct" and "the importance of eye color is a social construct" are two completely separate ideas. And that's the point. In ths case, "race" is equivalent to "the importance of eye colour", because "race" is the importance and social meaning we build around certain genetic differences.
        • oh_sigh 8y ago
          If race is equivalent to the 'importance of eye color', does that mean 'the importance of race' is the 'importance of the importance of race'? Why does race automatically have some kind of value judgement associated with it but eye color does not? Just because people have used it as a standard of other-ness in the past doesn't mean that the qualities have ceased to independently exist.
  • Symmetry 8y ago
    They certainly could. But they wouldn't group Khoisans and Bantus together as "Black" compared to the Irish person being "White". Traditional racial categories fail to carve reality at the joints and modern geneticists will always use terms like "ancestry" rather than "race" because the later just has too much baggage to deal with.
• kgwgk 8y ago
  Animal taxonomy is also a social construct: phylum, class, order, family, genus, species are all labels that we have created and not an intrinsic property of animals.
  • rubatuga 8y ago
    That last bit isn’t true, species are not a social construct.
    • kgwgk 8y ago
      They are to some extent: there are hybrids, rings, and other edge cases.
• faissaloo 8y ago
  Social constructionism isn't an argument, some social constructs are more useful than others so you need to argue why race is not a useful social construct (which I happen to agree with)