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> if you showed me a mixed room of hundreds of > native Danes and Sentinelese - I could classify them What relevance does that have? Could you reliably te
by charlesism 8y ago
> if you showed me a mixed room of hundreds of
> native Danes and Sentinelese - I could classify them
What relevance does that have? Could you reliably tell a Dane from a Greek? How about a Sentinelese from a Pakistani?
When people say "race" is a social construct, they don't - well, unless they're morons - mean that people aren't more different, the more distantly-related they are. It's the categories that are the social construction. Because anyone who really thinks about it carefully enough, can see those categories are arbitrary.
If history had been a bit different, and we hadn't come to lump brown- and blue-eyed people into the same "race," you might have written this...
> if you showed me a mixed room of hundreds of
> native Brundanes and Bladanes - I could classify them
- googlryas 8y ago> What relevance does that have? It shows, at least in this contrived example, that the information is present in the individuals and not in the brain of the classifier. I don't understand your last point. Is it wrong to say that I could extremely accurately classify blue and brown eyed people?
- charlesism 8y ago> not in the brain of the classifier. Sure, but you can see physical differences between your paternal and maternal grandfather, too, even if your culture considers them the same "race." > to say that I could extremely accurately > classify blue and brown eyed people? And why not classify them as deep blue, light blue, hazel, and deep brown? Or blue, gray, and brown? Etc. The point isn't that everyone's eye color is the same. It's that the classification is arbitrary.
- oh_sigh 8y agoI'm not arguing that race is a useful basis for determining someone's value in society, or anything like that. Merely that it actually does exist, and different peoples at this point in history have vastly different lineages.
- charlesism 8y agoI wasn't arguing that you were a bigot. I wasn't denying that the average Englishman is more similar to the average Greek, than to the average Japanese. I'm saying a belief in distinct "races" of people is bogus.