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> when I hear "race is a social construct" it's almost always in the context of denying biological differences between the races in the same way that some extre
by runako 5y ago
> when I hear "race is a social construct" it's almost always in the context of denying biological differences between the races in the same way that some extreme (though mainstream and influential)
Racial segregationists in the Americas literally had to write laws delineating races based on factors external to that individual (e.g. their parentage). That is: even people who believed in a racial hierarchy also believed it was not possible to objectively identify a person's race without knowing e.g. the races of that person's parents.
Race has never been considered a generally observable fact about a person.
- throwaway894345 5y agoBut is this only because they lacked a theoretical understanding of genetics (including an understanding of which combinations of genes that express the features that we attribute to race, which we still presumably lack by-and-large) and sequencing technology?
- runako 5y ago> which combinations of genes that express the features that we attribute to race If an arbitrarily large grouping of genotype combinations is necessary to categorize people, perhaps that categorization scheme is not useful? I would imagine that the number of "races" generated via the mechanism you posit would measure in the hundreds or thousands, rendering it unrelated in practice to the word "race" as it is used.