5 ms·

Race is a substantially less real concept than sex is.

• otterley 1y ago
  What does "real" mean here?
  • stanfordkid 1y ago
    It means two people of different races can have a baby together, but two people of the same sex cannot.
    • otterley 1y ago
      Sure, but does that make it any less "real"?
      • prmoustache 1y ago
        First because there is absolutely no objective way to define races in their coloquial meaning. So they don't exist. The only race we can truly define is homo sapiens sapiens.
        • otterley 1y ago
          > because there is absolutely no objective way to define races in their coloquial meaning. So they don't exist. This is a pretty controversial statement. Even studied anthropologists disagree with this.
          • r14c 1y ago
            Only in the sense that race is a type of caste system. There's really no biological reality to it.
            • otterley 1y ago
              If that is so, why does a black couple bear black children, and a white couple bear white children? I'll concede that much in the way of "race" is a social construct, but to claim there's no biology involved is categorically false.
              • r14c 1y ago
                race is a category assigned based on crudely determined heritable traits, but looking at the genetics you don't get the same categories. dark skin is a convergent evolutionary trait that comes from living near the equator, you don't need the groups to be related at all for them to arrive at a similar skin tone. the same goes for all skin tones in fact. racial categories actually don't make sense from a biological perspective, but that doesn't mean that traits correlated with race don't exist. the picture is just extremely crude to the point of being useless outside of the political element of providing a visible indicator of caste.
                • otterley 1y ago
                  There are in fact biological differences, some of which lead to disproportionate susceptibility to diseases such as sickle cell disease, Tay-Sachs disease, thalassemia, and Gaucher disease.
                  • r14c 1y ago
                    i'm not saying that there are no biological differences between different groups of people. you're missing the key point here: race doesn't classify people into genetic groups, it classifies people based on phenotypes that appear in genetically distinct groups. you're also conflating race with heritable traits in general. that's what I'm trying to point out with this example: https://www.npr.org/2009/02/02/100057939/your-family-may-once-have-been-a-different-color https://www.npr.org/2009/02/02/100057939/your-family-may-onc...
                    • otterley 1y ago
    • khuey 1y ago
      So literally every human characteristic other than their sexual reproductive capability is not real?
      • drdeca 1y ago
        Well, I said race is "less real" not that it is "not real". Here are other things that are more real than "race": "blood type", "whether one has Down syndrome", "the number of limbs one has". These kinds of properties/classifications are, I claim, more "natural", as far as biology. These groupings into classes are more natural (based on biological properties) than groupings into "races".
        • otterley 1y ago
          Maybe choose a more precise and less judgmental adjective than "real." The opposite of "real" is "fake," not "difficult to substantiate."
          • drdeca 1y ago
            But “difficult to substantiate” isn’t what I mean? I mean something more like whether something is there independent of what people think of it. (“Reality is that which, when one stops believing in it, doesn’t go away.”) Distinctions between categories are often somewhat fuzzy, but in some cases there are processes independent of peoples’ opinions that behave largely like there are distinct buckets. Such as “has a left arm”. With “race”, while there are certainly correlations between various genes and where one was born (and where one’s grandparents were born), and correlations between genes and other genes (which is partially explained by the correlations with location), any lines one may draw to split humanity into “races” will be fairly arbitrary, and at least substantially more arbitrary than splitting by whether someone is male or female (even though there are edge cases there as well; like I said, categories are often a little bit fuzzy). Now, there may be other concepts that are even less real than race, but I don’t know if any of them are cared about enough to - oh, astrological signs! A person’s astrological signs are probably even less real than race, and people care enough about them to give them names.
  • anon84873628 1y ago
    It's the delta between the common use of the term in public discourse versus the scientific biological basis for it.