Can terms like "race" and "ethnicity" be used meaningfully?

In My Humble Opinion
21

IANAS but DNA does not provide a series of three or four or five buckets called “race” where you can objectively look at an individual’s DNA and say, “Yep, Black.” Ethnic/national backgrounds are determined through DNA only by using data collected in the past about other people and knowing something about their backgrounds. You can say, for example, that I have a small number genes that are also commonly found in southern Italy. But there is no “Italian” gene the same way there are genes that give you blue eyes. Even for a simple attribute like height, there are dozens of genes that contribute.

DNA itself is a biological construct. The way we interpret that DNA is a human construct.

22

Statistics might show that variant X occurs in 31% of South Americans, and 26% of Africans. That does not split up a population into distinct “races” any more than you can split people up based on their height into a race of tall people and a race of short people.

23

Besides the lying, couldn’t she - or a Black person, have just woken up and decided to be Jewish? Then, if they go through the proper steps, they change their race? Or they become multiracial? And, if they are a woman, do their children automatically change their race as well?

Apologizing for my ignorance, but what criteria did the Nazis use to define someone as Jewish? I thought it was something like 3 or 4 grandparents’ religious practices, not ethnic background, and it was irrelevant whether or not you or your parents practiced Judaism. I thought they were casting an awfully broad net to paint groups as the “other.” Strikes me as a problematic basis for claiming the establishment of a race that is meaningful today. Just because the Nazis SAID they were doing things based on “race” doesn’t mean that they were.

I guess I always thought there were a limited number of commonly accepted races: Black, white, Asian, some indigenous peoples… IIRC the US Census also uses Pacific Islander. And Hispanic as “ethnicity.” Not sure how the Asian race covers east Asians, south Asians, middle easterners…

24

If you really want to know about that kind of bullshit like which Asians were honorary Aryans and which were sub-humans, you can start with

but, honestly, you will want a lot of brain bleach to forget it afterwards

25

If you get DNA data from a diverse group of people, and have no other information about their ancestral origins, you’re still going to be able to group them into clusters. You won’t know that one cluster is southern Italians, and another is native Hawaiians, but you will see separate clusters.

You’ll also see that some people are admixed—they are a mix of two or more clusters.

These clusters can be called races or families, but lots of scientists are using the term “ancestry groups”.

I guess in some Gatica future people might use haplotype distribution to decide who to deny bank loans, but until then, racists are going to have to stick with skin color, religion, national origin, or whatever trait they vest their hate in.

26

I don’t feel that Jews are a race.

But I do think that Nazis think that we are a race.

Social definitions of race have next to nothing to do with actual biological differences.

As has been pointed out earlier in the thread, the people identified socially as “black” come from a very wide range of genetic variations in everything other than skin color. And genetic variations other than skin color don’t line up neatly or consistently with skin color.

That’s what racism does.

27

You can wake up and decide to convert to Judaism. Or Islam. Or Catholicism. It doesn’t change your race.

28

So Judaism is/was a race WRT the Nazis, but not today?

29

Are you seriously under the delusion that there are no Nazis today?

30

It depends when you are asking the question. A friend has an old discretionary that has several pages in the back illustrating the “races of mankind”. It showed a couple dozen races. Ben Franklin would be happy not to be limited into the same racial bucket as the Scandinavians, and there were a ton of different African races (as befits the massive generic diversity of humans in Africa.)

More recently we seem to have lumped humanity into fewer “races”.

31

I don’t think you understand how social construction of race works.

Your hypothetical person would only be a Jew if at least some other people decided/perceived they were one. Could be some other Jews … or some Nazis.

That is why Racael Dolezal had to lie, so that other people (Black and White) would agree she was Black. If she’d just woken up one day feeling Black, but all the details of her past were common knowledge, no-one else would say she was Black.

As for what’s wrong about what she did - are you aware of the enormous benefits she derived from pretending to be Black?

32

Yeah - that is likely my difficulty.

But yeah - if a Black person converts to Judaism, don’t (at least some) Jews consider that Black person to be Jewish?

And no, I don’t really recall much of the specifics of Dolezal’s case. But if she legitimately accepted sufficient attributes of Black culture, and was accepted within sufficient portions of that culture, is that sufficient to satisfy social construction?

I guess I have difficulty with the extent to which I will simply accept agreement by a certain number of people as establishing facts/relationships. Trump has gotten millions of people to agree with various characterizations of things which I reject.

For example, I can understand that Hitler said his Aryan race was eliminating lesser races. So within the context of Germany, he was racist. But from an outside perspective - either then or now - I could imagine someone saying, “Don’t be silly. Someone going to temple doesn’t establish a race. You are antisemitic, but not racist (at least not in that respect).” My impression is the Nazis are/were equal opportunity haters, including being racist against Blacks, and ethnic haters such as against Romani…

Sometimes I find it challenging when people suggest a particular bad action is worse or not because of the label applied. I feel that about many hate crimes. I’m not sure the motivation necessarily worsens the offense.

I don’t think WG was saying that what the Nazis did was not horrible. Instead, I suspect she was expressing a belief that “racism” applies solely or primarily to acts against Blacks. I think she referred to it as being “between white folks.” From my perspective - as a 21st century white folk - I could imagine considering Germans and Jews to both be “white folks.” And in light of my upbringing and experiences, I find it challenging to consider “racism” a proper term to describe white peoples’ hatred of other white people.

If among Black people, persons of lighter or darker skin color disfavor the other - is that “racism.” Or if dark skinned people of African heritage disfavor equally dark-skinned people of Caribbean heritage?

It strikes me as odd to criticize - and suspend - WG for her choice of words WRT Nazi beliefs, when she never suggested that such beliefs were anything other than odious.

33

“Jewish” can refer to a person’s religious identity, or their cultural identity, or their ethnic (or racial, if you want to use that word) identity. Very often these things go together, but they don’t have to; you could have a Jewish atheist (who either does or does not keep kosher), or a Black gentile who converts to Judaism.

34

That is consistent with my impression. So which were the Nazis persecuting? I thought all 3. Which makes “racism” an inadequate and imprecise term to refer to Nazi attitudes/actions towards Jews.

And your comment as to whether I “want to use” the word ethnic or racial goes pretty straight to my question. I (and I would guess WG) thought race and ethnicity were different things. Do you believe they are interchangeable? Merely a matter of preference?

35

Yes. They kept track of people who were Jewish (mostly Ashkenazi Jews, I think) and rounded them up for extermination whether they were religious or not, whether they kept Kosher or did any other Jewish stuff. If someone decided to make some kind of protest by converting to Judaism in Nazi Germany, I’m sure they would be happy to round that person up, too.

I’m really not sure what you’re still confused about. Race is a social construct – for example, Franklin thought Swedes were a different race than the English, where we wouldn’t normally split them that way. Nazis (and, probably modern American white supremacists) thought that Jews were a different race.

Some Jews in America consider themselves a different ethnicity, some don’t. Since race is a social construct, those constructions can change over time.

Goldberg was being too provincial and tone-deaf when she claimed that what the Nazis were doing was somehow different than what racists in America do – she saw it at white-on-white racism, but it was really Aryan on Jewish racism.

36

They would then be Jewish and Black; it’s not an either/or. And there are indeed such people; as well as Black people who are born Jewish.

It doesn’t establish physical facts. It most certainly does establish social ones. How on earth do you think social facts get established, if not by agreement by enough people within the society?

I think there may be some people using the word that way. Definitions of racism are likely to be as inconsistent as racism itself.

White and Black are not the only possible races. Humans have made up all sorts of races.

And people have been pointing out all through this thread that there are no nice neat lines defining through all of history and all societies how racial divisions are made. Of course one society can define Jews as White and another society define Jews as a non-white racial group. Of course Jews can be defined in the same place as white and as non-white at different times. You appear to be failing to understand what a social construct is.

Why?

Of course racism is imprecise and full of errors. That’s the nature of it. You appear to be somehow trying to make it logical and correct. It isn’t, and can’t be, logical and correct: because it’s illogical and wrong. Why are you trying to insist that it must make objective sense?

37

Thanks everyone for all the answers.

In my ignorance, I had not understood the concepts of race and racism to be as ephemeral as they apparently are. Given that the terms are “imprecise and full of errors”, there are “no neat lines”, and definitions differ across time/societies, it strikes me as problematic to use such terms, as it is difficult if not impossible to ensure that all parties agree on the definition. IMO/E, that is exactly the sort of thing that interferes with meaningful communication.

I guess I am limited by my semantic preferences. As I do not understand how to intelligently use terms such as race/racism - and am unwilling to simply accept that something is racist if someone defines it as such - my safest course it to try to add that to the list of terms I’m best not using and topics I’m best not discussing.

38

If we take the definition of “racism” as the belief that:

  1. There exist certain categories of humans
  2. Those categories determine how those people can be treated by other humans

…then we can understand why the Nazi flavor anti-Semitism was racism. Nazis made systematic attempts to categorize humanity as to their mental, physical, and temperamental attributes so as to rationalize how the Nazis wanted to treat them.

So the Nazi treatment of Jews absolutely was racism, just like Arabs and Europeans did to sub-Saharan Africans.

The racism isn’t in noticing that different populations have different appearances. The racism is in using those attributes to form categories of which humans can be mistreated.

If you doubt this is the case, consider that the people doing the categorizing never once placed their own category beneath other categories, and they usually stood to benefit in money or status by putting others in lower categories (slavery, confiscation of property, manipulation of labor markets, etc).

Racism is a technology for apportioning social privilege. That’s all it is.

39

I’m really not trying to be obtuse here (tho I fear I am succeeding spectacularly at it!). So, if a man is mysogynistic, is he also being racist? After all, women are “a category of humans.” Or if I despised the poor, the wealthy, the short…?

I consider ethnic hatred, genocide, religious persecution, etc to be perfectly useful terms, w/o having to expand racism to include such thoughts/actions.

40

You can just use the broader term “bigotry” as an umbrella term that includes racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, etc. That way, if someone is really discriminating against or killing their fellow man for being of a different religion, but not a different race, you don’t have to worry about using the wrong term. Either way, it’s bigotry!

ETA: It even applies to misogynists!