Well, we generally have 6. Average, above Average and below average (or short, normal and tall) times two for male and female. You can add quite a few more to that for different cultures. A 5’10 white person is going to be normal, maybe on the the tall side, but if he’s Asian, he’ll be tall.
It’s just that we don’t discriminate WRT height. Probably, because we can’t discriminate against a culture based on height.
That’s what I was thinking when I read the OP. I hope this is Black Like Me II and not “I really am a black person, stop being so mean to me…now how do I sign up for my minority benefits?”
It seems like some kind of a new version of Black Like Me (with the help of a really good PR coordinator because of what she’s already said) is her best bet right now, not doubling down. Frankly, her actual best bet is probably just to back out of the lime light and let this blow over.
So, what does your claim mean? Are you claiming that the French Race, the Irish Race, the English Race, and the Jewish Race all have “scientific means by which [they] can be unambiguously determined”? What are the scientific differences that allow us to identify members of those races?
Now, Linnaeus said there were four races. Blumenbach said there were five races. When I was growing up, I was taught, (probably following the late 19th century Meyers Konversationslexikon,), that there were three races. I have seen further breakdowns that enumerated as many as sixty races. So, how many races are there and can you describe the “scientific means by which ‘races’ can be unambiguously determined”? Note that Linnaeus, Blumenbach, and many others actually thought that there were such things as races, yet they could not even agree on how many there were, so how accurate could such claims be?
The notion of social constructs that are identified as races has already been acknowledged in this thread. You, however, reacted against a declaration that there was not a scientific way to unambiguously identify them. If there is such a scientifically unambiguous method, please point it out, (and explain why so many scientists studying the races wound grouping so many different people into different races).
Well, I didn’t react strongly. I understand that pretending race is an outdated concept is a powerfully attractive notion for some dedicated progressives, but other dedicated progressives find race to be the only thing that matters. If the idea of race were to become outmoded, many progressives would lose there primary purpose in life. How could they promote diversity if we are all the same?
There is far more variation within racial populations than there is between them, and modern H. sapiens tend to be mutts anyway, so defining race is increasingly a pointless exercise. So, no, I don’t dispute the theory that races are ambiguous. But it is not constructive to pretend that race has no concrete meaning. Obviously it does, and I for one wish that fewer people would spend so much time obsessing over it.
You are swapping meanings in mid sentence. The opposition is to a belief that there is a scientific definition of race that is clearly expressed in biology, but you then go on to assert that there is a “need” for some to hold onto the social construct. As long as some people are motivated to (mis)treat others based on the social construct, there will be others who seek to mitigate the behavior that relies on the social construct. Pretending that the social construct expresses a biological reality does not make the claims for biological reality true. Trying to dismiss efforts to mitigate inter-group hostility by pointing to statements that the biological claims are erroneous and, therefore, claiming that the social constructs do not exist (as social constructs) is nothing more than word games.
I think you’re right that I’ve mixed my meanings, but after that I can’t follow your post. I think you may be ascribing positions to me that I do not hold.
Biological race is ambiguous, as I have made clear. Race as a social construct is important to society, as should be clear to anybody. Unless you don’t think racism is a problem.
Your posts are hard to understand because you keep moving goalposts without sating that you are doing so. Your responses are hard to understand where you refuse to answer simple questions.
So, once more:
Are you claiming that the social construct known as race has an obvious, concrete meaning?
If you are claiming that the social construct known as race has an obvious,concrete meaning, then what is that meaning, where did you obtain it from? Are there other meanings? If so why did you select that meaning? And if there are not multiple meanings then why do so many scholars disagree concerning what race means in a sociological context? Since you claim race has a concrete meaning, can you use that meaning to tell us whether Irish and Jewish are race? Regardless of the answer to the previous question, how do you explain that so many scholars reject that answer if race has such a concrete answer?
If you are not claiming that the social construct known as race has an obvious, concrete meaning, then what did you mean when you posted that race obviously has a concrete meaning?
I am really struggling to understand what you are claiming here, but maybe direct answers to these simple questions will help.
I think where we are not understanding one another is that you think I am saying that race SHOULD matter, which is perfectly contrary to my actual opinion.
I am saying that race DOES matter, because race too often dictates how people relate to one another.
It’s complicated, dammit. Races are real things, but the real differences are trivial in comparison to the perceived differences. Or at least they used to be, but now to acknowledge any difference at all is to invite a bunch of purist PC witch hunters to sniff you up and check your papers.
Once again, you are weaseling around in order to avoid answering simple questions.
What you actually said was:
Never mind what *you *think that I think *you *said. Can you please just explain what you actually actually *did *say? Where we don’t understand each other is the content that you actually posted,. The content that I quoted. Not anything that I think. I don’t understand what you actually wrote.
These are simple questions, so why are you being so coy about answering them?
You said that race obviously has a concrete meaning.
Do you mean that social race obviously has a concrete meaning, or that biological race obviously has a a concrete meaning.
If you mean that social race obviously has a concrete meaning, then can you tell us what that meaning is?
If you can’t tell us what that meaning is, then how can you claim that it is obvious and concrete?
And if you can tell us what the meaning is, where did you derive that meaning from and why you selected that meaning?
Do you believe there are multiple meanings to social race? If so then how can oyu claim that the meaning is obvious and concrete? And if you do not accept that there are multiple meaning, how do you explain that so many scholars use other, incompatible meanings of social race?
Since you claim race has a concrete meaning, can you use that meaning to tell us whether Irish and Jewish are races? Regardless of the answer to the previous question, how do you explain that so many scholars reject that answer if race has such a concrete answer?
If you are not claiming that the social construct known as race has an obvious, concrete meaning, then what did you mean when you posted that race obviously has a concrete meaning?
Nachtmusick, what you are posting makes no sense whatsoever. We are asking you simple questions to try to understand what you are posting, and instead of answering the questions you seem to want to be evasive.
At this juncture, nobody gives a shit whether race should matter or should not matter. All that we care about is your claim that race has an obvious, concrete meaning, and your claim that races are clearly different. Please explain how you arrived at those conclusion and what evidence your claims are based on.
I see that you are trying to understand, and I appreciate your effort, but I don’t know what else I can say.
Jewish is not a race. Irish and Egyptian and Aboriginal are races. There are real differences between people who are of those races. They have different skin color, different histories, different hair, and different cuisines. These differences are “meaningful” in the sense that they serve to distinguish one race from another. That is all that I meant.
Irish and Egyptian are nationalities, my friend. Or are you saying that anyone who is a citizen of a country belongs to a distinctive race?
When someone tells you they are an American, what skin color and hair texture comes to mind?
At any rate, however much these criteria may make sense to you, “different skin color, different histories, different hair, and different cuisines” is not what defines race for most people. Using this rubric, we’d have kabillion races (like the moon-pie eating Scot-Irish Southern American Race, which is separate from from the gribenes-eating Ashkenazi Southern American Jew Race). The descendants of American slaves would be in a different race than the descendants of the American slaves’ ancestors living in west and central Africa, most of whom would be in a different race from the peoples living in East Africa and southern Africa.
Well. By any reasonable genetic view of ethnicity, all these are different peoples. Black Americans, or black people in the New World generally, have a share of European and Native American ancestry that is not found in Africa. Meanwhile African populations on opposite sides of the continent may be more different from each other than either is from any given non-African people.
So calling all those people “black,” as if that’s some kind of real, unitary thing, doesn’t really make sense. Except, of course, to uphold crude racist codification.
I agree, but I’m finding it interesting that you’ve focused on the “black people” part of my post and not the “white people” part too. Is it also racist to lump the pale-skinned Scot-Irish with the pale-skinned Ashekenazi Jew? Or just convenient?
nachtmusick seems to be splitter, in that he thinks the Irish and the Egyptian belong to different races. Others disagree.
The crude criteria I used are in fact credible examples of what most people use to define their race. I didn’t mean to define the entire species, but what the hell, let’s go there.
Race, culture and nationality are larger constructs formed of smaller units. You are an individual, of course, but you are also a member of a clique, a family, a clan, a tribe. a company, a profession, an interest group, a party, a movement. You are a phenotype; the sum total of all the myriad groups and identities that define you.
You can choose for yourself which of these groups to emphasize, but it would be disingenuous to pretend that race, as defined by crude measures, is not one of the more important means by which the modern political and cultural landscape is being shaped.
So that is what I mean when I say that race is important, and that is also what I mean when I say it is too important.