Comment on Is this just how it’s gonna be till Election Day?
Cryophilia@lemmy.world 1 month agoIt’s not purely a social construct, I hate this stupid idea. It’s a phenotype. Babies do not have a randomized skin color at birth, it depends on their ancestry. Calling that a “social construct” is arguably racist in itself.
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 1 month ago
Skin colour is a complete continuum, and one which doesn’t very in any uniform way based on geography, aside from the darkest people coming recently from Africa.
By this logic, ear size is a race.
Cryophilia@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Yes! You’re getting it. Ear size is an aspect of race. As is hair texture and height and all the other inheritable phenotypes. Skin color is just the most visibly obvious one.
barsoap@lemm.ee 1 month ago
So you’re saying race == phenotype? Then you also have to say that race is a continuum, and, therefore, any arbitrary line on that continuum a social construct.
Which is btw blindingly obvious to Europeans, Harris is white in my book: Her palms are not lighter than the back of her hands.
Cryophilia@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Well by that definition fucking everything is a social construct. Which, sure, there’s a decent philosophical argument that even reality is a social construct, but it makes it impossible to discuss anything if you get hung up on that.
I’ve got a secret to let you in on: aside from mathematics and some physics, literally everything is categorized based on arbitrary lines on a continuum. Taxonomic classification. Whether an object is a planet or not. “Ocean” vs “sea”. Macro vs micro economics. Every single thing that is classified, a person or group of persons had to make a decision and in some cases that decision was not very clear or easy.
That doesn’t mean it’s a pure social construct, and it definitely doesn’t mean the categories are invalid. It means they’re blurry at the boundaries, like all things are. It means they’re part of a continuum, like all things are. It does NOT mean or imply that the categories are invalid.
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 1 month ago
Well, words can mean whatever you want, but usually race refers to the discrete-ish social categories that have been constructed. Black people were a discrete legal category for most of America’s history, and were nominally 3/5 of a person and treated as much less. Now, they have equal legal rights on paper, but the category is still there.
Cryophilia@lemmy.world 1 month ago
That’s an academic ivory tower definition that they invented and no one else uses. Even the blatant racists who sorted races into these social categories did so based on physical appearance. You didn’t see any dark skin people allowed to use facilities that said “whites only”.
It’s based on physical appearance, which is based on phenotype.