Comment on Is this just how it’s gonna be till Election Day?
barsoap@lemm.ee 1 month agoYOU JUST FUCKING ASSERT THIS. FUCKING A PRIORI.
No. Case in point: I mentioned how Harris has lighter skin than many a Sicilian, and also very much has a temperate climate nose. These are not, in the slightest, phenotype traits typical of sub-saharan Africa mostly Nigeria thereabouts where most of the slaves trafficked during the Atlantic slave trade where from.
If you can’t see that then I suggest you visit an optometrist.
If you pass as white you are, for all intents and purposes, white.
Then why is Harris considered black? What does “passing” mean, here? Does it really have anything to do with phenotype, or is it cultural?
But some humans have different numbers of fingers! Some have four,
That’s a misexpression, the genome codes for five. And even then: Having six fingers is a physical, objective, trait. Harris being black isn’t, phenotypically she could just as well be Italian.
Cryophilia@lemmy.world 1 month ago
As I have said, picking individual outliers does not invalidate a category. I think you’ve got it backwards. We interpret racial characteristics through a social lense. But the characteristics do, themselves, exist. And they are easily grouped (not exclusively, but generally) into the categories we call “race”. And we’re not randomly picking traits. They’re inherited via a common ancestry. As you said, physical, observable traits.
Could Harris pass as Sicilian? Probably not, but even if she could, she doesn’t have any Sicilian ancestry to my knowledge, so it would be inaccurate to call her Sicilian. Or Indian or Korean or whatever. She could call herself Nordic and we would laugh at her.
barsoap@lemm.ee 1 month ago
I didn’t say anything about validity.
So it would be inaccurate to call Obama black because he has no slave ancestry?
“African American” is a subculture identified with people freed from slavery. It is not a thing of ancestry, or Obama wouldn’t be part of it. It is not a matter of phenotype, or Harris wouldn’t be part of it. And both aren’t outliers, they’re simply prominent examples. At the same time, you have more recent African immigrants to the US who very much insist that they are not part of that group identity.
Noone, at least no American, is questioning Harris’ and Obama’s identity as African American, and that’s precisely because it’s neither about ancestry nor phenotype but subcultural belonging. They’re African American because they stay vibing that way.
Plenty of people with much darker skin in the Nordics. If she had gone to school and studied in Norway or something Nordic would be absolutely accurate. See here on the other side of the Atlantic we don’t sort ethnicities by phenotype because phenotype has nothing to do with ethnicity. Correlation, yes, causation, fuck no. Double triple fuck no.
Cryophilia@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Phenotype has nothing to do with nationality. Nationality =/= ethnicity.
You force migrant Africans to drown in the Mediterranean, get off your high horse dude.
It would be debatable. That’s the point I’ve been trying to make. You take a set of physical characteristics and common heritage and you classify people based on that. Some people won’t neatly fall into those classifications and that’s okay, but the classifications are still valid.
That’s the whole point of the phrase “race is a social construct”. Attacking the validity of race as a concept.
barsoap@lemm.ee 1 month ago
I never claimed them to be equal. Also, “Nordic” isn’t a nationality, Norwegian would be. If Harris was born in the US, moved to Norway when she was 3, went to school in Norway, studied in Norway, then returned to the US, what ethnicity do you think she would identify with? And yes bi-ethnic people exist, very common in fact because people do move around.
Did you just call me Italian. Or Greek. Or whatever.
Why would you connect such unconnected things as phenotype and heritage? Why not have separate classifiers for both things? Why, then, on top of that, sort people into subcultures based on those classifiers?
Democracy is a social construct.