Does Race exist?

[Peuri]

I also invites other that I know enthusiast on discussing this topic @Angst and @Peuri

Oh my, I'm certainly not an enthusiast of discussing race as a concept. I know I'll slip something, like saying that the Aztecs were not much better than the European colonists, and be labeled a racist for that.

Racism is essentially a social construct to divide people

You can't just shrug off a thing by saying it's "just a social construct, bro". Literally everything is a social construct. Without us socially construing knowledge about our surrounding, our surroundings would be incomprehensible to us in the form of language. Weddings are social constructs, countries are social constructs, nations are social constructs and even trees, ants and lakes are social constructs, hell even the Moon is a social construct. Without humans creating the categories and beliefs tied to a thing, none of those things exist in the form of language and understanding. Social constructs are ways for us to engage with the real world, which is always beyond our grasp because we always inhabit a position in the world through our senses, and can thus never engage with the thing itself as it exists. Everything is a social construct, and as such all our perceptions of our surroundings are partially influenced by our construing knowledge out of them.

Obviously I'm not saying that without humans the Moon wouldn't exist, but that without humans knowledge about the Moon wouldn't exist, and that all knowledge is socially construed. Sure some things, such as weddings and countries are trivially social constructs, in that the thing exists only socially, where as the matter of things like the Moon or the Earth exist in some way without humans, but then again the whole category of the "Moon" or the "Earth" exist only in our minds. It's more useful to talk about trivial social constructs and causal social constructs. Countries, nations and weddings are the former, where as lakes, atoms and the Sun are the latter.

Edit:
Before someone wooshes in and accuses me of racism because I attacked the notion of race being "just a social construct", I would like to say that while I believe all the above, I would like to add that while I think that just claiming that race "is just a social construct" is a non-argument against the existence of race, I do not believe that races exist as meaningful categories.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

Ooh haven't seen this thread for a few weeks. Hello old friend.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

One of the first things I was taught in my anthropology classes in college is that we are all HUMAN. "Race" is merely a matter of culture and minor genetic variation that in no way prevents humans from one region of the planet from interbreeding with humans from other regions of the planet.

And it annoys me greatly when I'm asked on some survey or census form what "racial background" I have. I realize that they really want to know if I have First Nations status (a whole different set of rules can kick in if I answer "yes" to that), so why not just ask that, and if they want to know about recent(ish) immigrants/refugees, just ask if someone was born in Canada or elsewhere, and if the answer is elsewhere, ask where, and when they came to Canada.

race is not a matter of culture.

human beings are animals. animals can be classified taxonomically!

We are *NOT* a human race. Human is our GENUS. the scientific name for our GENUS is HOMO. we are all HOMOS.

Our species is HOMO SAPIENS SAPIENS. we are ALL of the same species, while we have different genetic ADMIXTURE (neanderthal, denisovan, etc.). we share our species with all other human beings, which is exemplified by us being able to breed.

Race would be a taxonomic classification below SPECIES. we have different breeds of dogs, for example, who help us divide a single SPECIES into even smaller groups.

race is NOT part of our taxonomy. genetically speaking, race does NOT make sense. ancestrally speaking race does NOT make sense and we are much better off looking at MITOCHONDRIAL DNA. race is NOT a good system of phenotypical classification, we are much better off using ethnicity to avoid useless generalizations (like for example micronesians being "black"). even as an arbitrary system of classification, race FAILS utterly, because the groups are not divided by coherent metrics.

I tried making this as easy as possible, to avoid further confusion. please don't come in here with any bs about *human race*, tribalism or anything else of that nature.

 

[H4run]

Ok, I phrased that weird, now that I think about it. Just saying your English is great, it just needs a... classier... target.

now I get what you meant, I just in oblivious of what you are implying so I try to follow up with something similar, as a follower of UFC I know which episode I can follow up with that lol

No Farm Boy you really think that I have something against you, actually when reading that particular comment of yours, despite not understanding any of it, I thought your one liner is cool

 

[red_elk]

If there are car, bicycle or boat races, why there can't be a human race? Weird.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

Oh go on then.

1. Does Race exist and has its reference/basis in reality?
2. Are we agreed that many variable can be racialized?
3. If any neutral, non race variable (despite race itself exist or not in reality) suffers racism and being treat like one, can it declare itself as a victim of racism despite it is not being a race?

1. It exists as a method of classification, and the things it classifies exist in reality. So yes basically. However, the actual categories are ill-defined and inconsistent so it's not really clear what anyone means by "race" without actually going into detail.
2. Dunno.
3. That would surely just be some other form of discrimination for which a different label would be more appropriate.

However if race does not exist can someone become racist? can someone inherit a behavior of discriminating something that is not exist to begin with?

That's a bit like asking "if God doesn't exist, can someone be religious*?", or I suppose more aptly "if witches don't exist, can people be burned as witches?"

*yes I realise not all religions are necessariliy centred around God(s).

 

[Farm Boy]

In some of the most backwards places of the world, like the USA or Brazil, racism has become institutionalized and is inscripted on your ID card.

Ok, where you getting this from? We've got a billion different IDs from Universities to 50 different state driver's licenses to 50 different general state IDs, but I've looked about as much as I'm willing and finding only North Carolina has a spot for "race" on it's driver's license*, added by request of a representative of the Lumbee tribe in the (90s?) and their DMVs don't actively ask the question so it's blank on something like ~99% of issued licenses. Most of the rest of the articles I'm seeing revolve around police recording of "race" during stops, theoretically in order to track biases, and most of the articles about that seem to revolve around making police ask instead of guess, because they put way too many people down as "white" when they're made to do it themselves and it messes up the numbers.

*willing to be directed to what I'm missing, like I said, just not finding it

 

[Broken_Erika]

Race does exist, but it's not nearly as cool as Super Race!

Spoiler :

 

[H4run]

1. Does Race exist and has its reference/basis in reality?

1. It exists as a method of classification, and the things it classifies exist in reality. So yes basically. However, the actual categories are ill-defined and inconsistent so it's not really clear what anyone means by "race" without actually going into detail.

Here you are stating that it exist because it serves a function, to classify peoples base on their race, but for what benefit? And how we actually determined that?

As you mentioned and I agree with you, the category are actually ill-defined, and it used interchangeably with ethnicity, which pretty much ruins everything, because it is silly to trace ethnicity base on genetic track. If you get a person with a mixed of British, Italian and Polynesian we still categorized them as European. But when we got a mixed between a British Father with a Somalian mother, that one drop of blood will categorized all their children as black.

You know, Obama is as white as his mother, but why we only consider him black?

Ethnicity always defined by the culture and language that people adopt, not by genetic. Everyone consider Napoleon to be French and Nietzsche to be German, if you define both of these characters by their decedent Nietzsche supposed to be Polish while Napoleon is from Corsica, because they embraced the culture and language of that nation. The racial term define from antecedent and genetic actually popularized (this is served as a fact not strawman) by the Nazi.

 

[Hrothbern]

If there are car, bicycle or boat races, why there can't be a human race? Weird.

Because humans are not the result of domestic breeding like horses and cattle
(Unless you believe the story of the Annunaki)

With dogs there is a relation to nobility privileges (hunting dogs), with falcons etc there is a relation with nobility privileges, and especially with horses it goes all the way by introducing words like pure bred, full blood, thoroughbred, which all starts in England (only English horses, Arabian horses and their crossbred).
I think it goes a bit far to connect "ras" (meaning fast (forward) in old Norse, Dutch) with the English "race" in the same meaning, with race for horses especially bred for horse racing. But the converging is nice.
(Ras in Dutch has the doublle meaning of fast and race)

Here a nice article that tries to explain the etymology of the word race, describing several candidates as being the root... whereby noted that etymology is often quite opaque...
https://blog.oup.com/2009/04/race-2/

The most significant breakthrough happened in 1959, when Gianfranco Contini published an article in which he showed that an old Italian author had used razza while translating the French noun haras “stud” (to anticipate the natural question: most probably, haras has nothing to do with the English verb harass). He concluded that the etymon of race was French haras, which lost its initial h (as always), and that Italian razza, far from being the etymon of race, was an adaptation of the French noun. I’ll skip the morphological complications that have been dealt with rather well and mention only one fact. A chance gloss in a translated text would not have gone far enough to explain a swift adoption of race by the French (after all, it could have been a case of folk etymology, almost a pun, with the French author being seduced by the similarity of the two forms), but subsequent research showed how race ~ razza progressed in Italian and French, and there is no reason to doubt its results. All the pieces of the puzzle suddenly fell into place. It could have been expected that race would emerge not as a bookish creation but as a term of cattle or horse breeding (whatever the etymology of haras may be) and that it would be applied to humans later. Indeed, in Dante’s Italy razza was used only about animals; for people the word schiatta existed. Both Italian schiatta “stock, descent, lineage” (to say nothing of razza) and French haras “stud” have continued into the present (compare di nobile schiatta “of noble descent”). As we have seen, the true connection had been suspected early enough: Arabic ra’s, Basque arraza, and Spitzer’s reference to chivalry and horsemanship should not be overlooked, but in all those theories horses, falcons, and so forth played an accidental role, whereas they should have been the focus of the investigation.

 

[H4run]

2. Are we agreed that many variable can be racialized?

2. Dunno.

You don't know, that's mean perhaps you think the scenario is entirely possible, but you don't know if such scenario can happened, am I right?

3. If any neutral, non race variable (despite race itself exist or not in reality) suffers racism and being treat like one, can it declare itself as a victim of racism despite it is not being a race?

3. That would surely just be some other form of discrimination for which a different label would be more appropriate.

If the variable suffers racism, instead of focusing more on what the victim suffers, why we instead focus on who are the victim? Are they proper victim of racism or they cannot be classified as such? even though what they suffer is definitely racism?

 

[EgonSpengler]

I usually prefer the term 'ethnicity' to 'race', but sometimes that's not even clear enough. Sometimes I consciously use the term 'apparent ethnicity' or 'evident ethnicity' - I should probably use it more than I do - because what's often being talked about is a person's appearance. For example, there are lots of people from places like Mexico and Argentina who are ethnically European, and appear so to the eye. It seems to me that a person's appearance is usually what's being talked about when we call someone 'White', 'Black', 'Asian' or whatever, and it serves that purpose. They may also carry some baggage about the person's life and experience that may or may not be correct.

Random anecdote about apparent ethnicity: On the bus one day, two teenagers were sitting and chatting. They looked typically Latino, to my eye, maybe Puerto Rican or Dominican (there are a lot of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans around here). Sitting nearby was a woman, blonde, blue-eyed, very pretty - virtually the picture of your Scandinavian-American stereotype, in a paramedic's uniform. She was cute and the two guys started talking about her, in Spanish. She started laughing. It turned out she was from Caracas, and Spanish was her first language. The two guys blushed beet red and everybody had a laugh. Fortunately, the two kids were only talking about how good-looking she was, and didn't say anything offensive (I think - I couldn't follow, but she didn't seem angry, just amused), but I wondered how often Latinx people spoke Spanish around her carelessly, assuming that the gringa won't understand them.

You can't just shrug off a thing by saying it's "just a social construct, bro".

I'm not sure I follow you all the way to trees and lakes as social constructs, but I agree with your basic idea: Because a thing is a social construct doesn't mean it's not "real."

 

[Manfred Belheim]

Here you are stating that it exist because it serves as a function, to classify peoples base on their race, but for what benefit? And how actually we determined that?

How we determined what? The benefit? There doesn't have to be a benefit.

If you get a person with a mixed of British, Italian and Polynesian we still categorized them as European. But when we got a mixed between a British Father with a Somalian mother, that one drop of blood will categorized all their children as black.

Do "we"? Wouldn't it depend how much Polynesian "blood" is in the first person? The latter statement is only true if you're talking about someone holding to the "one drop" rule, it's not a general truth. Also surely 50% is more than "one drop" too?!

You know, Obama is as white as his mother, but why we only consider him black?

Maybe stop saying "we"? Having said that, it should be pretty obvious why a majority white country would collectively see a mixed person as being "the other", even if that other is Polynesian. I would guess in Nigeria (for example) he might be seen as white. Maybe he isn't, I don't know, but you can see how that could be the case.

But it's weird how you agree that the categories are ill-defined but then follow that up with two sweeping statements about how everybody thinks about race the same way.

You don't know, that's mean perhaps you think the scenario is entirely possible, but you don't know if such scenario can happened, am I right?

No I just meant that I don't really know what the question is asking.

If the variable suffers racism, instead of focusing more on what the victim suffers, why we instead focus on who are the victim? Are they proper victim of racism or they cannot be classified as such? even though what they suffer is definitely racism?

And I don't understand what you're saying here either I'm afraid. But for example if the variable is "being homosexual", and homosexuals are treated as a second-class group of "the other", then that is discrimination obviously, but it doesn't really make sense to call it "racism" since... being gay isn't a race (and yes I know I know, "race doesn't exist", "anything can be racialised", etc etc.)

 

[Valka D'Ur]

race is not a matter of culture.

human beings are animals. animals can be classified taxonomically!

We are *NOT* a human race. Human is our GENUS. the scientific name for our GENUS is HOMO. we are all HOMOS.

Our species is HOMO SAPIENS SAPIENS. we are ALL of the same species, while we have different genetic ADMIXTURE (neanderthal, denisovan, etc.). we share our species with all other human beings, which is exemplified by us being able to breed.

Race would be a taxonomic classification below SPECIES. we have different breeds of dogs, for example, who help us divide a single SPECIES into even smaller groups.

race is NOT part of our taxonomy. genetically speaking, race does NOT make sense. ancestrally speaking race does NOT make sense and we are much better off looking at MITOCHONDRIAL DNA. race is NOT a good system of phenotypical classification, we are much better off using ethnicity to avoid useless generalizations (like for example micronesians being "black"). even as an arbitrary system of classification, race FAILS utterly, because the groups are not divided by coherent metrics.

I tried making this as easy as possible, to avoid further confusion. please don't come in here with any bs about *human race*, tribalism or anything else of that nature.

ARE YOU SURE YOUR FONT IS LARGE ENOUGH AND OBNOXIOUS ENOUGH? GOT ENOUGH PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE SMILEYS?
Race is a matter of cultures when cultures are brought into it by people who are either genuinely ignorant or intentionally ignorant. Personally I have no use for it, but many people do. So don't yell at me, 'k?

I am perfectly aware that humans are animals. That's another thing we were told from the get-go in anthropology.

 

[H4run]

How we determined what?

How we determined which people belong to which race obviously

There doesn't have to be a benefit.

If there are no benefit then why the classification even required? as it only serves negative, one of it it breeds racism, obviously the term racism itself derived from the concept of race. If there are no benefit, should we just get rid of it?

Wouldn't it depend how much Polynesian "blood" is in the first person?

I know a person who mixed white Polynesian who are more considered as white than that of Polynesian, not because of specific measurable genetic rule, but more into the observable complexion, the concept is something pure observation based not base on clear measurement.

Also surely 50% is more than "one drop" too?!

What measure the one drop btw? I just know the one drop rule is a rule that stated a single drop of "black blood" makes a person a black, this is not about more or less than one drop, it is more about the mixture of blood.

Maybe stop saying "we"?

I'm sorry I can't limit myself like that. I used it as a general statement for the word like people in general, if you think that's not correct and I'm wrong about it, you can just make an objection about it

But it's weird how you agree that the categories are ill-defined but then follow that up with two sweeping statements about how everybody thinks about race the same way.

Race as something consensual doesn't means that it is something that poorly defined. When people look after a group of black people and categorized them as African, it doesn't mean race is a well defined category. ugh

 

[Lexicus]

The racial term define from antecedent and genetic actually popularized (this is served as a fact not strawman) by the Nazi.

Really, closer to the opposite is true. A view of race based on heredity was quite popular throughout the Western world and the Nazis showed everyone exactly what it meant. Now as @yung.carl.jung points out racial discourse is almost always couched in terms of "culture" because openly talking about biological race is frowned upon in most circles.

Having said that, it should be pretty obvious why a majority white country would collectively see a mixed person as being "the other",

It is indeed quite obvious: because it meant that the offspring of slave women raped by the master would be slaves as well.

 

[H4run]

ARE YOU SURE YOUR FONT IS LARGE ENOUGH AND OBNOXIOUS ENOUGH? GOT ENOUGH PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE SMILEYS?
Race is a matter of cultures when cultures are brought into it by people who are either genuinely ignorant or intentionally ignorant. Personally I have no use for it, but many people do. So don't yell at me, 'k?

I am perfectly aware that humans are animals. That's another thing we were told from the get-go in anthropology.

Valka really I don't think he meant to yell at you really, it is just his style, he do it all the time when he think he find something really interesting to say. I really hope you can overlook this

 

[brennan]

race is not...

I'll snip this for brevity.

People want to insist that race does not exist simply because the term and associated theories about race have been historically used to justify various crimes.

But it makes just as much sense as any other classification system: any criticism anyone can level at race as a concept can equally well be levelled at the term 'genus' or 'family', or at taxons in other schema such as cladistics, or indeed whole schema themselves.

Race is little more than sets of physical and/or cultural traits associated with groups of people. Different people use different distinctions but the principle remains. These things are easily observed and hence 'real'. People for literally thousands of years have distinguished between the races of their neighbours, the idea this is all a fantasy is silly and motivated only by political correctness.

It is worth noting that the people most likely to reject notions of race on CFC are also highly likely to make disparaging comments about 'white' people. Showing that they know perfectly well just how simple it is to classify people into races.

 

[BornInCantaloup]

*willing to be directed to what I'm missing, like I said, just not finding it

I'm not afraid of gross exagerations, when it suits me.

 

[Senethro]

I'll snip this for brevity.

People want to insist that race does not exist simply because the term and associated theories about race have been historically used to justify various crimes.

But it makes just as much sense as any other classification system: any criticism anyone can level at race as a concept can equally well be levelled at the term 'genus' or 'family', or at taxons in other schema such as cladistics, or indeed whole schema themselves.

Race is little more than sets of physical and/or cultural traits associated with groups of people. Different people use different distinctions but the principle remains. These things are easily observed and hence 'real'. People for literally thousands of years have distinguished between the races of their neighbours, the idea this is all a fantasy is silly and motivated only by political correctness.

It is worth noting that the people most likely to reject notions of race on CFC are also highly likely to make disparaging comments about 'white' people. Showing that they know perfectly well just how simple it is to classify people into races.

This is wrong and you're just trying to be contrarian. Genus and family (screw cladistics) are (ideally) based on descent while race is just rubbish.