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.
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.Racism is essentially a social construct to divide people
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.
Ok, I phrased that weird, now that I think about it. Just saying your English is great, it just needs a... classier... target.
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?
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?
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.
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.
If there are car, bicycle or boat races, why there can't be a human race? Weird.
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.
2. Are we agreed that many variable can be racialized?
2. Dunno.
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.
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."You can't just shrug off a thing by saying it's "just a social construct, bro".
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?
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?
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?
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?
ARE YOU SURE YOUR FONT IS LARGE ENOUGH AND OBNOXIOUS ENOUGH? GOT ENOUGH PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE SMILEYS?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.
How we determined what?
There doesn't have to be a benefit.
Wouldn't it depend how much Polynesian "blood" is in the first person?
Also surely 50% is more than "one drop" too?!
Maybe stop saying "we"?
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.
The racial term define from antecedent and genetic actually popularized (this is served as a fact not strawman) by the Nazi.
Having said that, it should be pretty obvious why a majority white country would collectively see a mixed person as being "the other",
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.
I'll snip this for brevity.race is not...
I'm not afraid of gross exagerations, when it suits me.*willing to be directed to what I'm missing, like I said, just not finding it