Edit: this question has been answered now. Thank you to everyone who took the time to help me understand.
the premise that race is not a natural, biologically grounded feature of physically distinct subgroups of human beings but a socially constructed (culturally invented) category that is used to oppress and exploit people of colour.
Okay… But we can take a DNA test and get our ancestry, telling us what percentage of what races make up our overall ethnicity. So how is race a social construct and not a biological feature, when we have a scientific method to determine our race? This part of the philosophy has been bothering me ever since I read it, and I’ve been hesitant to ask because of how offensive people get when you question this system.
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Responding so I can find this again since Lemmy won’t show me my own posts.
what
Everyone has different DNA and nobody refutes that, but the lines at which race are defined are completly arbitrary. Are you considered black if you have 50% sub Saharan African DNA? Most would say yes. Are you black at 25%? How about at 5 or 10%? The slew of different answers is a clue that race is just a social construct borne of perception rather than hard fact.
Similarly, a lot of groups that are considered “white” today would not have been in the slightest if you were to go back 100+ years. The Irish, Italians, Greeks, among others were not considered white until more recently than you might believe.
Thats the crux of it, race is only truly defined by these arbitrary lines in the sand that people draw, and these lines are different for different groups and individuals. Race is only real because people perceive it to be. We could divide up society based on hair color or if your ear lobes hang or are directly connected to your head and it would make just as much sense, which is to say not much.
I’ve heard it said that the average Englishman and the average Indian are more genetically similar than two random Englishmen, too.
In other words, if that’s true, there are some general trends in genetic differences between “races”, those trends are, overall, far smaller and less significant than the random differences that pop up by chance within a single race.
Ah, so it’s the race, like what you would put on a government form that they’re disputing, not the fact that we all have ethnicities which make up our person. I guess that makes sense, although it seems like splitting hairs to me. Nationality and ethnicity are already two different concepts. I suppose “race” in this context would be like you said, saying someone is “white” as opposed to saying they’re of English ethnicity. Is that right?
CRT focuses on how this arbitrary idea of race shapes how people are treated, especially on a societal scale. We divide people by wealth, by where they’re born, what gender they are, etc. All of these things affect how people are treated. I find most of the pushback is because some white people feel attacked when someone points to the fact that whiteness is a status.
The social construct of race is which features we consider important enough by which to categorise people. So in the USA, this is white, black, asian or hispanic. Maybe native. Those categorisations are based on real observable traits, but we could choose other categorisations. It notably groups together traits which we can easily distinguish and pull out as subdivisions, such as south-east Asians.
We could redraw these groupings: we could for example together north Africans, middle-easterners and Indians, separating out those from southern and central Africa. We could separate Europeans so that Scandinavians, Finns and Slavs are together, separately from western and southern Europeans.
Not_Rick has a great answer but I will add something. Your question about the quote you posted is based on a disagreement about what race is, between you and social scientists. The phrase “we can take a DNA test and get our ancestry, telling us what percentage of what races make up our overall ethnicity” already assumes that genetics = race, end of story. But this is an unfounded assumption. All the test can tell is our genetics. Not_Rick offered some good examples for the counterpoint, that genetics ≠ race. If you disagree with that basic premise then you will always be bothered by modern theories on the subject such as CRT.
Once you see that race clearly is not just genetics, you can start asking what it truly is and what things do determine one’s race. These are much more interesting questions. For example, a new question might be ‘what has been the historical relationship between ethnicity and “being white” in the US’? And let’s not even start on the ridiculousness that is the census form.
Weird. My DNA test didn’t tell me I am X% white, Y% black, Z% Native American. It told me my DNA was a majority match for people that hailed from regions A, B, and C.
Are you sure you know how ancestry DNA tests work?
The DNA test is just testing for genes which tend to be in certain groups - but that’s not necessarily the case - and the lines they draw between groups are arbitrary.
Your question has nothing to do with CRT, but with science (I am very critical to CRT if you want to know).
There is a scientific method to classify human beings by genetics. You can group by closeness of genetic code. When you do this you will arrive something similar to ethnicity NOT to race. Race classification is akin classification by eye color, while has some relationship to genetics - it has very little relationship and the genetic code similarities between two of ethnic groups, one has white skin, another have black skin, may be significantly larger than genetics similarity between two groups with black skin. This is why it is unscientific classification.
There isn’t even agreement on what the word means. When I was little my science book defined it as two individual are the same race if they can have offspring together. By that rule all humans are the same race.
If you start from false premises, it’s only logical you’ll end with the confused incomprehensible racist rant that is this post.
What is the false premise in your eyes? How is asking how race is a man made concept when there’s scientific methods to determine our race, racist?
Because there are, categorically, no biological evidence or basis to races in human genetics. Your premise is false and your post is racist bait. The scientific method does not support your racism.
Your accusations and refusal to actually explain anything in a meaningful way is an example of why people who don’t fully understand a new concept outright reject it, instead of discussing it more until they reach an understanding. But I have other meaningful responses that are actually helpful. Good day.
