As someone who hasn’t always been able to keep up with the longer threads, thank you. Talk about a picture worth a thousand words!
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There is a reason I have this bookmarked:
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You have suffered from racism, certainly. You have suffered from people treating you differently because they think you are biologically different, certainly. Of course that’s all so. But they were deluded. As you say, you are not biologically different from anyone else in a way that makes you a different physical race. It’s just not the case. Your lived experience of being treated like a race apart is very real - and it was inflicted on you by deluded people.
Again, it’s like flat earthers. They sincerely hold their beliefs, they truly think the earth is flat - and they are wrong. Racists sincerely hold their beliefs, they truly think that people can be meaningfully separated into races - and they are wrong.
Your experience is real - way too real. I would never deny that you have had all of your life’s experiences. My point is that those who have mistreated you did so out of a delusion. And their delusion, while wrong, is a real delusion that they believe is true. But they have been busted - there’s a mountain of proof out there that the theory of race is bogus.
And I don’t believe that you want to insist that their delusion is real - so I’m puzzled, because you say race isn’t biologically innate and then you insist that races are real. Yes, we’re all put into one or another racial category when people meet us, because we’re part of this culture and were trained to do that automatically. But do we have to keep pretending that race is a valid way to sort people? No, we don’t.
Races aren’t even the same everywhere - they change from country to country. A Dominican friend is treated like he’s black in New York, but treated like he’s white in Santo Domingo. A very dark South Asian friend is called a Person of Color in the U.S. and Black in the U.K. There is no global agreement on what racial category applies to what person, because the different sets of definitions are all social constructs, as you clearly say.
When people here talk about white people, they almost always mean Americans of European decent, and frequently they mean the white supremacists among them. They’re talking about a cultural group, they don’t really mean the Danes or the Finns, but they’re using racialist language, which is not clear. When people talk about black people here they usually mean African Americans, and they sometimes mean a subset of African Americans. They’re talking about a cultural group, they don’t really mean Malians or Ethiopians, but they’re using racialist language, which is not clear.
If they say “of course using black and white is just shorthand for cultural groups” - ask them about very different cultural groups which happen to fall into one of those categories of the theory of race. They will say that Finns are white and Ethiopians are black - because no one using racial terms can fully disengage from the racial theory behind those terms, even when they insist that they only use the terms for cultural differences.
So my words aren’t careless at all when I say that we have to start dropping race and racial terms as a way of evaluating and describing other people in favor of treating them like individual humans, with all of the skills and experience that individual human has. Yes, we see race based on all the signals we’ve been trained up in - we’ll never lose that, at this point. But we don’t have to continue supporting those who, in their delusion, think that races are biological or useful.
And yes, there are cultural groups like African Americans who have also been treated (very badly) as a racial group. Saying that racial groups are made-up does not mean that a person’s experience as an African American is in any way denied. It just says that being African American is a cultural identification. Which is very real. Untangling ourselves from the language of race is very difficult, it has twined itself into the language - we have to pull it back out.
In all the thousands of years of Egyptian history before the modern era, people of all colors and kinds came through Egypt, visited it, lived in it, and ruled it - and there’s no known record of ancient Egyptians caring at all about what we call race. It didn’t enter their minds. They did not sort people that way, into dark and light. They saw it, but it did not mean what it means to us, they didn’t have races. They would not understand all the misery we’ve caused in our culture by clinging to the theory of race. So there are excellent examples of living peacefully without races - but it will be very hard getting there, ourselves.
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Everyone suffers from racism in that it diminishes our society, but in many fine grained ways I’ve benefited from it insofar as I haven’t suffered most of the injustices suffered by POC and in the instances I have I’ve been more protected from them by my privilege.
Please do not assume I was referring to myself.
Nazis are deluded. Nazi Germany was very very real and tens of millions died because it was real.
Yes, race is a real social construct effecting the lives of billions. That distinction, to borrow an expression from @anon61221983, isn’t rocket surgery.
Of course not. We have to acknowledge that it’s a real social construct effecting billions now and throughout human history and we can’t “jettison” human history; we can address it and dismantle the injustices wrought by those using race, both those who delusionally believed it biological and those who didn’t know or care if it was biological.
The zeitgeist of whiteness shifts over time.
Wypipo ≠ white supremacists.
I disagree. Boing Boing enjoys an international readership and commentariat.
You said there’s no such thing as race. That’s harmful, hence careless, privileged language used almost exclusively by those with white privilege. I seek to appeal to your empathy to understand why.
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I think the fact that “race” is a social construct is one of the more hopeful ideas in this whole discussion. Because if something is a social construct, then it has been created by human action, is sustained by human action and can be broken up and abolished by human action. It isn’t an eternal, monolithic fact of nature, it’s mutable,
Now it’s accurate to say that you can’t just personally abolish race. People are still going to react to you in ways that belie their internal thoughts and prejudices. But these categories are ultimately viruses of the mind.
In order to dismantle racism, we’re also going to have to dismantle race itself. Now, since race is purely a construct of human categorisation, this is possible, even though underlying differences in humans will still of course exist. I always liken it to eye colour or blood type- natural variations in humanity, but we don’t construct huge categories around them.This end-state has to be our goal, but it’s fairly far off, sadly.
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This is part of why I chose the daycare my daughter goes to. Both the staff and kids are very diverse. Studies have shown infants have implicit bias against people who look different from family but that bias does not need to continue. I wanted my child to see kindness and love in all kinds of faces. I think I benefited from spending my elementary years in a school that was mostly asian (specifically Filipino).
Having white only spaces, particularly for the very young, is bad.
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No, everyone who understands how genetics works, and who has looked at whether or not genetics supports race, agrees that there is no such thing as race. And geneticists are not all “white” by any means. You are imposing a racialist definition of humans onto an argument to move away from the theory of race. Your logic is pretty confused.
When I say that racial definitions are bogus, I’m not saying they don’t exist. I’m just saying that they are bogus, and we should stop using them to evaluate other people’s worth.
And you are confused about what “white privilege” means, too, apparently. I get granted no white privilege on Boing Boing, certainly. And my claiming that the whole theory of race has been debunked is not “privileged language”. It’s just fact, with a mountain of supporting evidence.
Other way around. If we want race to become a thing of the past, we have to dismantle racism. If we attempt to dismantle race while racism exists, we will not only fail, we will benefit racism.
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The two have to be simultaneous. You can’t have the concept of race in the absence of racism, and you can’t have racism in the absence of a concept of race.
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Racism is just a set of beliefs. Race itself is a social construct based on those racist beliefs. If you dismantle the use of racial categories to evaluate other people, you dismantle race and racism simultaneously. They are not separate.
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No, we agree that race is a social construct without biological basis. We do not agree that there is no such thing as race.
And yet:
Absolutely.
Your “supporting evidence” that saying “there’s no such thing as race” isn’t harmful contradicts others’ lived experiences, as well as history past and present.
Correct.
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My last attempt at this - yes, people believe that races are real, and treat people differently based on their perceived race. But if you study actual humans, and match the racial definitions against actual people, you find that humanity does not fit the theory of race. So the definitions are real definitions - but they are bogus.
When you look at humanity without assumptions, you can’t find the races and all the racial inequalities and differences described by the theory of race. Anthropology, sociology, biology in general and genetics in particular do not support the theory of race in any way.
Sociologists failing to acknowledged the existence of a social construct aren’t very observant sociologists, but I suspect most trained sociologists don’t commit that error.
No one here is making the racist argument that race is innate, biologically or otherwise. In fact, that would be an efficient way to get flagged and hopefully banned from this forum, as racism is against the forum guidelines.
The only thing I’m telling you is that saying “there’s no such thing as race” supports racism, and thus is harmful. And that’s why you received push-back for it before I entered the discussion. It’s a common fallacy almost exclusive to those with white privilege, which POC have been pushing back against for generations.
That’s it. If you can’t or won’t accept that, then I sincerely wish you a pleasant weekend.
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Agreed. If there’s to be any redress for past injustice, how would that work if the targets of injustice suddenly became unidentifiable? It reminds me of what happened when the definition of minority was changed (in government programs) to include women.
I think it’s possible to have that concept (to acknowledge differences) while eliminating racism. I’m having a hard time imagining this society without the concepts of race, gender, or both.
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Certainly, and the really important thing is that we’re acknowledging the racial categories into which racism sorts people. There’s no contradiction between doing that and recognizing that those categories are an unjust social construction we want to dismantle. But denying them doesn’t dismantle them, it ignores them. Which is why marginalized people get frustrated when those who have the privilege to do so say there’s no such thing as race. Because of course there is and it’s created and perpetuated by racism and marginalized people have been suffering the oppression of it throughout human history.
Conceptually I agree with @Edgar_Carpenter, but linguistically I see how saying there’s no such thing as race hurts people and that’s why I won’t do it. Words matter.
I think we can, if we want to and are willing to do the hard work, build a society where race is a historical concept. But we can’t just wave it away by saying there’s no such thing. For a whole lot of people there definitely is such a thing and they directly unjustly suffer for it, and it diminishes us all.
I can imagine a society where gender is a personal choice and not a role foisted upon people.
But yeah, this stuff is going to take a lot of hard work.
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Agreed.
you have to understand: race relations – which have gotten worse – are a direct response to having a black president.
Cult45 is accelerant for the fire. They know it. They work it.
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Thanks. coming from you, that means the world.
On point.
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Class also has zero genetic basis. Does class exist?
If we abolished the concept of class from public discourse, who would benefit? Those currently defined as higher class, or those as lower class?
Calls to dispense with the concepts of class and race tend to come from nearer top of their hierarchies, because those concepts serve to describe and highlight their privilege. Without them, it is easier to handwave away uncomfortable facts such as the better health outcomes of the upper and middle classes, or the lower rates of death by police among white people.
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In this conversation, isn’t it clear that the people who are calling for an end to race are doing so in the same way that Marx described the end of class in a future society- by working to make it an irrelevant social relationship, not denying its current form.
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I certainly didn’t mean to question your bona fides in that regard, so apologies if it came across like that. You’re not denying the existence of race (as a social construct), and you’re not arguing that racism can be ended by simply wishing the concept of race away.
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