- never signed up for anything like this,
- never donated to or signed up for emails from the DNC, et al.,
- political texts like this come all the time, and
- I hesitate to reply “stop” because I don’t want them to know this is a live number (is my instinct here outdated/inapplicable?)
Well, words can mean whatever you want, but usually race refers to the discrete-ish social categories that have been constructed based roughly on specific phenotypes. For example Black people were a discrete legal category for most of America’s history, and were nominally 3/5 of a person and treated as much less. Now, they have equal legal rights on paper, but the category remains informally.
That’s an academic ivory tower definition that they invented and no one else uses. Even the blatant racists who sorted races into these social categories did so based on physical appearance. You didn’t see any dark skin people allowed to use facilities that said “whites only”.
It’s based on physical appearance, which is based on phenotype.
That’s what I said!
THAT is not a race. That is treatment of a race. That is 100% a social construct.
Race itself is a real biological thing that exists. Not a pure social construct.
Stop conflating them.
I really don’t think most people use this definition. Like, would you say “what race are you” is a grammatically incorrect question, then? And what about “hispanic” as a racial descriptor? How do you be hispanic-er than someone else?
No? That question is totally in line with the definition of race I gave.
The census says “hispanic” is an ethnicity rather than a race. I disagree; I think that’s splitting hairs.
I’m 1/4 Hispanic. My mom was half Hispanic (Mexican mother, European father…not saying the country = race before you get your panties in a twist, it’s just a fucking shorthand, everyone knows that most Mexicans are Hispanic and most Europeans are not). My mom is more Hispanic than me. Fairly simple concept.
Right, so what’s the Hispanic phenotype? As far as anyone can tell it’s a language, which isn’t a phenotype, and until someone brown opens their mouth they could just as easily be an Arab or a particularly tawny Italian. Or are Arabs Hispanic, too?
…if all brown people look the same to you, you might need to start meeting more people from different races.
Hmm. How good is your eye for heritage? Can you pick apart Telugu from Hindi, for example? Mongol from Chinese?
It’s a total continuum so there is no perfect, but mine might be relatively bad, that’s true. I have an uncle with mixed ancestry, and I didn’t pick up on it until someone told me, lol.
Re-edit: Aaand federation broke. My apologies to this user for the misaimed accusation. I’ve apologised in private messages, which hopefully go through normally.
Phenotypically? Yes, they’re very close. The whole Mediterranean is which shouldn’t be terribly surprising. I guess the reason USians use “Hispanic” and not “Greek” is because Mexico speaks Spanish.
The reason Europeans can reliably tell Sicilians and Arabs apart is not because of phenotype, but because Arabs tend to look like they visit the barber five times a day. Probably because they do.
Yeah, but to be a phenotype, and not just a social construct based partially on a phenotype, it has to go the other way. If having the phenotype isn’t enough on it’s own to guarantee a race, it’s not just about phenotypes. Kind of like how having wheels doesn’t make a suitcase a car.
(Also, FWIW Spaniards are mostly pale-skinned - I know because I’ve actually been there. The brown in Latin America comes from admixture with other local and imported populations)