Let's keep in mind what your actual claim throughout this post is supposed to be: that race is a social construct with no biological basis. It is not "some races have more genetic variation than others" or "you can draw the lines a little differently if you wanted to", or "look I can quote trivia!". If a point you make does not facilitate this claim, it is irrelevant.
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Indeed, before we start I want to give a simple thought experiments that is my litmus test for whether race isn't socially constructed by my definition of the word.
If you fed to a really capable machine learning program a bunch of data on individuals' typical racial classifications, and asked it to determine a set of practical actions that are as genetically determined as possible, like which medicine to describe or how tall the sample is likely to be on average, would the race variable encode any useful information to improve its predictive power? Would the program even bother to use it?
The answer is, obviously yes.
Here's a more case specific one:
If you had someone's genome and, in a double blind test, had to predict which race they identified with, would you be able to predict it at a fairly reliable rate? The answer is obviously yes, as we can do these genetic tests all the time. We can test for ancestry and this is highly correlated to what race they happen to identify with.
If it were just a "social construct", it would not have predictive power even in areas that aren't socially constructed. It's not just skin color.
Originally posted by The Lost
The way science groups races is not genetically based, to be fair. "Race" is not
even accepted within biological codes of nomenclature. If we go down the genetic route, a majority of races would classify as African, considering Africa is the continent with the most genetic diversity on our planet. This isn't done because races are grouped by visible traits rather than genetic. This why all Africans are grouped into a single race (they're black).
Totally irrelevant filler. All you're establishing is that the racial groups each encapsulate an uneven range of genetic variance. That different groups capture a different sample space of possibilities doesn't invalidate the idea that there are biological differences between them. And here we have the first example of the sophistry rampant throughout your post: you pick at "issues" with the classification scheme without explaining how they prove it was "socially constructed".
You are, furthermore, assuming that the only valid criteria for categorizing people is direct gene-level variance, when the relevant consequences are the PHENOTYPIC EXPRESSIONS. (that would include behavioral traits in this context) What's wrong with categorizing by phenotype, again? I don't care if this is the best way to do it from the standpoint of genetics because "it's not the best possible categorization" does not mean "it is a social construct".
Now with regards to phenotypic expression, it is not the case that black populations have greater variances in measurable traits than most other ones. So your claim is merely that we could employ a different metric if we wanted to, not that it is socially constructed.
Even "Jew" and "Arab" are used as racial terms but there is no substantial genetic difference when you compare a majority of Israeli Jews and Palestinians. Yet, with the two former words, they are used as racial terms when it's not at all genetically descriptive.
There are clear phenotypic differences between most Jews and most caucasians.
The problem with terminology is that it is seemingly far too generalizing to be useful as it corresponds to skin pigmentation and little else.
Nonsense. Different racial groups have different propensities to various diseases, and different distributions of height, weight, bone structure, etc.
What's more, the fact that pigmentations in western Europe, Africa, Asia, etc. were, up until very recently, almost uniformly their respective stereotypical colors is a pretty obvious sign that there was not significant breeding between the typically designated racial groups (white, black, Asian, etc.) until only briefly in the timeframe of homo sapiens. And no, case specific exceptions don't disprove the rule. I don't know how this could've even been a question that East Asians and Caucasians weren't breeding with each other in large quantities tens of thousands of years ago when there isn't evidence that they knew of each other's existence until the late bronze / classical era.
And now, repeat with me again: that there is a lot of IN-GROUP variation has nothing to do with whether there is BETWEEN-GROUP variation.
It's altered so much historically, it has seemingly lost any meaningful significance when used biologically. "Race", as a term, carries a lot of weight and served some uses as informal terminology within scientific community but it's purely pragmatic. It usually is used by scientists where specificity is not a necessity (broad group studies, surveys, and the like).
Concession accepted, as it is only ever pragmatic in Science because there are differences in the distribution of biological traits between races.
When discussing differences between groups of people with separate geographical ancestries, it seems "ethnicity" would be a more fitting terminology, as "race" (especially in the context of modern scientific study) is only formal in social sciences. It has a really weak grip in modern biology, which is where most people lose their footing when trying to establish race beyond the realm of social construction. It's been phased out, in terms of of describing phenotypical traits with any concrete formality and meaning. Race has no taxonomic importance any longer within biology, is the long and short of it.
So the one actual argument you make in this paragraph that isn't just a restatement of your conclusion is that we should be using ethnicity instead. Ethnicity can be useful too, but:
1. This isn't mutually exclusive from using race since you admit that it's useful in certain contexts.
2. Ethnicity suffers even more from your complaints about migration and intermixing, given that different ethnicities are far more likely to be fluid between one another than different races, which have only been fluid between one another in recent history.
The consensus of scholars and scientists is that race is socially constructed, non-intrinsic to human beings. The biological application of it, and it's gravitas, is antiquated.I can actually pretty much guarantee that, as much as you'd accuse "liberals" or others for causing discussions about race to be hamstrung by the sheer tautological distractions of the term "race" and where it fits as a social construct, likely anyone with even intermediate knowledge of sciences where the term is commonly used will tell you it simply doesn't apply where you'd like it to. Again, you'd be better off using "ethnicity."
To digress only for a moment, it's usually also why I dismiss people who propose or argue for scientific racism (A.K.A. "race realism"😉 because I don't have any room to debate beliefs that have been proven to be empirically false. Classifying people of varying and different genotypes/phenotypes into distinct races is (and I use this term with literal certainty) unscientific. The body of work surrounding scientific racism contains too many pseudoscientific disciplines to be even remotely taken seriously.
So here we get to your claim that scientific racism is pseudoscience. Of course, you have yet to give a cogent definition of what "scientific racism" actually is, in your eyes, so I'll ask for it now.
If it's something idiotic like "white people are evolutionarily superior to black people and black people are just like apes", then sure, congrats. If it's something like "there are average group differences between racial groups" though and this is somehow pseudoscience despite all of modern medicine saying otherwise, then I'm going to destroy your case pretty eagerly.
To conclude and go back to my recommendation of ethnicity being a preferable nomenclative alternate to use, the previous POTUS (Obama) is a black person in North America who's biracial in South Africa and the Caribbean and potentially white in some places within Latin America. Seeing as there seems to be a clear disparity in what is considered "black", wouldn't that imply that race, as opposed to ethnicity, has an incredibly strong cultural basis? I mean, among the other things I've mentioned, of course.
Come up with a clear criteria for determining ethnicity then.