sarker

It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing

0 followers follows 0 users joined 2022 September 05 16:50:08 UTC

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sarker It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing 15d ago

Originally you said race doesn't cleave reality at the joints. Even if there's no objectively correct size of the category, it doesn't prove what you originally said. If there's a lot of joints, one person can cleave slightly to the left of how another would do it, and they'd both cleave at the joints.

This is an extremely pedantic point to make, but sure, I can agree that the metaphor I chose was perhaps not totally correct.

The broader point I made was that there isn't one correct way to define "white" (which you seem to agree with) and therefore who is white and who isn't is socially constructed.

This is before getting into cultures that conceive of race very differently from anglos, like the Latinos who invented about thirty races for different admixtures of black, white and native, or the Romans who (from what i can remember from my reading) did not have a notion of white/nonwhite and instead considered themselves quite different from the various peoples they conquered, even their next door neighbors the Etruscans, who did they not grant citizenship to until hundreds of years after the conquest.

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sarker It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing 15d ago

Okay, I guess I should have known that there are people making that claim. However, I'm not trying to steelman it because I think it's dumb.

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sarker It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing 15d ago

Once you sort groups by similarity, you can draw a rough boundry around them. You can call that category "white" or you can call it "blorgoschmorg" but it will consist mostly of the same people, especially if you ask the sorters to draw boundaries of the same size.

The size of the boundary is exactly what makes it socially constructed.

If you put them next to each other, quite possibly so. Especially relative to other groups.

If you get someone to put two groups close to each other, they'll think of them as close to each other? Is that the claim here?

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sarker It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing 15d ago

what content is the sentence "color is socially constructed" even carrying.

That the assortment of bands of the electromagnetic spectrum into color words is socially constructed.

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sarker It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing 15d ago

Nobody is saying that the similarity of colors to each other is socially constructed (or at least I've never heard this claim).

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sarker It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing 15d ago

The precedence defense is confusing considering how many of these cases contradict each other.

If you ask people to sort ethnic groups by how closely related they are to each other, I'm pretty sure it will match the genetic clustering.

Your claim is that "white" is an objective category, not that people's perceptions of ethnic group closeness matches reality (which I find highly dubious to begin with, do you think people think of e.g. native Americans as related to Siberians?)

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sarker It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing 15d ago

I haven't encountered the notion that Indians are an edge case before.

that doesn't mean that they aren't basically capturing real and useful information and describing somewhat natural categories.

Neither is calling it socially constructed. Colors are a great example - the set of colors in English is totally arbitrary. Some languages have more, some less, some as few as two. There's no natural law that there should be exactly 11 basic color terms as English does. Nevertheless, the English words do convey useful information.

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sarker It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing 15d ago

Okay, let's see the clustering.

I hope it considers that all Mexicans are white (as a federal court did in in re Rodriguez), that people who are half white and a quarter Japanese and a quarter chinese are not white (in re Knight), Syrians are white (in re Najour), Afghans are white (in re Dolla), Armenians are white (in re Halladjian), Indians are white (United States v. Balsara), Syrians are not white (Ex parte Shahid), Indians are not white (In re Sadar Bhagwab Singh), Afghans are not white (In re Feroz Din), Arabs are white (In re Ahmed Hassan) and that arabs are not white (In re Ahmed Hassan).

If it conflicts with the above in some way, it would seem that the term "white" used in ordinary language and society doesn't always conform to what you might see on a multidimensional genetic chart. That you can define "white" in a way to be defensible via the chart doesn't mean that's how it's always or even typically used. Hence, "socially constructed".

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sarker It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing 15d ago

The steelman of "race is a social construct" is that the usual notion of race doesn't cleave reality at the joints. You say that whites are superior weightlifters (already a dubious claim), but Bulgaria has 13 gold medals in olympic weightlifting and Finland has 1. Yet both Finns and Bulgars are white (don't @ me). The steelman is that the category "white" (or "black" or "Asian") contains a variety of different ethnicities with different characteristics and the way that ethnicities are assorted into broad racial categories is not a fact of nature, it is indeed socially constructed.

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