With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.
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Notes -
'Race is a social construct'
I really hate these word-games they play. You can have endless debate over whether Greeks or Bulgarians are white, about mixed-race offspring, about the shifting meaning of Oriental or Asian based on where you are, about the genesis of the term 'white'. So yes, race is a social construct, congratulations.
But we know that blacks are superior runners, whites are superior weightlifters. We know things about sickle-cell anemia, blood type and bone marrow differences between races. We have the basic human quality of knowing that different couples would produce different-looking children. We have the basic human quality of seeing distinctions in a continuous spectrum and assigning words to clusters: races.
We have the basic human quality of appreciating that some races produce good schools, STEM Nobel prizes, powerful armies, well-maintained infrastructure and advanced technology while others don't (I say basic because I mean this is the origin of racism millennia ago, not out of consensus-building). Those continuous differences cause civilizational effects on a large scale. We have the advanced human science of genetics too, providing the causal logic behind the above phenomenon.
Saying race is a social construct is so shameless. It's communicating a specific idea via an easily defensible fact, something so defensible that the mere fact of saying it implies you mean something else entirely. And in this case, what is really being said is that there are no significant biological differences between races (in contrast to biological sex).
"Money is a social construct. It's unfair that he has more wealth than me (there aren't truly legitimate reasons why this might be) - we need to fix this inequality. I need his wealth."
"It's OK to be white. Us whites need not feel ashamed for our ancestors or privileges. There are lots of people who clearly think it isn't OK to be white: they have bad intentions."
The problem I have with social constructions is that virtually everything in society is at some level a social construct. It’s meaningless as a claim. Religion is a social construct and likewise contains legions of subgroups and deviations that make generalizations difficult. And that also isn’t a good reason to say religion is unimportant. Just because Southern Baptists, Anglicans, and Greek Orthodox Christians are all Christians, that doesn’t mean they’re identical or interchangeable in obvious ways.
Further, most of the ideas of what to do (generally deconstruct it) are silly. Just because it’s no longer seen as anything other than a social construct doesn’t mean it doesn’t have something of a force of reality. People are affected by social constructs, gender roles, social norms, and other social conventions because that’s how society actually works. Even if we recognize that we drive on the right side of the road in the USA as “just a social construct” that doesn’t mean that change is desired.
The people who use the "social construction" deepity are ironically the people who take the thesis the least seriously.
Imagine if every human disappeared and alien scientists had to puzzle out the purpose of these giant buildings and steel veins that dot the landscape. Why some buildings on a certain coast are built to different specifications, why standards vary across climes.
These things are clearly artificial but no archaeologist or historian worth his salt would start and stop at "people made this, so they just made it up because".
It really is just a blank slateist motte-and-bailey.
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I once heard this problem neatly solved with the saying "a house is a social construct, but I do rather prefer to live in one"
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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.
It's just a motte-and-bailey, because "race realists" would be quite happy to carve up races further for precision (and do ime) but their opponents have no interest in that task at all.
Admitting that the colloquial definition of "Asian" isn't fit for purpose and maybe we should speak of "East Asians" and so on has never, AFAICT, won someone over to some sort of race realist view. If anything, people just seem to ignore it altogether and go back to attacking the model that has like five races.
The classification based in the idea of notable biological differences itself is the sin.
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Cool, because if that's the steelman, then we can say that the entire notion is false, since it doesn't get better from there.
This is false, it does cleave reality at the joints. You can run a genetic clustering algorithm, and you'll see coherent clusters emerge that correspond to the colloquial understanding of "race". Containing a variety of different subgroups does not blow up a category, and if it does, you just blow up the entire system of biological taxonomy as a whole, as well as each of it's components individually
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".
That's not ordinary language, that's a bunch of court cases with goofy rules about precedents.
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.
The precedence defense is confusing considering how many of these cases contradict each other.
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?)
I'm not sure what you mean by "objective", I only said it's not socially constructed, but let's go with it, I guess. I don't know how you're separating the two. 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.
If you put them next to each other, quite possibly so. Especially relative to other groups.
The size of the boundary is exactly what makes it socially constructed.
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?
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.
In one case I meant "how related they are to each other" in the other I meant physically, so a person can take a look at each of them, and mark their similarities and differences. As opposed to just name-dropping "Native American" and "Siberian" to a person who has never seen either, and is only aware of the geographical separation between America and Siberia.
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This is the game played when calling it socially constructed. Of course there are messy edge cases where the lines get blurry and arbitrary socially constructed rules throw people into one bucket or another. You could play the same game with most other categories like species or colors or flavors and so on, but that doesn't mean that they aren't basically capturing real and useful information and describing somewhat natural categories.
I haven't encountered the notion that Indians are an edge case before.
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.
Yeah, but that's irrelevant. Again ask people to sort colors by similarity, and they'll reach pretty much the same result, regardless of their language and culture.
Are you sure? The phrase that comes to mind is "wine-dark sea". I've seen academics suggest that the notion of blue is a surprisingly modern invention.
I was going to make an argument about Homer, but in fact after searching to back it up I'll just link this.
Two points he doesn't mention:
But yeah, it's just one of those things some academics are completely wrong about, but that Science! Journalists repeat because it's catchy and counterintuitive.
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If I’m remembering correctly, there was a radiolab / NPR something podcast on this very topic
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Yes, I'm sure. I even know which exact video you got this from. It also had an example of an African tribe that supposedly can easily tell very similar shades of green apart, because they have more words for it in their language.
The phrase you quote does not imply an inability to perceive blue - the sea is pretty damn dark during a dark storm, and wine is also often dark enough that you can't tell it's color - and the African tribe thing was outright made up for the clicks (or views, I guess) by the BBC and a corrupt academic they were filming.
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Nobody is saying that the similarity of colors to each other is socially constructed (or at least I've never heard this claim).
Ok, well I'm pretty sure that if ask people to pair up objects of the same color, they'll also do that regardless of their language or culture.
If you're going to say that no one claimed that the sameness of colors is not socially constructed, then I don't know what content is the sentence "color is socially constructed" even carrying.
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If you read Foucault and his descendants, all "scientific knowledge" is socially constructed. Think of Power as an OSI layer between "reality" and "our understanding of reality", with the actual existence of immutable reality left deliberately ambiguous.
It's not that some things are "socially constructed" and others are "real", even if it's used that way tactically ("Science Is Real! No, your science is a socially constructed artifact of the cisheteropatriarchy"). It's that all our methods of understanding go through a filter of social power/biopower/whatever.
It's a very clever definitional superweapon.
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We do well in strongman contests, though, or at least did in the 90s.
Apparently (according to some Instagram posting I found) Finland didn't send a weightlifting team to olympics between 1920-1948, which also represents (apart from 1952 and 1956) the golden era of Finnish Olympics success, with the general medal count beginning its fall to 0 (in the most recent Olympics) after that. Perhaps the strong athletes were just sent to wrestling or some other strong guy sport.
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Well, there is currently a ton of people on (Matt's) Twitter feed socially reconstructing Latinos from the category of "non-white" to "white, white adjacent, possibly white supremacists".
One thing I find interesting about this is that if we continue to shave "minorities" off of the "minority" list and add them onto the "white" if they vote a certain way, we will have built a more diverse coalition of "whites" than "minorities." "White" now contains Asians, Whites, and Latinos.
Most Asian American group lean Democrat,with few exceptions (Vietnamese lean Republican), none of them vote R as strongly as whites.
Asians have already been put in the White category for overperforming other minorities (and even whites) in school grades and earnings. Further, I think that they're way more fickle than a lot of other demographics. (East) Asians are much less political than other races until someone messes with their schools. You see this repeatedly in California, where every single initiative to make schools more "equitable" guarantees that Asians vote against it.
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White already expanded to take in Italians. It can't get any worse than that.
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Who are the big left twitter people besides Matt? I checked Hasan and he's calling for more progressivism - Kamala was centre-right with her 'lethal military' and 'border protection' rhetoric!
I think it is a fair critique that Harris ran to her right. The problem with running to her right was that it was fake. She didn’t assure moderates because she couldn’t explain why she switched on numerous positions (it felt fake). But her left wing was pissed because she ran from them.
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I'm not sure about big accounts, I mean stuff of the sort that one can find in the comments and retweets of this tweet, for example. (though admittedly in a lot of cases it's more like "white adjacent" or "think they are white" or so on.)
Most brazilians in the south, along with argentinians and uruguayans, are at least 75% european. I really don't care about getting into the "white club", but acting as if "latinos" make sense as a racial category is where the stupidity begins in the first place. "Castizos", "Mestizos" and "Mulattos" are infinitely better descriptors of the most common "races" in Latin America. In Richard Lynn's study, the average IQ for brazilian castizos was 95, while mulattos/mestizos had 83.
Again, I don't care whether we're considered "white" or not, there's barely any advantage to being considered "white" today other than being blamed for a lot of things, but it frustates me that "latino" is considered like, a real and useful category. It's only useful in the US context where you're often talking about mexicans, puerto ricans and so on which are majoritarily mestizos/mulattos, but as a general descriptor of everyone coming from Latin America it tells as much information about your race as saying you're "american". Can you imagine using "american" as a race category?
Glad to see my pet peeve about American racial categories getting support from an actual Latin American.
What are your predictions for the new 'Hispanic' census label? I expect mestizos to continue using it but I imagine the next generation of castizo children will abandon it for 'white'
In the very long-term, even if Republicans get more strict about immigration, I doubt that they'll be able to completely stop the universal pattern of genetic exchange between neighboring countries. "White" people, as in 100% european, are simply outnumbered in the American continent. Due to interracial marriages "whites" will slowly get some Native American or African DNA in them, I can't imagine even most white nationalists requiring a DNA test to check if your partner has 5 or 10% non-white DNA, and the moment you stop distinguishing between 100% european and 90% european, you'll soon stop differentiating between 90% european and 80% european.
Therefore yeah, I do expect castizos to start being progressively called "white" like the italians or irish were included in the "white" category too over time, and as happened in Latin America itself, however I don't know how long it'll take. Given that there's now a political controversy of latinos voting conservative and being lumped with whites under the banner of "traitors", I think we'll see the change in 1~3 generations, around the time that more whites will have produced offspring with mestizos.
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