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naraburns  nihil supernum  7d ago (text post)   26648 thread views

U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

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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.

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".

If it conflicts with the above in some way, it would seem that the term "white" used in ordinary language

That's not ordinary language, that's a bunch of court cases with goofy rules about precedents.

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.

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.

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?)

Your claim is that "white" is an objective category, not that people's perceptions of ethnic group closeness matches reality

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.

which I find highly dubious to begin with, do you think people think of e.g. native Americans as related to Siberians?

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

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?

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

Sorry about the pedantry, but I find it frustrating because to me the metaphor has a clear and useful meaning, it says the the way one drew the categories is fundamentally broken. In biology you can create categories like "mammal" and "reptile", and even though nature will throw a duck-billed platypus at you sometimes, these categories will still cleave reality at the joints. On the other hand, if you tried to draw a boundary in a way that includes half of all known mammals, and half of all known reptiles, that division would be broken, and wouldn't cleave reality at the joints.

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.

The important thing to note is that even though there isn't one correct way to define any particular race, the core is usually the same, and people fight over the boundaries. This makes broad statements like "white is socially constructed" clearly false, as that implies the core of the concept is up for grabs.

like the Latinos who invented about thirty races for different admixtures of black, white and native

They're just operating at a different level of granularity. It does nothing to disprove the point that race is not socially constructed.

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.

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.

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:

  • The Greeks always drank their wine heavily mixed with water (this is a key point of the Centaur Wedding myth that distinguishes what it is to be Greek from what it is to be barbarian). Watered down wine looks much bluer, and can even turn fully blue if the wine is poorly made.
  • There's a reason from modern times not to read Homer literally. Troy was not very far from a sea we now call the Black Sea. I wouldn't use the name of the Black Sea as an argument that some seas are in fact black instead of blue...

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.

If I’m remembering correctly, there was a radiolab / NPR something podcast on this very topic

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.

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.

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.

Except for the Chinese combining 青 with 青, or the Russians separating синий from голубой....

You're talking about language, I'm talking "sort these according to how hard they are to separate with your eyes".

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.

Maybe I'm pedantic, but I'd call that "language is a social construct".

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.

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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