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