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naraburns  nihil supernum  6mo ago (text post)   27957 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. 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.

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".

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.

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.

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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