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There's an industrial grade motte-and-bailey around the 'race is a social construct'. I encountered a medical doctor talking about how race was really just a social construct as opposed to biological, how there were really just populations with different distributions of alleles. The very next sentence she talked about how Ashkenazi jews are predisposed to have more of various kinds of illnesses. It seems that race is indeed biological! The argument is very much reliant on authority - I wasn't going to ask a pointed question about how those two ideas could be reconciled in a crowded room.
"Wealth is just a social construct - there are all kinds of complexities with debt, income, currency, liquid/illiquid assets and cost of living. Therefore progressive income tax is unfair and we should have a flat tax system!"
Nobody would accept this - wealth is a real thing and it's clearly a self-serving argument.
"Race is just a social construct - there are just populations with different distributions of alleles. But these different distributions of alleles don't have any substantive impact on intelligence or personality. Differences of outcome are a result of social institutions and/or oppression - these must be reduced by affirmative action."
I'm not woke, but I do think "Race is a social construct" has some merit. It's a terminological disagreement rather than a scientific one.
Someone who has one white parent and one black parent is often considered black, despite the genetic make-up being 50/50. National demographics on race also largely come from self-reported data in surveys, which have a famously growing list of races you can pick from.
As for intelligence differences between races, I think most people are simply ignorant rather than cognitively dissonant. It's not obvious to everyone that racial groups have different mean IQs, it's not something you learn from mainstream sources. Even once this fact is known, it's not crazy to think achievement disparities can be explained by culture and social institutions. We would all be a lot less economically productive if we moved to Haiti. Oppression isn't even a necessary factor.
Oh there are obviously issues with institutions, history and so on - but the sheer biologicality of it! Those very black-white mixed-race children have issues getting bone marrow because their parents often can't be donors. It was subtle discrepancies in the orbit of Mercury that doomed Newtonian physics. Above bone marrow issues alone would be enough to disqualify the 'race is not biological' argument if we were working purely quantitatively. A quick trip to the Olympics shows that African/blacks dominate sprinting but there's not a single black weightlifter to be found at the very top.
Race may be a social construct in a certain sense, but it's a very strong, useful social construct. The distinction between green and blue is arbitrary and continuous - but it's still there. There are such things as turquoise but green and blue are still real and useful. If the sky was green one day I'd be pretty shocked, if my apple was blue I'd know not to eat it!
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But wealth is a social construct. You could give a monkey a hundred bananas and he may lord it over his peers, using it to coerce sexual favors and social position - but he couldn't imagine having a million bananas, more than he could ever eat, or create a system of classes dependent on banana-ownership, or leverage his bananas into purchasing banana plantations in El Salvador.
If wealth is real, it has a quality of subjective realness that only exist in human societies.
IIRC there've been a few experiments with teaching monkeys to use vending machines and they cottoned onto wealth very quickly.
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I've noticed what you observe constantly. It's this bizarre phenomena of unidirectional knowledge I've almost singularly encountered in those that are woke and "educated". There are other forms of disordered thinking I've encounters among the religious right. But this particular form of disordered thinking I've only encountered there.
When I say unidirectional knowledge, I'm talking about bring up a fact, but you are only allowed to acknowledge the truth of that fact when you are using it to point in an approved direction. Otherwise you must deny it. So in your case, the fact is "race is a biological fact". If you use that fact to say anything unapproved, it's false. Like pointing out large measured IQ differences between African Americans and everyone else. But if you use that fact to help target funding towards neoliberal client populations, say African American's with sickle cell anemia or Jews in the New York media with other special health needs, then it's true.
Or maybe to take a less charged example. I'm tall. That's the fact. If it's pointed out I'm stronger and can reach high places, I will admit I'm tall. If it's pointed out I cost more to feed, and I'm awkward in confined spaces, I will deny until my dying breath that I'm tall.
A lot of this double think is facilitated by academia churning out split definitions. They will cleave "tall" into "good tall" and "bad tall". And they'll force all of society to adopt those terms, so you can't even think coherently about the topic anymore. I mean look what they did to sex and gender.
IIRC the measured IQ differences aren't "between African Americans and everyone else", they're between Africans and Whites/Asians, with other groups somewhere in the middle.
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More on unidirectional knowledge, which is a nice phrase that crystalizes what I've observed for years:
The Classic Merited Impossibility
Great Replacement Theory (the thing that is criticized) isn't an empirical claim, it's just a normative claim. The GRT is that "demographic replacement of whites is bad." The opposite normative claim, "demographic replacement of whites is good" is mainstream and appraised.
Is it racist to believe that Mexicans are more criminal than white people? (ctrl + f "psyche" for full context)
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I'll agree that it can be really hard to talk about complicated things in public. If I was asked the question implied above I would say it was more the case that race genuinely is a social construct, but that ethnicity shows human variation from shared history and genetics. So, 'Black' is a racial category but is never going to be an ethnic grouping, because there are dozens or hundreds of ethnicities with wildly differing histories and genetics that are lumped into that category; but Ashkenazi Jews are in contrast an ethnicity with a shared history and gene pool, as are say Telugu Hindus. So there is biology of ethnicity, but it's more difficult to have biological facts about the broader categories referred to as race.
An example of this that I can think of is health outcomes of South Asians or people from the Indian subcontinent, in Britain. There are high rates of predicted genetic problems if you're of South Asian descent, which can affect how likely a woman is to be referred for certain tests in pregnancy or a child for certain tests in infancy, because some South Asian groups have favoured kinship relations such as cousin marriage for cultural reasons. Other sub-populations within the South Asian heritage groups favour exogamy and are hence very much less likely to have the same rate of birth defects. But it's less acceptable for your midwife to sit down and enquire, "So, is the dad a first cousin of yours, are your mum and dad first cousins to each other?" than it is to have you check a 'race identity' box where you indicate you have heritage from the Indian subcontinent and they then refer you for additional tests on the basis of that racial category even though it's a broad category amongst whom many will not have any elevated risk.
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