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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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... reads exactly like "race is a social construct" except you're constructing it in a way convenient to your particular (somewhat idiosyncratic) white nationalist sentiments.

That just gets back to the common Motte-and-Bailey of "race is a social construct", doesn't it? On a narrow reading, it clearly is, as OP's personal account of racial categorization provides evidence for. On the reading with the further implication of "... and therefore whatever racial groupings are often used are entirely arbitrary [and have no grounding in biology whatsoever]", which is the one that's often meant when the phrase is used in arguments, I'd say it's clearly not, and OP provides a few reasons to think that, e.g. phenotype or various degrees of admixture.

In other words, I don't see the own-goal here, OP seems clearly aware that racial categorization draws both from cultural attitudes and genetic facts. You could basically read his posts as: "this is my social construction of whiteness, here's why I think it captures something about objective reality and why it's socially useful".

In other words, I don't see the own-goal here, OP seems clearly aware that racial categorization draws both from cultural attitudes and genetic facts. You could basically read his posts as: "this is my social construction of whiteness, here's why I think it captures something about objective reality and why it's socially useful".

I wouldn't disagree that racial categorization draws from both cultural attitudes and genetic facts. I'm not in the "race is 100% socially constructed" camp.

But I think the boundaries are much, much fuzzier than white nationalists and other racial identitarians want to admit. Hence their being just as willing as social justice activists to redraw the boundaries of "whiteness" to suit their agenda, without much regard to actual genetics and often without much regard to culture.