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non_radical_centrist  2mo ago (astralcodexten.com)   2509 thread views

How Should We Think About Race And "Lived Experience"?

astralcodexten.com

I'm generally a fan of "blurry" definitions where something can qualify as X if it fulfills a few of many criteria. I think trying to create hard rules around blurry areas like race and culture is fool's errand, and Scott does a great job laying out how overly strict definitions can go wrong.

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People use the claim “there’s no such thing as biological race” for a lot of purposes, mostly to confuse and deceive people, but here it’s worth focusing on the tiny sliver of justification for such a claim: the biological clustering of populations isn’t exactly 100% the same as socially-defined racial categories

Scott seems to not understand. Race is still a social construct. There are genetic variations among different populations, but this doesn't mean the categories of race are not socially constructed. Who decided we are going to define one race white and another black, based on skin color? He uses the example with Jews, but this makes no sense since their categorization of race is different from the Western categorization. These racial categories have a purpose and are useful for a variety of reasons, but he's not making a convincing point that racial categories are not socially defined. Certain racial categories are fuzzier and an American invention: whites and blacks.

Race is both a social construct and a biological category with real consequences independent of how society chooses to treat it. Consider for a parallel example, tallness. Different cultures have different standards of tallness and might treat people they consider tall or short differently. 'Tallness' here is basically how society decides to treat or respond to the very real feature of height.

Race is both a social construct and a biological category with real consequences independent of how society chooses to treat it What do you mean by this? I am pointing out how race is defined is a social construct. Could you clarify what you mean by real consequence and relate that to racial categories? If anything, your example with height is not really about race but more about a specific trait.

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