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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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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 obviously not just a social construct but both a biological construct AND in part a social construct and also does not count as a social construct in the way many people using that term mean.
How can it be both a social construct and not a social construct? Since a lot of the people using the term seem to be using it to mean arbitrary, existing only in our imaginations, when it isn't. Or as something in the exclusion of a biological group. To the extend there is a social construct is based in large part to biology, or as a synonym for broader or narrower ethnic group, where there other robust things about it related to shared culture, ethnic identification by them and by others, and also relate to ancestry.
Most ethnic groups have been described as races in the past.
In general most things called social constructs by deconstructionists and overly dismissive people are not that. The connotations carried with the words social constructs in such cases are misleading. Same would apply to someone who is pro barter economy, or pro communism saying that money is a social construct. Or even ethnic groups.
Yes there is an element in social categorization but white and black people clearly exist as biological races.
There are biological differences between different populations and sub-populations, but deciding a group of phenotypes (like skin color) was unmistakably influenced by Western biases. You are probably aware of the issue of defining whiteness and blackness (Mixed ethnicities in United States or exclusion of certain ethnic groups from White category) . There is no perfect system of categorization of course, but the issue with Scott is he tries to conflate asserting race as a social construct as somehow not existing. Social construct doesn't simply mean "it doesn't exist" or "useless". I am sure there are radicals who think this, but that is cherry picking for easy wins
True! But are we not all sinners? There are tiny dust specks in my eye, yet I still see. What hasn't been influenced by biases? Our conception of "color" is biased by our photoreceptors, in turn biased by the distribution of light in our ancestral environment, but we still find color useful. The question should be - how biased is it? I think you should "put a number on it". How much, precisely, were race/ancestry groups influenced by Western biases? If the number is say, 80%, then yes we should probably abandon current categories of race. If the number is 4% ... then maybe they're good enough.
Of course not! I am pointing out this is just one mode of thinking that has dominated the way we perceive and categorize race. Racial categorizations are more complicated in different cultures was my point. Regardless, I am not disputing usefulness of these categorizations. Acknowledging biases when approaching and building conceptual frameworks is essential in science. It's not even because of political correctedness, but more for understanding limitations and accuracy.
An analogy is that when studying other religions, there is a tendency to interpret different religions from a Christian perspective (most likely because it is the dominant religion in the western sphere and most researchers who approached different religions were mainly Western). It's why early cultural studies has been updated to reflect a more accurate understanding.
If pursuing the truth and accurate information is the goal of any research field, then there should be no issues in acknowledging some limitations and biases of racial categorizations. I am not really concerned about political correctedness even, but more so it's a pretty big discussion amongst professional geneticists that there are issues with this classification.
Okay, so, obviously if you're, like, writing a paper on the impact of race and IQ, you should more complicated measures of ancestry than self-reported race if you can. I don't disagree with that. However, I think "race" is close enough to "ancestry" in casual conversation.
also e.g. biobanks don't allow people to use their data for race and iq research, which is both unfortunate and ... potentially indicative of the kind of bias that would systematically affect science on the topic!
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