Do You Think Race is a Social Construct?

How could we have an effective affirmative action program without that information?

 

Right. And I suppose that this is the only nation that realizes that some members of our society have had to play catch up since the beginning----and need some help to catch up.

 

"is still in general use by the scientific community," is no longer true as we are in the process of settling on the replacement term.

 

Are you the scientific community? Sources? Or is this so new and hush hush that it's not out on the internet yet?

 

Starting last summer, it's been in peer reviewed publications, genetics websites and biology and genetic anthropology news sources.

 

Racial differences presumably were not socially constructed in their origin, but racial divisions are socially constructed, often for nefarious purposes. One example: What are the offspring of a white parent and a black parent? They're supposedly black, not white. Why? Some say because long ago white gentlemen in the South didn't have to pay child support for their illegitimate children if the children were black, but they did if they were white, providing an incentive to classify people of mixed race as black--but that's no longer true, and it was never a good reason to begin with. A more modern example: if political advantage is thought to be attainable by taking the supposed side of "people of color" and pitting them against "white people," then there's an incentive to maximize the number of "people of color" by counting in everyone of mixed racial ancestry. In both cases and many others like them, the losers are people who recognize the unity of humanity and see little or no importance in differences of appearance among human beings. (Yes, I'm one of those!)

 

Largely yes. There are genetic differences but they amount to the differences you get the further you diverge in a family line, there is no intrinsic differences in races. The whole idea of perpetuating races is itself racist (meaning tribalitistic).

 

I was born in Oklahoma, which was called officially "Indian Territory" before it became the state of Oklahoma. Almost all Indians of whatever tribe in Oklahoma are as much white as they are Indian but even if they are only 1/8 or 1/16 Indian, then they are counted as members of that tribe. I have relatives on my mothers side of my family who fit this definition. Most of them look as white as Donald Trump or Joe Biden but they all want to be registered as members of one tribe or another because of the monthly checks they get from the Indian-owned casinos. The money from those casinos goes to the tribe headquarters which then cuts a check to every tribal member, and those checks can be several thousand dollars a month. If a casino is owned by the Choctaw tribe then all registered members of the tribe get monthly checks and the tribe gets the money for those checks from the casinos that tribe owns. same for Cherokee tribe, etc

 

Another example, from before tribes ran casinos: John Ross, principal chief of the Cherokee Nation from about 1828 to 1867, was a white-looking guy with little Cherokee ancestry, but chose to be regarded as Cherokee, not white. By the same logic, a person with little white ancestry should be able to choose to be regarded as white--but that's not how it works. I've probably got at least as much Cherokee ancestry as John Ross had, but I don't live in Oklahoma, I couldn't register as a Cherokee (so far as I know) to cash in on casinos, and I'm regarded as white.

What we're talking about here is people voluntarily identifying themselves as members of a racial (or tribal) group from which most of their ancestors didn't come. That may be harmless enough, and may enable them to cash in on casinos, affirmative action, or the like. But it's totally unreasonable for people to be involuntarily dumped into a racial category from which some or most of their ancestors didn't come, merely because other people have bad reasons for dumping them into it--which can be anything from divisive "identity politics" to the view that people of mixed race are somehow polluted by any amount of nonwhite ancestry. In reality, racial categories should be regarded as having little or no significance in human life.

 

I try not to get into discussions about race, because most people are so set in their views that no dialogue ever happens. At University I took a class in Cultural anthropology. The teacher was a Mature Jewish Woman who attempted to add sense to the reality of discrimination. As I recall we are all in this together. The teacher adhered to evidence that all humans are descended form small groups of bushmen in southern Africa approximately 70-100,000 yers ago. They were hunter gatherers who migrated north following game and populated the rest of the planet. As they dispersed, isolation and natural selection led into the various racial groups that survived to this day. Skin color for humans is a stupid concept common in the 19th century to systematically divide populations into groups. She went on to explain that racism emerged from a fear that people coming from different cultures might supersede and minimize established cultural traditions. The friction between African Americans and European Americans, does not make sense, because African Americans had their culture taken away from them during slavery and most of them adopted European culture. I had the pleasure of working in an ethnically diverse department. I found that there was more disagreement within the African American employees as a group than with other ethnic groups. This was especially true when we hired immigrants from Nigeria, Kenya, and Sierra Leon. These people were very open minded and were eager to work with a diverse staff. We had to deal with friction between some African Americans and the immigrants from Africa. One African American told me that there was some friction with immigrants, because they had no history of slavery and were nor worthy of equal status. The issues are complex, and will not get fixed until we all work together.

 

Anybody who denies it is basically arguing with the entire discipline of sociology.

It's official.

Back to the Future? The Emergence of a Geneticized Conceptualization of Race in Sociology - Reanne Frank, 2015 (sagepub.com)

 

In order to consider whether thousands of sociologists could be wrong about "it," I'd have to know what "it" is. I'm not seeing the antecedent of that pronoun.

 

Race does not matter. He was an Outstanding American Patriot

 

The concept of race hasn't gone away in the 2020s despite the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and social changes of ending official forms of racial segregation against African-Americans and discrimination against other people of color (i.e. Asians, Latinx, Native Americans and Pacific Islanders) and ethnocultural groups (like Middle Easterners and South Asians). Unfortunately, not all of us are taught to not be prejudiced against people based on their skin color or what country they come from or their religion (in the case of Jews, hence the term of Anti-Semitism, the hatred and bigotry against Jews who aren't a "race" but have origins outside Europe in biblical-era Palestine). We still have consequences of a past legacy of slavery, segregation like Jim Crow and white privilege when a larger number of Anglos/Europeans/Caucasians in North America are in the middle and upper income classes, while higher percentages of Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans find themselves in lower or poor economic classes.

 

I have seen photos of John Ross and he looks as white as Andrew Jackson, and wondered how someone so "white" could be chief of the Cherokee Indian Nation at the time of "The Trail of Tears". Jackson is vilified for moving the Indians from Georgia to the land west of Arkansas but the fact is he may have actually saved them because if he had not ordered their removal then local militias in Georgia would likely have massacred most of them so the plantation owners and small farmers could take their land. We forget today that during the Revolution Era almost all the Indian tribes sided with and fought for the British against the colonists. In the decades after Independence was won that fact was not forgotten or forgiven, and there was constant fear that the British, or possibly the French or Spanish, would again pay the Indian tribes between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi to start another war against the new Americans. But this version of history is no longer considered the proper view so instead of being seen as a mercenary threat the Indians are now seen as "victims" of white imperialism or white racism or whatever this season's fashion is.

 

The notion that "Hispanics" are a racial category illustrates the arbitrariness of so-called racial divisions. "Hispanic" isn't a race any more than "English-speaking" is a race.

 

No doubt it's an oversimplification to regard the Indians uniformly as innocent victims of white loathsomeness. Severe complaints about King George III unleashing the "merciless Indian savages" (Declaration of Independence) as "hell-hounds of savage war" (William Pitt the Elder), against the American colonists, had some basis in fact.

But the Cherokees, in the time of John Ross, were no longer "savages" in any sense; they were among the Five Civilized Tribes. The hostility against them involved the exploitation of racial or pseudo-racial divisions for the nefarious purpose of stealing their land. They took their case for their right to remain in their land to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled in their favor. President Jackson, siding with the land-stealers, ignored the Supreme Court's ruling and ejected them anyway. And he didn't save the lives of the many who died on the "Trail of Tears."

I may be as white as John Ross, but I think I do have a good idea of what was justice and what was injustice in the treatment of my Cherokee ancestors by Jackson and his ilk.

 

I think that racial discrimination predates civilization, when our ancestors were hunter gatherers. Apparently all of us are dependents of small bands of bushmen who followed game out of southern Africa over 100,000 years ago. This why I believe that prejudice is primarily a learned behavior and male thing, who were responsible for protecting females in the band from strangers. I also believe that African American men learned this behavior from their White Competitors. I was born and raised in a multicultural city. Competition between White Men and men from all other cultures has always been apparent. On the other side, for the most part, "Black Women and White Men" along with "White Women and Black Men" have been able to interact harmoniously in a social setting throughout the last sixty years.

My point is that discrimination is irrelevant in a multi cultural society, and we can all unlearn the temptation and teach our children to do the same. Hopefully bigotry will die out in a generation.

 

Immigrants to the US from Spain and Portugal are not classified by the US Census as "Hispanics" yet anyone from the Caribbean, Mexico, Central & South America is. Where is the logic in that? There's none; it's all about domestic political calculations.