Edit: this question has been answered now. Thank you to everyone who took the time to help me understand.
the premise that race is not a natural, biologically grounded feature of physically distinct subgroups of human beings but a socially constructed (culturally invented) category that is used to oppress and exploit people of colour.
Okay… But we can take a DNA test and get our ancestry, telling us what percentage of what races make up our overall ethnicity. So how is race a social construct and not a biological feature, when we have a scientific method to determine our race? This part of the philosophy has been bothering me ever since I read it, and I’ve been hesitant to ask because of how offensive people get when you question this system.
Everyone has different DNA and nobody refutes that, but the lines at which race are defined are completly arbitrary. Are you considered black if you have 50% sub Saharan African DNA? Most would say yes. Are you black at 25%? How about at 5 or 10%? The slew of different answers is a clue that race is just a social construct borne of perception rather than hard fact.
Similarly, a lot of groups that are considered “white” today would not have been in the slightest if you were to go back 100+ years. The Irish, Italians, Greeks, among others were not considered white until more recently than you might believe.
Thats the crux of it, race is only truly defined by these arbitrary lines in the sand that people draw, and these lines are different for different groups and individuals. Race is only real because people perceive it to be. We could divide up society based on hair color or if your ear lobes hang or are directly connected to your head and it would make just as much sense, which is to say not much.
Edit: I might add that there’s more genetic diversity in sub Saharan Africa than anywhere else in the world but they all get lumped together as black because “skin dark”. It’s stupid when you examine it.
My go-to examples are Melanesians and Indigenous Australians. They sometimes have darker skin than people we in the West call black, and if we saw one of them walking down the street in a Western country, we would think they were black. But they are quite genetically distant from Sub-Saharan Africans. They just also have very dark skin pigmentation.
So are they both the same race? If not, what are we calling race here? Because I’ve only ever heard it described in terms of skin color.
I’ve heard it said that the average Englishman and the average Indian are more genetically similar than two random Englishmen, too.
In other words, if that’s true, there are some general trends in genetic differences between “races”, those trends are, overall, far smaller and less significant than the random differences that pop up by chance within a single race.
Ah, so it’s the race, like what you would put on a government form that they’re disputing, not the fact that we all have ethnicities which make up our person. I guess that makes sense, although it seems like splitting hairs to me. Nationality and ethnicity are already two different concepts. I suppose “race” in this context would be like you said, saying someone is “white” as opposed to saying they’re of English ethnicity. Is that right?
CRT focuses on how this arbitrary idea of race shapes how people are treated, especially on a societal scale. We divide people by wealth, by where they’re born, what gender they are, etc. All of these things affect how people are treated. I find most of the pushback is because some white people feel attacked when someone points to the fact that whiteness is a status.
I’ve seen push back by people of various backgrounds, not just “white” people, which we shouldn’t actually say, since it’s a construct in direct contradiction with the assertions of CRT. Right? To be clear, my post isn’t meant to be a criticism of the CRT statement. I asked so that I could more clearly understand, which I do now, thanks to you and some other people here. Thank you.
Not Rick had a great answer, but I wanted to try to contribute simple examples:
True, skin color is a trait that can be traced by DNA, but so is eye color, or hair color. We could easily create “races” based on “Brown hair vs blonde hair”, “brown eyes vs green eyes”, “people who need glasses vs people that don’t”, “shorties and tall-os”, “those who can roll their tongue, and the inferior swine that were never blessed by the Great tongue father.”
All traceable in the same way as skin color, but we consider them “features”, and not race defining traits.
Who decided that? And why?
Yeah that’s clear. As to the why, I suppose it’s because our brains are wired to categorize things and find patterns everywhere. It is useful to have labels for groups with common traits, although I do recognize the issues with that when it comes to systemic discrimination.
Edit: thanks for the answer!
The thing is, hair is equally as heritable, and immediately visible. As humans, we can see and categorise skin equally with hair.
The fact that we don’t use hair as a major defining trait though is arbitrary. That’s just social norms, nothing more.
We kind of do though. There’s nothing official about hair types, but there’s all kinds of stereotypes about people with certain hair colors, like blondes, or redheads. There’s even some scientific evidence that people with red hair have higher pain thresholds.
Not_Rick has a great answer but I will add something. Your question about the quote you posted is based on a disagreement about what race is, between you and social scientists. The phrase “we can take a DNA test and get our ancestry, telling us what percentage of what races make up our overall ethnicity” already assumes that genetics = race, end of story. But this is an unfounded assumption. All the test can tell is our genetics. Not_Rick offered some good examples for the counterpoint, that genetics ≠ race. If you disagree with that basic premise then you will always be bothered by modern theories on the subject such as CRT.
Once you see that race clearly is not just genetics, you can start asking what it truly is and what things do determine one’s race. These are much more interesting questions. For example, a new question might be ‘what has been the historical relationship between ethnicity and “being white” in the US’? And let’s not even start on the ridiculousness that is the census form.
The DNA test is just testing for genes which tend to be in certain groups - but that’s not necessarily the case - and the lines they draw between groups are arbitrary.
You’re conflating a few different concepts, and misunderstanding how DNA tests work. …And the only thing any of this has to do with CRT is that these questions are a symptom of it.
Race, ancestry, and ethnicity are not synonyms.
Race is “A group of people identified as distinct from other groups because of supposed physical or genetic traits shared by the group. Most biologists and anthropologists do not recognize race as a biologically valid classification, in part because there is more genetic variation within groups than between them.” (American Heritage)
Ethnicity refers to “people sharing a common cultural or national heritage and often sharing a common language or religion.” (American Heritage)
Ancestry is biological lineage.
DNA tests approximate the location on the globe (overlaid with national borders) where your ancestors lived at some point in time. They do this by taking DNA samples of people from all around the world, mapping that with human migration patterns, and comparing your DNA to that data pool to determine the statistical likelihood that you’re ancestors lived in a certain place within a certain time period in human history.
DNA tests do not determine race (social classification) or ethnicity (cultural classification). DNA tests can determine some physical traits, but not everyone with the same traits belong to what we might consider the same race. And not everyone who considers themselves to be of the same race have the same DNA.
There is no biological definition for the word “race”.
Just nitpicking, but there is a biological definition of race (albeit informal), which you quote the definition of. it’s just that it cant be applied to humans because (as your quote mentions) there tends to be greater variation from within human “races” than there is between some “races”.
There’s also the issue that there’s no “boundary” or distinction between the human “races”, and an actual race would need to be distinct from the rest of the specie population in order to be recognized as an actual race.
