- never signed up for anything like this,
- never donated to or signed up for emails from the DNC, et al.,
- political texts like this come all the time, and
- I hesitate to reply “stop” because I don’t want them to know this is a live number (is my instinct here outdated/inapplicable?)
Science moved away from phrenology, but we’re not going around claiming that skulls are a social construct. It’s ridiculous. Just because something has been misused by bigots, doesn’t mean we should pretend the thing doesn’t exist.
Phrenological propensities
arewere a social construct. Skulls and variation within them exist. Ditto for human biological variation in other things. You can call that race, but nobody else thinks of Senogambia when you say “the milk drinking race”, and words don’t have fixed meanings independent of how they’re understood.Sorry if I came off as a little abrasive there, that wasn’t my intention, I was basically just saying we should agree to disagree at some point.
I’m afraid I can’t settle for that. This idea that race is some made up thing is offensive to me. I have to correct people who say they agree with it.
There it is. That’s actually what this entire discussion turns on, every time I have it. First, I have to get the other person to admit that inherited physical characteristics exist, which can be a chore for some people. Then, when they admit that, they say some variation of “but that’s not the definition of race / that’s not what people mean when they say race”.
This is actually the more important thing that you have to shake loose of. Certain academic institutions claim this, but they are overwhelmingly wrong. When people talk about race, they do not talk about some vague abstraction. They almost always are referring to specific inherited characteristics usually tied to the physical place a person’s ancestral group is from.
The irony is, the only people who could be operating under the delusion that when people talk about race they’re referring to some vague social thing are people who don’t interact with a lot of different people. This idea that race is a social construct is quarantined to one very specific social stratum, because anyone who gets more worldly experience very quickly realizes it’s bunk.
It’s pretty intuitive when once you realize it. It’s very basic, very “what you see is what you get”. When people talk about race, they talk about the very surface-level, most obvious, simplest definition. No deeper meaning. People are not subconsciously philosophizing. People are not closet racial supremacists. They’re just describing what they see. “Inherited physical characteristics” is the simplest definition of race, and trying to find some deeper meaning of the term is a red herring.
To go back to the phrenology example, the existence of race does not require bigotry. Which is probably why academia came up with this absurd idea, they were scared of bigotry. The existence of skulls does not require phrenology to be true. It’s bunk, and it’s racist.
Racism is bullshit.
Race exists.
Well then, I guess I break this off unilaterally at some point. Debate doesn’t work, you can’t browbeat someone into believing something (well, on soft topics anyway, you can with math). Most people just know that, I had to learn the hard way. Maybe you will eventually too.
I personally am neither rich nor fancy. I live in the country; I’ve never lived anywhere else as an adult. Believe me, specific races are a real thing where I live, and probably in the city too. It’s not some thing made up by a spooky cabal of academics. It’s strange you could even think that, with all the evidence from recent history to the contrary, including laws referencing the separate races, and how much mixing of them was acceptable. You could argue I’m not worldly enough, but my family is rather international, which should count for something. I’m kinda academic now, but that’s because I just was born an egghead. If it’s class that’s the issue, I’m not in the picture.
Debate is for the audience, not for your opponent.
I don’t think the audience cares either, past a point. The shit that gets a response is factual, and getting facts out is, along with basic respect for you, the reason I’m here.
Upvote/downvote totals matter. Seeing a ton of push back in the comments matters.
Well, you pushed, and I pushed. We’re deep in enough most people have stopped reading anyway. Goodbye, nice chatting with you.
Fair enough, have a great day.