Liberals insist that race is just a social construct. However we can clearly see that races really exist and the members of different races have their own privileges and disadvantages. Blacks are mostly stronger and bigger than whites, Caucasians usually have higher IQ than Africans. Why do libs refuse to accept obvious things? We will never be able to create the society free of racism since it's a completely natural thing.
yes, it is a social construction. if all people either looked this or this or this and nothing in between, then there might be some logic to the concept of race. but as one travels from norway, to germany, to turkey, to egypt to nigeria or instead to syria...to iran...to pakistan..to china there is a gradual change in the way people look. this dispels the concepts of distinct human races.
There's no scientific agreement on who belongs to which race. Different countries (cultures) classify people differently. What people in the US classify as Hispanics and not white would get classified as just White in a lot of other Western nations. The Nazis split Europeans up into different groups. Lived to the east of Germany? You're subhuman, prepare to die. Would you though classify Poles and Russians as anything but White?
You touch on several points which I will address. 1. Liberals insist that race is a social construct. Egalitarianjay02: This is a misleading statement because it suggests that the rejection of human races is somehow a political position that only liberals take. The fact is that many scientists reject the existence of biological races for humans and this position is based on scientific reasoning and empirical evidence. Here is a rundown of how scientific consensus has developed in recent years to support the no biological races position: 2. Blacks are mostly stronger and bigger than whites. Egalitarianjay02: Are they? Do you have evidence that Blacks are bigger than Whites? As for stronger if that were true Blacks would dominate Olympic weight lifting the way they do the Olympic sprint. They don't. I think that some populations in Africa have differences in body build that affords them greater sprinting ability and this combined with world class training regimens explains why people of predominately African descent are among the fastest sprinters. 3. Caucasians usually have higher IQ than Africans. Egalitarianjay02: While it's true that IQ tests show that people of European descent score higher than people of African descent on average environmental differences between the groups easily explains the variation and the claim that genetic differences related to intelligence between races is the cause is based on pseudoscience. Read these sources for insight on this subject: 4. We will never be able to create the society free of racism since it's a completely natural thing. Egalitarianjay02: Racism isn't natural. Racism is a choice. We can choose not to be racist because we have the ability to reason. The proof is the fact that society has become a lot less racist in recent decades. The way racism was reduced is by appealing to the morality of people and showing them just how wrong and dangerous racism really is. That's what happened during the Civil Rights Movement and society has gotten a lot better since then. There is no Post-Racial society on Earth and racism is still an ongoing problem but the fact that cultures can change their views on race and individuals can be completely non-racist shows that racism isn't natural. Race only has as much social importance as we give it. There are some biological differences between populations but race was socially constructed to classify people and justify social hierarchies. Biologically defined races do not exist in the human species and socially defined races are arbitrary. If the main point you're driving at is that race is not only real but socially significant then your argument can not be further from the truth.
In nature there are species showing a well more clear differentiation in races. Think to dogs. Dogs show a great variety of races, real races ... but they are not racist. They are all dogs and they don't show behavioral problems in dealing with dogs of different races. Human species presents a less evident variety of "races" so that the differentiation is more superficial than substantial [think to the difference of dimensions and aspect among dog races, we don't see this in human species]. I have never heard a biologists sustaining that dog races are a "social construct" [overall because I've never been in a club of dog thinkers where a wise Labrador Retriever could explain to me how canine society developed the conceptualization of race]. But I've got 3 dogs in front of my home, in a couple of villas. I could ask them.
In a few words, what I'm saying is that some races exist for real [in the sense that some macro groups of humans can be differentiated as "races"], but actually it's not that important: we are all human, like dogs are all dogs. I tend to think more to species than to races, to be honest.
Race is biological and therefore not a social construct. For example, some races are more prone to certain kinds of diseases than others. Some races cannot have straight hair while others can. Racial identity is a social construct and is a very different thing than biology.
Race is only important to those who make it important. Perhaps with this world getting smaller and smaller and people moving all over the place, throw in inter racial marriages, perhaps we are slowly moving back to one race which we all are a part of. The Human Race.
race seems to be determined by genes that cause physical differences in appearance, other gene difference go less noticed for instance, Obama has a white mom and black dad, but because of the physical appearance we say he is black
In America race is much more than a question of physical appearance. It's also a matter of ideology. In America different races have different belief systems.
That's true, for appearances anyway. I married a Thai gal, very brown. My oldest Daughter and son are dark or almost the same skin color of my wife. My youngest daughter can easily pass for white. The strange part of this is my son had blond hair and very light skin when born and for his first year or two when the hair changed to black and his skin to brown. My youngest daughter was real dark brown when born and for her first year or two until she really lighten up. All are 50-50 white and Thai. I have two grand kids by my oldest daughter who look white and her two youngest kids look Thai. She married a Laotian. So who really knows how kids will look? My youngest daughter married a white gay and her three kids look white although they are one quarter Thai. My son has two kids, one looks Thai and the other white, he is married to a white woman. I gave up trying to figure this stuff out a very long time ago. It makes no sense.
I don't know, most whites and blacks in this country are Christians... even some middle eastern people are Christians, so not sure that plays a role in it people may think this, but in reality it's not always true.... I will give you an example... http://www.northjersey.com/opinion/on-this-ground-zero-tolerance-1.320911?page=all
I don't think Christianity in America is as powerful as it once was. And I don't think of it as a unifying force. Christianity is an itinerant faith, born in the Middle East, growing up in Europe, but losing its moral authority in the West. Christianity has more moral suasion in its new home in Sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia where it is growing by leaps and bounds. In America Christianity has been rolled back by moral relativism and secularism. Even the Roman Catholic Church in America has to import priests from overseas. The lights are going out for robust Christianity in the West. Black folks are mostly leftists who believe in paternalism. And white working class and middle class are mostly part of the Republican base because they still believe in the values of traditional America. Latinos generally don't believe in those traditional values of limited govt. and individual autonomy, etc. Asians are a curious group, neither fish nor fowl. In any event, none of those groups are unified by any principle which creates a shared identity. Blacks and whites in America are sort of like the Tamils and Sinhalese of Sri Lanka.
It is interesting that liberals, while promoting equality, will seek to give special advantages to those they have racially defined as unequal. I'm not exactly sure what the exact differences are between different races but I do know that it takes everyone to support the human race and everyone has different strengths and weaknesses. Liberals have succeeded in making it illegal to see and acknowledge these differences. With regard to IQ, it's just a meaningless test.
Old information. The genetic makeup is the same but the difference between races seems to rest on the subtle matter of relative allele frequencies. So genetics, the structure of genetics, makes the difference.
That's not old information. That article was written last year. What it says if you read it is that while there are biological differences that are ancestry informative there are no genetic boundaries between human populations that can be used to classify distinct races. The racial categories used by society are socially defined and human populations are not objectively biologically differentiated in to classifiable subspecies.
the genetic difference between most human beings is too low to be considered of any taxonomic significance, or to be symptomatic of a subset of homo sapien sapiens.
... choice. Putting everyone with black skin, ginger complexion, or Ukrainian accent into a group and calling that a "race" is an arbitrary choice. It's no more genetics than putting everyone with a gold tooth into a group is metallurgy.
It is human to oversimplify and label. It is human to fear the unknown. But it is also human to have integrity, humility, generosity and empathy and to learn from past mistakes.
But there is no oversimplification here. Races exist indeed and it's obvious for everyone. Better not to try making people deny the existence of races while promoting race-mixing but just making people of all races be proud of their looks and heritage.
