The best one is when it just straight up lies and says it was delivered

Fair enough, have a great day.

Upvote/downvote totals matter. Seeing a ton of push back in the comments matters.

Debate is for the audience, not for your opponent.

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.

You can call that race, but nobody else thinks of Senogambia when you say “the milk drinking race”,

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.

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.

I hate people who push bad science in service to an agenda. Especially when it’s doublethink levels of blatantly, obviously wrong bad science.

A haplotype is a group of alleles in an organism that are inherited together from a single parent,[1][2] and a haplogroup (haploid from the Greek: ἁπλοῦς, haploûs, “onefold, simple” and English: group) is a group of similar haplotypes that share a common ancestor with a single-nucleotide polymorphism mutation.[3] More specifically, a haplotype is a combination of alleles at different chromosomal regions that are closely linked and that tend to be inherited together. As a haplogroup consists of similar haplotypes, it is usually possible to predict a haplogroup from haplotypes. Haplogroups pertain to a single line of descent. As such, membership of a haplogroup, by any individual, relies on a relatively small proportion of the genetic material possessed by that individual.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup

That’s race! That’s the definition of race! Fucking university types just don’t like the word!

Haplogroups can be used to define genetic populations and are often geographically oriented. For example, the following are common divisions for mtDNA haplogroups:

African: L0, L1, L2, L3, L4, L5, L6

West Eurasian: H, T, U, V, X, K, I, J, W (all listed West Eurasian haplogroups are derived from macro-haplogroup N)[10]

East Eurasian: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, Y, Z (note: C, D, E, G, and Z belong to macro-haplogroup M)

Native American: A, B, C, D, X

Australo-Melanesian: P, Q, S

They are describing race! It’s super fucking obvious if you get rid of whatever white guilt stupidity makes you get the ick when you hear the word “race”.

Yeah but it’s still obvious bullshit. Bad science is bad science no matter what level of authority does it.

That information is provided that way because people won’t know what Y-DNA haplogroup they’re in, but will generally know if they’re considered black.

So? Instead of “race” you’re saying “Y-DNA Halogroup”. Performative bullshit just to avoid the fact that race is real. You could call it “Mario Kart” instead of race, it’s still the same damn thing and it’s still real.

One is incorrect. I don’t really understand the question.

Racial categories aren’t useful for science, though.

Au contraire

Black people are at a much higher risk for mutations in the hemoglobin gene responsible for SCA. Researchers believe the reason lies in how this condition has evolved.

Over time, sickle cell conditions have evolved to protect against malaria, a parasitic infection spread by mosquito bites. Malaria is common in sub-Saharan Africa and other parts of the world that also have a high prevalence of sickle cell. Having SCT — but not SCA — helps reduce the severity of malaria.

https://www.healthline.com/health/sickle-cell-anemia-black-people

That’s just off the top of my head, I’m sure there’s many other examples. Health care for Black vs white vs Asian etc is slightly different. And it’s not due to social conditions alone - the same mechanisms that made people whose predominant ancestry is sub-Saharan African have darker skin, also caused this decreased resistance to sickle cell anemia.

Another one that just came to me was lactose intolerance. White people have higher tolerance for lactose, so a milk-heavy diet is worse for other races.

Ignoring race is not only problematic societally, but is bad science.

No worries, it happens.

Ok, there you have it. I think that’s an incorrect usage of the word, but for the sake of discussion, let’s call it genetics. It’s a real, physical, biological phenomenon and it’s not purely a social construct (except in the vague sense that all of interpreted reality is a social construct).

Ethnicity is not genetic.

I told you, ignore the genetic bit if you want to quibble about it. I’m talking about inherited physical characteristics. What would you call it? Pick a word, whatever. That’s what I’m talking about, and that’s the basis for race.

If Harris was born in the US, moved to Norway when she was 3, went to school in Norway, studied in Norway, then returned to the US, what ethnicity do you think she would identify with?

Identity with, or identify as? You can choose the former to an extent, but the latter is biologically inherited.

Why would you connect such unconnected things as phenotype and heritage?

Fine, since you’re getting hung up on definitions, instead of “phenotype” say “inherited physical characteristics”. I don’t feel like getting into an argument about genetics, it’s beside the point. The point is, people inherit physical characteristics common to their enthnicity, and that is what “race” is. It’s not a bad thing, just a descriptor.

The connection is not “You have black skin, therefore, you are African American”

The connection is “you have black skin, and wiry hair, and African ancestry, and X and Y and Z, therefore you are Black.” And it’s less a connection than a definition. No value judgment, just a statement.

It sounds like what you should be arguing against is “you are Black, therefore you are inferior”. Which would be a really easy and common argument to make without all this bullshit “race is imaginary” crap.

Phenotype has nothing to do with nationality. Nationality =/= ethnicity.

See here on the other side of the Atlantic

You force migrant Africans to drown in the Mediterranean, get off your high horse dude.

So it would be inaccurate to call Obama African American because he has no slave ancestry?

It would be debatable. That’s the point I’ve been trying to make. You take a set of physical characteristics and common heritage and you classify people based on that. Some people won’t neatly fall into those classifications and that’s okay, but the classifications are still valid.

I didn’t say anything about validity.

That’s the whole point of the phrase “race is a social construct”. Attacking the validity of race as a concept.

As I have said, picking individual outliers does not invalidate a category. I think you’ve got it backwards. We interpret racial characteristics through a social lense. But the characteristics do, themselves, exist. And they are easily grouped (not exclusively, but generally) into the categories we call “race”. And we’re not randomly picking traits. They’re inherited via a common ancestry. As you said, physical, observable traits.

Could Harris pass as Sicilian? Probably not, but even if she could, she doesn’t have any Sicilian ancestry to my knowledge, so it would be inaccurate to call her Sicilian. Or Indian or Korean or whatever. She could call herself Nordic and we would laugh at her.

I think I actually can pick Mongol from (Han) Chinese, actually.

It’s a total continuum so there is no perfect

Agreed.

As for your edit, you responded to me, dude. I didn’t jump over here.

No category is absolute. By your logic, it’s impossible to call anything a car, because cars have wheels but suitcases ALSO have wheels, therefore the entire idea that cars exist is just a made up social construct.

Or for a less ridiculous example: is a battery-powered bicycle actually an electric moped? Or the ever classic, is a hotdog a sandwich? We can discuss these questions without questioning the validity of concepts such as bicycles, mopeds, hotdogs and sandwiches. Categories exist. They are useful descriptors despite the existence of edge cases and blurry boundaries.