But like... no one claims there's some essentialist and typological race. Everyone knows that it is lossy but a real category. Whom are you attacking here?
Any educated person knows that there's no one to one mapping between DNA and how the word "Asian" is used. There's a good predictive power for DNA and a high correlation. But that's how language works.
Between a "hill" and a "mountain", there's no concrete boundary. So even this is not essentialist. But no educated person would claim that hills and mountains don't exist as categories.
I think this is what you have done: you want to signal that you are against racism. So you end up using a strawman definition of race and then deny that race as a category itself doesn't exist.
Advice: don't create this strawman. Argue against the real thing: race is a category albeit a fuzzy one that humans use through language and this category has a biological basis.
There is one human race, you can divide them in groups by whatever markers you want, doesn't make it a race. "Tall people" is no more a race than "white people" is.
> I think this is what you have done: you want to signal that you are against racism.
To whom? If you had any idea the spats I got into (let's say with "liberals", as a shorthand) because I heard and understood Body Count before they were even born, and same for MLK and Frederick Douglass. I don't do sides, and I'm not aware of any that would have me, so don't assume about me to get away of the scientific facts on race when it comes to humans.
And this isn't 1950s, so "not being racist" is not a flex to me. It's not something to be proud of, but rather grateful for. Like not sacrificing children to volcanos anymore or whatever doesn't make us better people, it makes us better off. We're lucky to have the opportunity to be less ignorant is all.
You can’t solve racism by playing semantic games and claiming race as a concept itself doesn’t exist. There’s not just a single human race just like there’s no one colour. There’s beauty in our differences.
It doesn’t make you more moral to collapse the white and black race into one.
> Advice: don't create this strawman. Argue against the real thing: race is a category albeit a fuzzy one that humans use through language and this category has a biological basis.
Advice: the above is essentially indistinguishable from the false scientific argumentation that white supremacists use to make their case. It has no meaningful basis in science.
> Advice: the above is essentially indistinguishable from the false scientific argumentation that white supremacists use to make their case
Wow. You make things worse by calling people who think race is a fuzzy category white supremacists. This kinda thing is part of the problem. Please reconsider - its childish and everyone can see through this.
Essentially indistinguishable? That's going so far. Please don't do this. It's so counter-productive to provide evidence for the "they call everything racist/white-supremacist" accusation.
Any educated person knows that there's no one to one mapping between DNA and how the word "Asian" is used. There's a good predictive power for DNA and a high correlation. But that's how language works.
Between a "hill" and a "mountain", there's no concrete boundary. So even this is not essentialist. But no educated person would claim that hills and mountains don't exist as categories.
I think this is what you have done: you want to signal that you are against racism. So you end up using a strawman definition of race and then deny that race as a category itself doesn't exist.
Advice: don't create this strawman. Argue against the real thing: race is a category albeit a fuzzy one that humans use through language and this category has a biological basis.