• TheDemonBuer@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    It’s racist that we continue to use racial identifiers even though race science was debunked as pseudoscience some time ago.

    Edit: for those who don’t know, here’s more information:

    Scientific racism, sometimes termed biological racism, is the pseudoscientific belief that the human species is divided into biologically distinct taxa called “races”, and that empirical evidence exists to support or justify racial discrimination, racial inferiority, or racial superiority. Before the mid-20th century, scientific racism was accepted throughout the scientific community, but it is no longer considered scientific. The division of humankind into biologically separate groups, along with the assignment of particular physical and mental characteristics to these groups through constructing and applying corresponding explanatory models, is referred to as racialism, race realism, or race science by those who support these ideas. Modern scientific consensus rejects this view as being irreconcilable with modern genetic research.

    Scientific racism misapplies, misconstrues, or distorts anthropology (notably physical anthropology), craniometry, evolutionary biology, and other disciplines or pseudo-disciplines through proposing anthropological typologies to classify human populations into physically discrete human races, some of which might be asserted to be superior or inferior to others. Scientific racism was common during the period from the 1600s to the end of World War II, and was particularly prominent in European and American academic writings from the mid-19th century through the early-20th century. Since the second half of the 20th century, scientific racism has been discredited and criticized as obsolete, yet has persistently been used to support or validate racist world-views based upon belief in the existence and significance of racial categories and a hierarchy of superior and inferior races.

    Source

    Basically, “race” is a pseudoscientific concept that has been discredited. Race doesn’t really exist. There is no Black race or White race. Those races were made up, constructed around arbitrary physical characteristics, without any basis in actual biological science.

    Race doesn’t really exist, but what does exist is ethnicity:

    An ethnicity or ethnic group is a group of people who identify with each other on the basis of perceived shared attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Those attributes can include a common nation of origin, or common sets of ancestry, traditions, language, history, society, religion, or social treatment. The term ethnicity is often used interchangeably with the term nation, particularly in cases of ethnic nationalism.

    Ethnicity may be construed as an inherited or societally imposed construct. Ethnic membership tends to be defined by a shared cultural heritage, ancestry, origin myth, history, homeland, language, dialect, religion, mythology, folklore, ritual, cuisine, dressing style, art, or physical appearance. Ethnic groups may share a narrow or broad spectrum of genetic ancestry, depending on group identification, with some groups having mixed genetic ancestry.

    Source

    • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months ago

      This is just a variant of the “I don’t see race” argument. When they say black and we say racist, we’re talking about a social construct, not pure biology. The cop and hiring manager still see people as black. Us refusing to use the word for this construct makes it harder - not easier - to address at a systemic level.

      • TheDemonBuer@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        This is just a variant of the “I don’t see race” argument.

        I don’t agree. Acknowledging the very real status of race science being a totally debunked pseudoscience, is not the same as saying, “I don’t see any outward, physical differences between people.” I recognize that some people have, for instance, darker skin than others. I don’t expect that the full rejection of the pseudoscientific concept of “race” will or should result in people becoming “color blind,” so to speak. However, I do think as we move from race classifications to ethnic classifications, skin color (or any other arbitrary outward physical characteristics) will become less important and other ethnic signifiers (like language or dialect, culture, art and clothing styles, nationality, religion, etc) will become more important.