Help I’m high and watching a video on Rachel Dolezal.
I'll go for a short answer.
Race as we know was basically made up around the time of post-Recpnquista Spain. Before then, you primarily identified divides between strangers around you by religion. Spain hosted Catholics, Muslims, and Jews. But Ferdinand and Isabella, ultra-Catholics, decreed that all their subjects must convert to Catholicism. So now that we're all Catholic brothers and sisters, how do you figure out who the bad people are? What they look like superficially, and who their ancestors were.
Coincidentally, the kingdoms of Western Europe were also sending expeditions to other continents around this time, continents full of non-Christians who looked very different from Europeans. Non-white, non-Christians who made really great slaves. So race and hierarchies of racial supremacy mutated over centuries as a self-justification for colonization, imperialism, slavery, and genocide.
This of course poses a chicken-and-egg problem. Did racism develop as a justification for colonialism, or did colonialism and slavery happen because Europeans were racist? Both. Both economic self-interest and racial prejudice fed into and intensified each other.
Im not an expert but this is how I see it:
Genetically, human beings from outside of Africa are more similar to eachother than pretty much every genetic group of humans in Africa (thhey are considered one race though).
Then you have the fact that when accounting for material conditions and availability of opportunity every study shows that humans tend to perform the same in cognitive ability when differentiating by race (with some exceptions in narrow academic fields and/or small genetic groups such as askenazi jews, which can easily be explained by cultural nurturing).
This is enough for me to take every argument that is race divisive or race deterministic as absolute garbage.
I understand that people like familiarity and as such, many people feel more comfortable surrounded by folks that look, talk, smell and act the same way as them and their families, but that is conventional and depends on the particular person.
Sometimes I think about the time Blaire White gave a hypothetical about going on a date with her. If she got to the restaurant first and then you show up, the waiter would ask, "who are you sitting with?" You wouldn't say "him, over there." because she doesn't look like a man. This isn't a comprehensive look, and I think, notoriously, you wouldn't find a comprehensive look from her, but it's a base way of looking at gender as a social construct (as opposed to how absurd it would be to make the definition of gender somehow genetic - the waiter wouldn't understand you). In the same way, if you're a white supremacist and you fucking hate the Russians - Russians aren't exactly white and Italians are definitely your allies. If Russia is incapacitated, Britain fucks off, and France is subjugated, conveniently, Italians stop being white. If there's one strain of Germanic white on Earth because you're a white supremacist who exterminated everyone else, and you learn through gene testing that a person had an Italian ancestor 500 years ago, that person isn't really white because of that drop of Italian blood. In that sense, whiteness is a product of the social and cultural context around it. Likewise, there can be a lot of diversity in people who are black, but they might all just be called black.
But Hume and Kant both wrote about how Africans were inferior to whites, arguing on polygenic bases (that different regional/national peoples were permanently hierarchically organized by intelligence, etc). (On National Characters, Hume, 1754) (On the Different Races of Man, Kant, 1777)
A scientific basis for racism as a concept was also (not only but also) championed by Thomas Jefferson who called upon scientists to come up with a scientific reason for why black etc people were inferior to whites.
Anyway, to prevent this from getting too off topic, check out Naomi Zack's Philosophy of Science and Race for how the social construct of race and attempted scientific explanations intersect. ( chapter 1 )
He talks about it in his Notes on the State of Virginia
To our reproach it must be said, that though for a century and a half we have had under our eyes the races of black and of red men, they have never yet been viewed by us as subjects of natural history. I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.
ugh, I've learned to hate this argument because I have to start from zero and virtually no one who wants to have it has the necessary context on both race and gender. but I'm a pain piggy so once more into the breach. downvote button is to your left.
thesis: we're giving people like Rachel Dolezal really short shrift, much like transgender people got in the first half of the twentieth century. I'm not going to argue that she is actually trans racial. I'm arguing for the theoretical possibility that transracial people exist.
background:
in order for this argument to make any sense, we need to talk about gender, how it/sex are constructed (yes, sex is also a social construction), what it means for something to be socially constructed, and the most miserable topic of all, speaking as a trans femme person - what it means to be transgender.
fuck, a whole book could go right here. I really fucking hate this.
a socially-constructed category is not an imaginary one. money is socially-constructed, but it obviously has deep and real impact on the world. that is, in fact, what it means for something to be socially-constructed: an idea that exists within the minds of people, that people agree exists, and that has force on the world. categories of people, like gender, are socially-constructed when they are not uniquely biologically determined and the categorization has real impacts on people's lives (good and bad). frequently, they have some elements that are rooted in biology - like primary sex characteristics being used to determine (by people, of people) their sex categorization. people do largely fall into a bimodal distribution of sex characteristics and what we call sex does describe the two dominant modes, but it fails to capture the full diversity of sex characteristics and how people express them. for example, what category should an XY person with complete androgen-insensitivity be placed in? their chromosomes say male, their primary sex characteristics say female. and there are a billion examples like this.
in the same way, both gender and race are socially-constructed. exercise for the reader: make both of these cases. I'm getting tired and I'm definitely going to fall asleep before I finish this. notice that for all of these socially-constructed categories, they determine many parts of our lives and violence is used to enforce all of them.
the rest coming in the morning... leave questions on this first part and I'll be sure to answer them.
I'm also a pain piggy (as you well know by now...) and recently read/skimmed that controversial Hypatia article; but much more interesting is this quite good and recent critique also in Hypatia.
Basically one of the things these feminist philosophers were seriously arguing is that adopting and raising Black children would 'transracialize' the parent.
That raising a Black kid and being 'involved with their Black struggles' somehow rubbed off onto the parent, such that they are no longer 'completely White'.
It is almost like the White liberal feminist version of "my friend is Black so I can say the n-word too!"What is also really strange for people outside of academic philosophy, they don't talk about any 'common conception' or 'existing social construct'; rather they define race and gender as whatever assists in the political goals of emancipation.
i.e. some combination of what best describes systematic oppressions people face, and what generalizations have emancipatory potential.In that context, saying "trans women are women" is not a claim about trans women, but about the socially constructed category of 'women'.
And then any argument about "is Rachel Dolezal a Black person" instead becomes something like "would it be better for Black people if she was?"There was another example in that critique about 'racial transgression' which is really interesting, it is worth skipping the rest of the article to read just that part.
oh this is fascinating, I'm going to have to think about this.
I was going a different direction, similar to the previous discussion we had (to which I still owe you a response!), looking at gender as a subjective experience and as an experience of objectification, and noting how the two can differ, creating a third experience - the image of the self, or the self as conceptualized or symbolized (I think this mostly fits with Lacan so far). neither the subjective self or objectified self / mirrored-self exist as discrete entities within the mind, they're experiences that we have, and they aren't necessarily (or ever) coherent. we attempt to synthesize these two experiences when we construct our conceptualized self, or the self-as-image, the mirrored self.
gender identity is one subjective experience of many while the social-construction of gender exists primarily as an object experience, and it exists there with such force that we can barely conceive of gender as a subjective experience at all - most people when pushed could not tell you what it feels like to be masc or femme, especially cis people. where these two experiences match, our self-as-image/self-image has no contradiction and we don't have to maintain the dissonance of objectifying ourselves to construct our self-image in a way that differs significantly from either set of experiences.
where they don't match, however, we have a problem. our self image can either correspond with one or the other, but the social construction of gender offers only a binary choice (and not even necessarily a coherent one as gender-identification-by-external-parties can change from moment to moment) - man or woman, while our multiplicity of experience doesn't necessarily allow such neat and easy categorization. and so we get dysphoria as the self image must differ from one or both of these sets of experiences - if my subjective experience is closer to femme and the world is telling me that I'm a man, I'm going to view myself as one, the other, or something in-between. transgender people transition because the subjective self is very hard to change (and doing so is usually traumatic) while changing how others see you is much easier. dysphoria is deeply unpleasant and it requires a lot of work to maintain this dissonance in either direction.
(side note: this explains quite clearly why trans people experience an uptick in dysphoria when they first accept that they're trans. their self-image changes immediately but now the primary dissonance is between the self image and the mirrored self, and there are a lot of opportunities for that dissonance to manifest as we are gendered repeatedly/often.)
race is a little bit different. so far as I know, and this might be an expression of cisracial privilege, there isn't a subjective experience of race, per se. instead, race exists purely within the mirrored-self, a construct from entirely outside the mind, as people categorize themselves and others into races, and those categories are imbued with sociopolitical force, defining much of the experience of our lives. some of these experiences are fine and good - cultural memories and shared experiences like food, traditions, and rituals - while others are strictly negative, like what schools you are allowed to attend or where you are allowed to sit on the bus. decolonization theory seems to agree with this, as the self-image is targeted and constructed by the colonizers, using it to police our understanding of our own subjective experience (with patriarchy filling the same role for gender).
however, what if, like with gender, we could develop a subjective experience of race? (we could also here go in the other direction and try to eliminate the subjective experience of gender but I've found through experience that there does really seem to be something there; for the sake of this argument the path doesn't really matter.) colonization and upbringing deeply affect the self-image, constructing it through every facet of life in order to maintain power structures in the world, and through trauma, bonding with other people, etc, our subjective experience can start to feel something rather like the construct of race. we can view this developed experience either as negatively-constructed (experiences you ought to have based on the self-image but don't - like Asian people are smart but I don't feel smart; or even Asian people are smart so I do feel smart) or we can view it as positively-constructed experiences (an upbringing in South Asian culture having become an internalized part of subjective experience; or consider a Black child raised in a white family, shielded from race until young adulthood, and so possessing the subjective experience that they are no different from white people, the self-image reflecting this, until it is called into sharp relief during a family vacation to the American south). as these two views are just mirrors of each other, I'm going to use the latter framework. this is also the trickiest part of the entire argument and the hardest for me to explain as it's so poorly understood and I actually don't know of anyone else who has done work on this line.
so again, we have three views of the self - the subject, the mirrored self, and the self-image. they inform and change each other, over time creating new experiences. all three of these selves can differ from each other requiring some level of dissonance to maintain the distinction, allowing for something rather like dysphoria. even with the negatively-constructed view of race, where the subjective experience is primarily a lack, the difference between the self-image as informed by that lack and the mirrored-self as viewed through the eyes of other people, is plenty to create the possibility for racial dysphoria.
so I think we must allow for the possibility of transracial people and we should treat people who claim this experience, like Rachel Dolezal, with more empathy and compassion - especially those of us who are transgender and have so many experiences with the reactionary ways people try to enforce the categories of race and gender. reactionaries want to make these categories immutable and a la the argument you linked, weakening the racial category can only be good for the people oppressed by it.
I also want to point out just how reactionary the opposition to the possible existence of transracial people gets, with people repeating transmisogynistic and cissexist views verbatim, except that they refer to race rather than gender. so much of this is born as a visceral disgust at the possibility that people might escape what is generally viewed as a biologically real and essential categorization. I encourage people who fall into this camp to think long and hard about where that moral outrage comes from, why they've set it aside for transgender people (many, many people never do), and why they feel like they need to maintain it for the category of race.
there is even a TERF-like position here that leftists will adopt, citing the need to abolish the category entirely as a reason not to allow for the existence of transracial people, arguing that transracial transition into oppressed groups appropriates a long history of violence, colonization, and enslavement. probably the most charitable and best position in this line is that we must allow the oppressed to define themselves, and oppressors should not be able to insert themselves, as this self-determination is one of the most important things taken from colonized and enslaved people. I personally don't see how we can possibly eliminate the category while continuing to enforce its boundaries. and I encourage people to think long and hard about why they would reject these arguments for gender but not race. I'd also suggest looking at people like Dolezal who say they wish to transition from white to Black with a little bit of empathy and consider the hardship that comes with managing dysphoria. eliminating the category requires weakening its boundaries, there are people at the margins of these categories who experience violence and harm (even if it's internalized to the self), and our tolerance could ease it.
I try to share this view for this reason. we're very quick to leap to judgement because we do not understand. personally, I need a little bit more before I'm firmly in the "transracial people are definitely real" camp - we have so few transracial people who have shared their experiences and asked for recognition that it's not yet clear to me that the argument I'm laying out here is correct. but I very much want to create the space for those people to ask for recognition, to share their experiences, and so that we are prepared to meet them with solidarity when they do.
shoot, I don't have a log in so I can't read that critique. know how I can steal it?
it's on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub
(see also the chat)
Idk if this exactly answers you Q.
So defining race in anything other than describing appearence, should be useless as it provides no obviously useful information about a person/group of people, does it?
Also "race" is a debunked meaningless term, meaning 'genetic stock' before we actually knew anything about genetics. But let's humour it.
So why is 'race' used and how?
In short: Race is now used to symbolise a group of people in relation to skin colour etc. Ugh.
An example of this is used in the USA. you guessed it... Classism. In African-Americans communities, many of which communities are comparatively poorer. Many black people throughout America are descendants from modern slaves. You would expect after a long time and many, many generations that the wealth gap would've healed between black and white communities, it didn't. Many black communities are still comparatively impoverished in the US. The economic system has so far not facilitated social mobility well at all. If the US had fluid social mobility, 'race' would not be as topical. Because why would it?; skin colour represents nothing about who we are morally, politically, or talents, interests or how we think as an individual/group. In the US, racial minorities have mostly retained the symbolism of poverty that still stagnates in many black/latino communities.
This can be seen (anecdotally) in the converse situation, where most black/Latino celebrities do not appear to experience racism to anywhere near the same extent as working class black/latino individuals. You think Will Smith had trouble getting a house in the Hollywood suburbs? In the same way white celebrities are treated to a significantly better standard than white working class people. The biggest factor here is that celebrities are overtly wealthy, regardless of being black, white or latino.
Skin colour has nothing to do with poverty. Being a descendant of people who had nothing, in a society without social mobility, does has something to do with poverty.
When you have all of the negative connotations that come with poverty, associated with a race of people (ie crime violence etc), some Tucker Carlsonesque genius is going to get scared and racist, and subsequently blaming skin-pigment for socio-economic issues.
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ok linking part 2 of my response for the OP under the expectation that he's no longer high and so unlikely to come back to this thread: https://hexbear.net/post/13525/comment/86363
let me know if there's anything that isn't clear or needs further explanation. I'm tired of rewriting this so I'm going to save this response and edit it as I want to improve it from here on out.
