I’m currently educating myself about racism and anti-racism, and I keep reading that “race is a social construct”. I see how much subjective social views condition our ideas of different races. And yet, people from different places have certain traits that are quite obvious, and shared in common. If I’m not mistaken, that can apply to more than just visible things – things like susceptibility or resistance to certain diseases, if I’m not mistaken. Obviously no one deserves to be mistreated for any of these traits. But what I’m reading and what I seem to experience don’t add up. Anyone able to clarify things for me?
In: Biology
Anything that anyone thinks of as a race is inherently of pretty huge group. One of the common mistakes people make, in doing brain work like forming opinions and thinking about complex things, is seeing patterns where there are none.
Some people who study how other people think did an experiment where they gave people a special test. The experimenter would tell the person they were studying that the experimenter had in mind a rule that applied to a group of three numbers. The person would try to figure out what the rule was by asking the experimenter about as many groups of three numbers as they wanted, the experimenter would tell them whether or not each group of three numbers satisfied the rule. It was very rare for someone to succeed at this test despite getting to ask about as many sets of numbers as they want, because the rule was always any 3 numbers in ascending order. Most people would ask about a few sets of numbers getting idea ask about further sets of numbers until they were sure they were correct.
This is essentially the same process by which every person on the planet forms ideas about race. We encounter other people in our lives and we form ideas that there are different groups of people. But these subgroups don’t really exist in a real way, the groupings we form in our mind aren’t people with more similar DNA than everyone else. Sometimes these groups share a skin tone but often they don’t and one “white” person might have a skin tone closer to someone from Southeast Asia then an extremely fair-skinned “white” person.
We encounter the true reality that everyone we meet is human with individual origins and history not best described by membership in a group other than human and because of a tendency to over identify patterns reform the belief that there are subgroups within humanity that when you try to define objectively you discover do not exist
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