- never signed up for anything like this,
- never donated to or signed up for emails from the DNC, et al.,
- political texts like this come all the time, and
- I hesitate to reply “stop” because I don’t want them to know this is a live number (is my instinct here outdated/inapplicable?)
No. Case in point: I mentioned how Harris has lighter skin than many a Sicilian, and also very much has a temperate climate nose. These are not, in the slightest, phenotype traits typical of sub-saharan Africa mostly Nigeria thereabouts where most of the slaves trafficked during the Atlantic slave trade where from.
If you can’t see that then I suggest you visit an optometrist.
Then why is Harris considered black? What does “passing” mean, here? Does it really have anything to do with phenotype, or is it cultural?
That’s a misexpression, the genome codes for five. And even then: Having six fingers is a physical, objective, trait. Harris being black isn’t, phenotypically she could just as well be Italian.
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 didn’t say anything about validity.
So it would be inaccurate to call Obama African American because he has no slave ancestry?
“African American” is a subculture identified with people freed from slavery. It is not a thing of ancestry, or Obama wouldn’t be part of it. It is not a matter of phenotype, or Harris wouldn’t be part of it. And both aren’t outliers, they’re simply prominent examples. At the same time, you have more recent African immigrants to the US who very much insist that they are not part of that group identity. Dunno how Obama’s father identified but he had that kind of heritage.
Noone, at least no American, is questioning Harris’ and Obama’s identity as African American, and that’s precisely because it’s neither about ancestry nor phenotype but subcultural belonging. They’re African American because they stay vibing that way.
Plenty of people with much darker skin in the Nordics. If she had gone to school and studied in Norway or something Nordic would be absolutely accurate. See here on the other side of the Atlantic we don’t sort ethnicities by phenotype because phenotype has nothing to do with ethnicity. Correlation, yes, causation, fuck no. Double triple fuck no. This man is Oldenburger. How could I claim otherwise his Low Saxon is better than mine!
Phenotype has nothing to do with nationality. Nationality =/= ethnicity.
You force migrant Africans to drown in the Mediterranean, get off your high horse dude.
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.
That’s the whole point of the phrase “race is a social construct”. Attacking the validity of race as a concept.
I never claimed them to be equal. Also, “Nordic” isn’t a nationality, Norwegian would be. 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? And yes bi-ethnic people exist, very common in fact because people do move around.
Did you just call me Italian. Or Greek. Or whatever. You force migrant Latinos to drown in the Rio Grande.
Why would you connect such unconnected things as phenotype and heritage? Why not have separate classifiers for both things? Why, then, on top of that, sort people into subcultures based on those classifiers?
Democracy is a social construct. Freedom is a social construct. The only thing that’s getting attack, and should and must be attacked, is a purported biological basis for ascribing properties to people based on phenotype because that’s complete BS. And with that, I repeat the Epictetus quote:
Do you now, finally, understand what he’s saying there? The connection is not “You have black skin, therefore, you are African American”, the connection is rather “You have black skin, therefore, you get sunburnt less easy than me”.
Identity with, or identify as? You can choose the former to an extent, but the latter is biologically inherited.
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 “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.
So Obama isn’t African American, got it.
Ethnicity is not genetic. Are you one of those yanks spewing nonsense such as “I’m 23% French that’s why I like mayonnaise”.
That anyone said that is something you’re imagining. Also just because we’re imagining something doesn’t mean it’s not real. A judge is just a human in fancy clothes imagining to have power over you, try telling them that as a defendant they’ll be impressed at your reasoning skills. The bailiffs? Only imagining that they have to follow the judge’s orders.
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.
That’s genetics.