White Supremacists protest at UVA

[Darth Executor]

When we apply simple biological methods the fact is that commonly defined racial groups lack clear-cut genetic boundaries.

Entire post consists of equivocating nonsense, mostly by putting up meaningless things and pretending they're meaningful, like this statement. This is true not just of racial groups but entire species (IE: ring species). Just because there are no clear cut genetic boundaries doesn't mean racial groups don't exist. All biological classifications are, like Psychic Missile would say, social constructs, in that we invented them for our utility, but they are based on actual traits. Racial groups are not based on genotype but phenotype anyway, so pointing out that there are no clear-cut genetic boundaries is meaningless. There are clear and obvious differences in phenotype, starting with the most obvious (appearance).

[Darth Executor]

Looks like the claims by Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe about guns stashed by the white nationalists was "fake news" according to the Virginia State Police.

They wouldn't even need to stash guns because Virginia is an open carry state and many of the right wing protesters were armed.

[Psychic Missile]

then your earlier objection to seer is nonsensical since you were arguing that race isn't something real but "just a social construct"

There is no discrepancy between the statements you quoted. Just because a categorization is arbitrary doesn't mean it can't still matter when it's reinforced by society.

[Leonhard]

then your earlier objection to seer is nonsensical since you were arguing that race isn't something real but "just a social construct"

I don't think you understand what 'social construction' means. It doesn't mean 'doesn't exist', or 'just made up', or 'just lala fantasy land'. Sociocultural constructs, are those agreed upon terms we use in a people living in a society, describing various aspects of our reality, rooted in soft fact. That is, its a term made by people for people.

Lemme give you an example 'Conservative'. Without culture, without civilisation, without us talking... just us back to being dumb brutes around a fire... does the word 'conservative' describe anything real at that point, or is it referring to something we have in say 21st Century United States? Neo-Con is the same thing. There's nothing timeless or absolute about that, but its a welldefined term, but only within a certain sociocultural context.

The consensus of biologist, currently at least, is that race is a sociocultural construct. It has a basis in family resemblance, and the fact that large populations were reproductively isolated for a while, giving rise to various skin tones. But these skin tones, variations in phenotype, all appear to be nothing but variations within a group. And no boundaries, sharp, or fuzzy, can be drawn around any race, all the groups blend seamlessly both genetically as well as historically together.

That, and the fact that some groups have been disadvantaged gave rise to certain situations where rich US plantation owners enslaved another group, to use as cheap disposable labors. These people, say the Confederate intellectuals, saw the black either as definitely cursed by God to be 'servants of the servants', 'Ham's curse' etc... or saw them as an inferior stock of people that needed to be lifted out of their brute state by being slaves. Northerners did the same. Denmark has had its slave trade as well. Rich Europeans seeing them either as animals, or barely civilized.

So 'white people' and 'black people' are real terms in as much as they describe these groups. They're just as real terms as 'SJW' and 'Alt-Rigth', but outside of the particular historical and cultural context they make no sense.

[Darth Executor]

The consensus of biologist, currently at least, is that race is a sociocultural construct.

No it isn't. In fact this statement doesn't even make sense because it's not a biological consensus. Why would biologists have a consensus on something that is not within the realm of biology? The actual consensus in biology is that races are too INCLUSIVE (the opposite of what race denying peddlers try to claim) and prefer to divide humans up by populations, which are much narrower (and more closely resembles how humanity divided itself up before racial theories popularized in the 1800s).

[Adrift]

I don't think you understand what 'social construction' means. It doesn't mean 'doesn't exist', or 'just made up', or 'just lala fantasy land'. Sociocultural constructs, are those agreed upon terms we use in a people living in a society, describing various aspects of our reality, rooted in soft fact. That is, its a term made by people for people.

Lemme give you an example 'Conservative'. Without culture, without civilisation, without us talking... just us back to being dumb brutes around a fire... does the word 'conservative' describe anything real at that point, or is it referring to something we have in say 21st Century United States? Neo-Con is the same thing. There's nothing timeless or absolute about that, but its a welldefined term, but only within a certain sociocultural context.

The consensus of biologist, currently at least, is that race is a sociocultural construct. It has a basis in family resemblance, and the fact that large populations were reproductively isolated for a while, giving rise to various skin tones. But these skin tones, variations in phenotype, all appear to be nothing but variations within a group. And no boundaries, sharp, or fuzzy, can be drawn around any race, all the groups blend seamlessly both genetically as well as historically together.

Correct, as sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant (both of whom specialize in racial theory and classification) put it,

As a result of prior efforts and struggles, we have now reached the point of fairly general agreement that race is not a biologically given but rather a socially constructed way of differentiating human beings. While a tremendous achievement, the transcendence of biologistic conceptions of race does not provide any reprieve from the dilemmas of racial injustice and conflict, nor from controversies over the significance of race in the present. Views of race as socially constructed simply recognize the fact that these conflicts and controversies are now more properly framed on the terrain of politics.

Anthro-biologist John Relethford concurs in his book 50 Great Myths of Human Evolution,

Genetic variation exists among human populations and is geographically structured (populations are typically most similar genetically to their neighbors), but the key features of global genetic variation in humans is not captured by the biological race concept. Race is a label and not a biological reality.

He goes on to say that the concept of race can be broken down in a variety of ways ("ancestry, geography, nationality, cultural identity, religion, and language among others"), and because there's a variety of cultural and biological definitions of race, "it is possible that two people can talk to each other about race and actually be talking about quite different things." But concerning the biological concept of race, Relethford points out that up until the later part of the 20th century, race was considered the equivalent of a "subspecies". That idea has since been thrown out because "The extent of biological variation in the human species and its distribution argue against diving humanity into different subspecies, and biologists and anthropologists place all of humanity in a single subspecies–Homo sapiens sapiens."

Many anthropologists have questioned the utility of geographic races because of the indeterminacy in picking the number of races, as expected when we try to break down continuous variation into a set of discrete, nonoverlapping groups. (Recall the example about different shades of skin color from the previous myth.) Others have argued that despite these flaws there are times when a broad breakdown of humanity is useful, even if the dividing lines are arbitrary. The problem here is that such an approach contrasts with traditional views of race that emphasize discrete groups. There are occasions when it is useful to examine broad patterns of variation by using large continental groupings as the unit of analysis, but these regional groups should not be referred to as races as the history of the biological race concept implies something different than a simple label. This is not a case of politically correct semantics, but refers to underlying differences in assessing variation. The biological race concept is not useful for describing human biological variation.

Source: Race and Global Patterns of Phenotypic Variation by John H. Relethford, AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 139:16–22 (2009)

ABSTRACT Phenotypic traits have been used for centuries for the purpose of racial classification. Developments in quantitative population genetics have allowed global comparison of patterns of phenotypic variation with patterns of variation in classical genetic markers and DNA markers. Human skin color shows a high degree of variation among geographic regions, typical of traits that show extensive natural selection. Even given this high level of geographic differentiation, skin color variation is clinical and is not well described by discrete racial categories. Craniometric traits show a level of among-region differentiation comparable to genetic markers, with high levels of variation within populations as well as a correlation between phenotypic and geographic distance. Craniometric variation is geographically structured, allowing high levels of classification accuracy when comparing crania from different parts of the world. Nonetheless, the boundaries in global variation are not abrupt and do not fit a strict view of the race concept; the number of races and the cutoffs used to define them are arbitrary. The race concept is at best a crude first-order approximation to the geographically structured phenotypic variation in the human species.

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