If race is nothing more than a "social construct".....

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How do you explain testing that can reveal a person's genetic ethnicity? If there is no such thing as race/ethnicity then why do we see it manifest in DNA tests? It isn't "racist" to suggest that there are different groups of people. It is absurd to say that there is no such thing as race or ethnicity. We can see it with our own eyes. We have proof of such. We can also see the different phenotypes amongst groups of people. When human remains are found, they can determine not only their age and gender, but their race as well. These things are documented. I don't see why its considered wrong to acknowledge these findings. We are not all the same. We are all different, and there is nothing wrong with it.

Human diversity is real. Individual traits are distributed around the globe geographically. So DNA tests can give you clues as to where your DNA came from. But "race" is something else. Human genetic diversity doesn't fall into concordant patterns that can be called subspecies or "races". The "evidence" that "we see before our eyes" are differences in a small number of phenotypical traits. Traits that happened to have social importance in pegging people. And these traits have social importance because they are high visible (like skin color, hair type, eye shape, etc).

We discriminate based upon skin color. Not upon the shape of your incisors, or upon your blood type, nor upon how lactose tolerant you are even though those traits are just inheritable from your ancestors as skin color.

Yes, calling race a social construct doesn't deny that DNA codes for certain physical traits. It is the value we place upon people and their contributions which is a construction.

The concept of "race," as in ascribing qualities other than purely physical qualities to a particular "race," is a social construct.

Dark skin, in and of itself, does not confer characteristic psychological traits on a person.

Dark skin, in and of itself, does not make a person inferior in intelligence.

All dark skin, really, is an adaptation to a strong sun.

Race doesn't determine the "psychological" characteristic of a person. We are all individuals. However, race and ethnicity aren't merely "social constructs" they are genuine and observable mainly in our physical traits. To deny it , is to be woefully ignorant.

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Yes, denying that there are differences of physiology between various members of some group of organisms would be woefully ignorant. However, denial of physical attributes and their genetic ontology is not at all the point of understanding race as a social construct.

The point of understanding race as a social construct (and incidentally, of understanding disability as a social construct) is to

1) accept that there are differences between us
2) accept that those differences, because they are marked and visible, have provided for us a means of categorising people
3) deny that those categorizations should come with the traditionally-upheld value judgements.

For instance, black people are not innately less valuable than white people. However, evidence shows us that black people ARE valued less. (The Black Lives Matter movement tries to show us that police have a tendency to shoot argumentative black people, and a tendency to give white people a chance to argue.)

This value judgement is what has been constructed.

The construction has its roots in imperialism of African labor. Imagine someone who is a totally different skin color shows up in your town and puts you in handcuffs, puts you in a boat with hundreds of others and makes you row in order to avoid getting whipped and earn some food. Then the boat lands, the people with the whips trade you for money, and the landowner that bought you takes you to his farm and makes you do work....provides you with no education that would help you even begin to cope in this new, strange society where the landowner has a whip and you don't. Generations--and that is a very very important word--generations of black people were brought to the US and placed under these conditions. How can they possibly get a leg up? For this reason, black contributions to US culture have been re-appropriated (into jazz for instance) but not valued. The understanding that deeply permeates US culture--whether we are willing to admit it or not--is that black IS innately less valuable than white, unless black has been snatched up and incorporated into white culture, whose roots are largely traced to Western Europe.

The value judgements are embedded in art, the media, literature, the educational system.

The point of calling race a social construction is to provide a starting point for beginning to dismantle the value judgements and begin seeing people as individuals, not simply part of their category.

I wish people would at least try to understand some of what the OP is posting.

I may not subscribe fully to a particular poster's viewpoint, but it sounds like these people may get sidelined and mocked as bigots or racists. I can understand why they fear they are under attack. Not all their points are wrong. People also say that free speech doesn't give you the right to be free from negative consequences of certain speech and expressions...but isn't the whole point of civilized debate in the first place to have a civil, rational argument or discussion without high levels of rudeness?

I see no such attacks here. Why bring it up?

I don't see any attacks so far in the thread... But it might be the case that it is confusing that there are two different definitions of the word race at play here.

No one in the thread (so far) has denied that DNA codes for certain physical attributes.

When people talk about race as a construction, they are defining race as something more than physical attributes.

So, definition #1 for race (off the top of my head, so maybe not perfectly thought out: a set of coincidences of gene expression that we can often observe at first glance

Definition #2 for race: a set of assumptions that have become attached by society to race as defined in definition #1

Sure there is genetic differences between black Africans, and white Europeans, but it's also true that there are differences between ethnic groups within African and European groups. But despite that, all human beings, regardless of color, all have more in common genetically than not. Hence, there is zero reason why race mixing shouldn't happen.

Yeah, there are the physiological differences between ethnic groups and European groups. I think I read about the African race groups being the most diverse, at least as far as anything but hair or eye colors. Sorry, but I have yet to see a person of non-white descent carry or express attributes of any hair colors but brown or black, or any eye colors besides a brown or whatever. I think I might have actually saw it before online, but for non-whites, it's far fewer of the population than the white population. So sorry, but I just don't see how the natural versions of red hair or fair blonde hair can survive and not die out.

Nobody came on this particular thread and actually said that race-mixing shouldn't happen. I don't really agree that we should try to stop it either, but what I'm concerned about in the back of my mind is all the natural hair and eye color variations I mentioned in the above paragraph.

Neither did I see any attacks like fluter mentions, but I was talking about the context of these topics in general.

But what if mixing races resulted in even more variation, [i]within[]i] the color brown? Would you consider that a bad thing?

The whiteness fetish seems in no danger of disappearing.

I get tired of threads where people on the right endlessly complain about phantom attacks. I consider it plausible that they happen, but I rarely get a reply when I ask where and how.

The point is, the variations I mentioned are recessive and it would require two parents who hold the same gene for it to be expressed in a child. I think that's really how it works, though even I'm not an expert.

But for your second question, if mixing races [i]did result in more and different-looking variation, sure why not? Hell, I'd might even strongly encourage it in that case, for the sake of our species. But my first point was that, natural blondes and redheads are in decline and even if they don't totally die out, I would still have less of a chance to meeting or seeing one. There's also the idea that natural fair hair is just a legacy that is no longer necessary.

Thing is, though, light skinned people sometimes have dark skinned babies. Genetic testing has destroyed s lot of ideas people used to have about skin color.

There may be a genetic component to preferences for similar or different features. Like I said in another thread, you can prefer people with particular features, skin tone in particular. Leave it out of your profile or alienate some people and enrage others. Date who you like.

Ethnicity and genetic haplotypes are real, race is a social construct. Identifying someone as a member of a race based on their external appearance or other identifiers doesn't give insight into their genetic background; someone who you identify as 'white' or 'black' or whatever may well have mixed ancestry. Two mixed people of similar genetic backgrounds may well be lumped into different races based on other considerations like appearance and self-identification.