TimewornTraveler@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
… that is not how race works.
we already ARE the same race. we constructed differences to divide us, elevate ourselves and put down outsiders without having to accomplish anything.
Imagine a world where everyone taller than 6 feet is considered a different social class. that’s race.
DeadMartyr@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
I get it and agree mostly. I definitely think socioeconomic classes are more of a defining/dividing line than a heritage you happen to share with someone.
Only <1% of any humans DNA differs, but I think a better point is that everyone is atleast 50th cousins or something (Granted if you share a heritage its much closer)
But also if you told someone like my girlfriend that race isn’t real she’d probably sock you. She’s experienced it and its very real to her.
When we started dating I would actually try to talk about how I don’t understand why she would side with someone solely because their skin was dark like hers and it would be a point of contention. She would literally associate with someone that objectively did something she thinks is reprehensible because of literally only that. She grew up very wealthy and never hurt anyone, guy on the news was someone in and out of prison who literally fired first on the guy that revived him with narcan–but they happen to have the same color of skin.
As a boy other Latinos would literally antagonize me for “acting white” because I would rather read during recess than play football/soccer–because being educated is associated with being white; we were the children of poor families with gangbangers as role models so we must obviously be destined for different things /s
I feel like a lot of racial issues are cultural and self-perpetuating. But my girlfriend in particular was the only black woman in a white conservative town, people would open doors for her friends and close it when it came to her, If I visit her hometown she doesn’t want to be out for long, etc. So I get why it is very important to her.
TimewornTraveler@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
socially constructed things are very real. I don’t know who the fuck let that fart out in our society, to make people think that when they hear “it’s a social construct” they hear “it’s not real!” pretty frustrating
what it means is that it’s an arbitrary thing based on mostly nothing except history and all it would take to change it is for us to act differently towards it.
but the history behind it is very real, so we can’t just eliminate race by pretending it isn’t real. we have to acknowledge the impacts, respect the differences, and work towards making the idea of race obsolete. that’ll probably take a few thousand years lol
squaresinger@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The discrimination is real, no question about it.
The thing that’s not “real” is that this is solely about skin color.
In the USA race is defined quite closely along the lines of “continent of origin” (or of origin of the ancestors), because the USA Is a country with worldwide immigration. Thus the groups are larger.
Compare that to Europe, where world-wide immigration only started picking up in the last two decades. Here people can discriminate just as easily within what would be considered the same race in the USA. For example, many people in Austria really hate Serbians. Many Serbians really hate Croatians. Many Croatians really hate Albanians and so on.
This is also visible in the meaning of the words “race” and “racism”. Before WW2 “race” was commonly used in Europe as in the “German race”, the “English race” or the “French race”. And while the term “race” fell out of use after WW2 and was subsequently re-imported from the USA with the USA-meaning, the original meaning lives on in the meaning of “racism”.
For example, if a French man hates all the English, this wouldn’t be racism in the USA (since both are from the same “race” by US-definition), it would totally be racism in most European languages.
The “social construct” part of the discrimination is along which lines discrimination happens. There’s nothing “natural” about discriminating along the lines of US-race. Discrimination can happen just as viciously along any other line.
And that certainly doesn’t mean people don’t suffer from it. But it also means that making sure everyone is as equal as possible (e.g. by eliminating US-race) won’t stop discrimination.