Will racism ever be over?

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GE Morton
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Re: Will racism ever be over?

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Good_Egg wrote: December 1st, 2022, 7:31 pm
At one time and place in history, North Africans enslaved Europeans. At another time and place in history, Africans enslaved each other, and Europeans traded in the commodity thus created.
Yes indeed. Slavery was a customary and ubiquitous practice throughout most of the world --- in Asia, the Middle East, in Africa (Africans enslaving other Africans), and in much of Europe. It was practiced by the Vikings, by native Americans, in ancient Egypt and Persia, and most notably in ancient Greece, where it was accepted without a second thought, barely attracting the attention of such enlightened minds as those of Plato and Aristotle. It was widespread in the Roman Empire, and accepted later by both Christianity and Islam.
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Re: Will racism ever be over?

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GE Morton wrote: December 2nd, 2022, 12:44 pm
Pattern-chaser wrote: December 2nd, 2022, 10:59 am
"Race" signifies a great deal more than just a subpopulation. In the creed of the racist, those whose 'race' is different from theirs are not even of the same species as them, which is obvious nonsense.
*Sigh*. The concept of race does not entail racism. You need to attack the latter on its own grounds, on the claims it makes, not by denying the distinction on which it is based. You don't counter sexism by denying there are sexes, or "age-ism" by denying that people age. That is just stupid. Moreover, it is completely pointless --- racial differences won't go away because you deny them. Do you imagine the racists will be disarmed by such linguistic foolishness?
Giving 'race' its own word glorifies it, and raises it way beyond a simple category of difference. There are many differences; those associated with 'race' are just among them, but not special among them.
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Re: Will racism ever be over?

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GE Morton wrote: December 2nd, 2022, 12:44 pm
Pattern-chaser wrote: December 2nd, 2022, 10:59 am
"Race" signifies a great deal more than just a subpopulation. In the creed of the racist, those whose 'race' is different from theirs are not even of the same species as them, which is obvious nonsense.
*Sigh*. The concept of race does not entail racism. You need to attack the latter on its own grounds, on the claims it makes, not by denying the distinction on which it is based. You don't counter sexism by denying there are sexes, or "age-ism" by denying that people age. That is just stupid. Moreover, it is completely pointless --- racial differences won't go away because you deny them. Do you imagine the racists will be disarmed by such linguistic foolishness?
Linguistically no. However, what happened in the past cannot be changed. And to pay reparations to a person who did not live then is not going to fix any of the past. Just as BLM tries to play the victim card, they have become the aggressors to anyone outside of their race- thus causing racism to become more of an issue than what it was before Floyd died. I watched footage of riots throughout the world- and noticed if a black person was not in alliance with BLM, they also were attacked.

In school- at a young age, have you ever noticed that children don't notice race? Racism is a taught behavior. Racism will not go away until we stop teaching the behavior and treat each other on an individual level instead of classifying on outward appearance.
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Re: Will racism ever be over?

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Mounce574 wrote: December 3rd, 2022, 1:42 am In school- at a young age, have you ever noticed that children don't notice race? Racism is a taught behavior. Racism will not go away until we stop teaching the behavior and treat each other on an individual level instead of classifying on outward appearance.
We don't "teach" that behaviour. Well, not knowingly, anyway. These attitudes are learned by social 'absorption', not in education. Because of this, it takes generations to get rid of them! As I said quite a lot of posts ago:
Pattern-chaser wrote: November 11th, 2022, 10:15 am Improving ourselves, even if it is possible, is not easy. Our children absorb our attitudes very young, long before they are able to consider them critically. And so my forbears' racist attitudes were passed on to me, unconsciously and unknowingly, as I learned about our culture by 'osmosis'. It takes many generations to change deep-seated attitudes like these. Happily, I am less racist than my parents, and my children, I hope, are less racist than me.

Don't misunderstand. My conscious attitudes, beliefs, and preferences oppose discrimination of all types. But the cultural programming I received just by growing up is still there, lurking unconsciously. Much as I wish it wasn't.

Self-improvement is hard, and it takes a long time.
The best we can observe is that each succeeding generation is just a little bit less racist than the last. In only 1000 years, we might get there...
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Re: Will racism ever be over?

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Pattern-chaser wrote: December 3rd, 2022, 9:14 am
The best we can observe is that each succeeding generation is just a little bit less racist than the last. In only 1000 years, we might get there...
It depends upon what you mean by "racism" --- is a "racist" a person who believes there differences among the races, some of which are significant (such as differing vulnerabilities to various diseases), or a person who believes that some races are morally inferior (occupy a lower moral status) to others? Opponents of "racism" tend to conflate those meanings.

If the first meaning, then "racism" will never go away, because those differences are tangible and measurable. "Racism" per the second meaning is potentially eliminable through education.

It is interesting that both "racists"(per the second meaning) and those anti-"racists" who conflate the two meanings are both driven by unrealistic, atavistic tribal longings for uniformity and conformity.
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Re: Will racism ever be over?

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Michael Hardimon defends a "deflationary", "minimalist" concept of race, and distinguishes it from other ones:

QUOTE>
"We will find that race is a complex but tractable phenomenon best understood through the articulation of a series of four distinct but interrelated concepts:

1. The racialist concept of race: The familiar pernicious traditional, essentialist, and hierarchical race concept often mistakenly identified as the race concept. It maintains that races have intrinsic biological essences, are distinguished by normatively important features such as intelligence and moral character, and can, on the basis of these features, be objectively ranked as superior and inferior.

2. The minimalist concept of race: The ordinary concept of race, stripped down to its barest bones. It captures what is “rational” in the ordinary concept: the ordinary concept’s “logical core.” A nonracialist concept—it does not invoke the idea of intrinsic biological essences or normatively important features, nor does it posit a correlation between such features and visible physical characters— the minimalist concept of race maintains that races are distinguished by differences in patterns of visible physical features (skin color, hair texture, nose shape, and so on) corresponding to differences in geographical ancestry.

3. The populationist concept of race: A nonracialist (nonessentialist, nonhierarchical) candidate scientific concept that characterizes races as groups of populations belonging to biological lines of descent, distinguished by patterns of phenotypic differences, that trace back to geographically separated and extrinsically reproductively isolated founding populations.

4. The concept of socialrace: The nonracialist, critical, emancipatory concept of social groups that are taken to be racialist races.

Taken together, these terms provide a language that makes it possible to think and speak coherently about race."
(pp. 2-3)

"The Racialist Race Concept Defined:
So what is the racialist concept of race? In its classical form, it is the race concept that

1. holds that each member of each race exhibits a fixed set of “heritable” physical, moral, intellectual, and cultural characteristics common and peculiar to his or her race;

2. requires a “strict” correlation between a race’s distinctive pattern of visible physical features and its constellation of moral, intellectual, and cultural characteristics;

3. demands that a race possess a hidden or under lying biological structure— a biological essence that acts on each member of the race and accounts for the correlation between a race’s distinctive pattern of visible physical features and its constellation of moral, intellectual, and cultural characteristics; and

4. insists that a race be rankable on the basis of its constellation of moral, intellectual, and cultural characteristics.

This characterization specifies the elements that make the racialist race concept a racialist race concept."
(pp. 15-6)

"The Minimalist Race Concept Defined:

A race is group of human beings

(C1) that, as a group, is distinguished from other groups of human beings by patterns of visible physical features,

(C2) whose members are linked by a common ancestry peculiar to members of the group, and

(C3) that originates from a distinctive geographic location.

C(1)– C(3) fix the conditions of minimalist racehood. The minimalist concept of race is, first of all, a group-level notion. The predicate race is in the first instance a predicate of groups rather than individuals. The minimalist race concept is the concept of a kind of group. The concept does not require or allow a “constituent definition” in philosopher of science Elliott Sober’s sense of the term: what it is for a group to be a race is not defined in terms of what it is for an individual to be a member of race. What it is to be an individual member of a minimalist race is defined in terms of what it is for a group to be a race."
(p. 31)

"The minimalist biological phenomenon of race exists. There are differences in patterns of visible physical features of human beings that correspond to differences in geographical ancestry."
(p. 68)

"The Populationist Concept of Race:
The populationist race concept (populationist concept of race) is a refinement of Kitcher’s biological concept of race, which is modeled on Mayr’s celebrated biological species concept. The latter concept figures in the present discussion as a foil for the populationist concept of race.

The Biological Species Concept:
Species are groups of actually or potentially interbreeding populations which are reproductively isolated from other such groups.

The Populationist Race Concept:
A race is a subdivision of Homo sapiens— a group of populations that exhibits a distinctive pattern of genetically transmitted phenotypic characters that corresponds to the group’s geographical ancestry and belongs to a biological line of descent initiated by a geographically separated and reproductively isolated founding population.

Let us call populations that satisfy the criteria of the populationist concept of race populationist races.

One reason for calling the populationist race concept populationist is that it represents races as groups of populations. The fundamental point of similarity between it and the biological species concept is that both instantiate the general biological attitude Mayr calls “population thinking.”

The populationist race concept differs from the minimalist race concept in that its content includes the scientific concepts of genetic transmission, phenotype, reproductive isolation, and founding population—none of which are found in the content of the minimalist concept of race. The two concepts are clearly distinct."
(p. 99)

"Are Populationist Races Subspecies?
‘Race’ and ‘subspecies’ are generally taken to be synonymous. But the term ‘subspecies’ is used in contemporary biology in a technical sense, which makes it sensible to ask whether the populationist race concept satisfies the currently accepted, technical concept of a subspecies. The answer is no."
(p. 107)

"The Populationist Race Concept Is Nonmalefic:
The populationist race concept does not introduce a conceptual framework that can easily revive unjust and damaging social practices. There is nothing in its content to rationalize contempt, fear, hatred, or ideologies of racial inferiority. Like the minimalist concept of race, the populationist concept of race is nonmalefic."
(p. 116)

"The concept socialrace variously refers to

(1) a social group that is taken to be a racialist race,

(2) the social position occupied by a par ticular social group that is a socialrace, or

(3) the system of social positions that are socialraces.

Socialrace thus picks out three different but related social kinds—a kind of social group, position, and system. It is distinct from the ordinary concept of race, which purports to represent a biological kind of thing.

To say that a socialrace is a social group is to say that it is a group that is social rather than biological. Social races are social groups because they are constituted by social relations and defined by social properties. They are not biological groups because they are not constituted by biological relations or defined by biological properties. Examples of social groups include a peer group, the working class, and the US Congress. I treat the notion of a group as intuitive. A socialrace is a social group that is taken or thought to be a biological group of a par ticular kind, namely a racialist race. Analogously, a socialwitch is a human being who is taken or thought to be endowed with supernatural powers. The idea of a racialist race is the idea of a group that satisfies the conditions of the racialist concept of race. This is the familiar essentialist and hierarchical race concept commonly misidentified as the concept of race discussed in Chapter 1. It posits a correlation between visible physical features such as skin color, eye shape, and hair type, and normatively important characteristics such as intelligence, sexuality, and fitness for selfgovernment. It is now generally recognized to be vacuous. The concept racialist race does not pick out a biological kind. It is not biologically respectable. Because of this, its status as a biological concept is sometimes denied. But there is sense in which it is a biological concept: namely, it purports to pick out a biological kind. Racialist race can be said to be a failed biological kind in just the sense that phlogiston can be said to be a failed chemical kind. To represent a group G as a racialist race is to falsely represent G as a biological group. Socialraces are by definition social groups that are falsely or wrongly taken to be racialist races. To understand what socialraces are (and to understand what the concept socialrace is), one must understand that socialraces are not racialist races and, indeed—to fully understand the phenomenon and concept— one must understand that there are no racialist races."
(p. 131)

(Hardimon, Michael O. Rethinking Race: The Case for Deflationary Realism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017.)
<QUOTE

(Note that "socialrace" is not a spelling error on my part, because this is how Hardimon himself writes the term! He doesn't write "social race".)
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Re: Will racism ever be over?

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Consul wrote: December 3rd, 2022, 11:43 pmQUOTE>

"The minimalist biological phenomenon of race exists. There are differences in patterns of visible physical features of human beings that correspond to differences in geographical ancestry."

(Hardimon, Michael O. Rethinking Race: The Case for Deflationary Realism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. p. 68)
<QUOTE
Right, but there is the objection that…

QUOTE>
"No one who argues against the race concept denies that human variation exists or claims that this variation is not systematic. In fact, it is systematic variation that allows anyone to estimate, with varying degrees of specificity, a person’s place of ancestry from their physical features. However, to identify a person as having ancestors from, say, Northern Europe does not identify a biological race of Northern Europeans."

(Sauer, Norman J. "Forensic Anthropology and the Concept of Race: If Races Don't Exist, Why Are Forensic Anthropologists So Good At Identifying Them?" Social Science & Medicine 34/2 (1992): 107–111. p. 110)
<QUOTE

QUOTE>
"What is distinctive about racist ideologies is that they invoke or presuppose the problematic idea of race, a concept that attaches social meaning to visible inherited physical characteristics, continental origins, and biological ancestry."

(Shelby, Tommie. Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. p. 23)
<QUOTE

The question is whether natural divisions of mankind defined in terms of "differences in patterns of visible physical features of human beings that correspond to differences in geographical ancestry" should be called races or not. Note that realism about so-called races is compatible with eliminativism about the concept or noun "race"!
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Re: Will racism ever be over?

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Meanings of "race" in the Oxford Dictionary of English:

QUOTE>
1. A limited group of persons descended from a common ancestor; a house, family, kindred.

2. A generation

3. A group of persons, animals, or plants, connected by common descent or origin. In the widest sense the term includes all descendants from the original stock, but may also be limited to a single line of descent or to the group as it exists at a particular period.

4. The offspring or posterity of a person; a set of children or descendants.

5. A tribe, nation, or people, regarded as of common stock.

6. A group of several tribes or peoples, regarded as forming a distinct ethnical stock.

7. One of the great divisions of mankind, having certain physical peculiarities in common. The term is often used imprecisely; even among anthropologists there is no generally accepted classification or terminology.

8. A breed or stock of animals; a particular variety of a species.

9. A genus, species, kind of animals.

10. A genus, species, or variety of plants

11. One of the great divisions of living creatures:

11.1 Mankind. In early use always the human race, the race of men or mankind, etc.

11.2 A class or kind of beings other than men or animals.

11.3 One of the chief classes of animals (as beasts, birds, fishes, insects, etc.).

12. A group or class of persons, animals, or things, having some common feature or features.

13. A set or class of persons.

14. A set, class, or kind of animals, plants, or things.
<QUOTE

In the most general sense, "race" can be a synonym of "class", "genus", "kind", "set", "sort", or "species".
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Re: Will racism ever be over?

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QUOTE>
"I believe that the operative, ordinary meaning of ‘race’ is something like the following. This is a rough way of putting it, and it only captures part of the definition, but it’s a good starting point: Races, by definition, are relatively large groups of people who are distinguished from other groups of people by having certain visible biological traits (such as skin colors) to a disproportionate extent."

(Glasgow, Joshua. "Is Race an Illusion or a (Very) Basic Reality?" In What is Race? Four Philosophical Views, Joshua Glasgow, Sally Haslanger, Chike Jeffers, and Quayshawn Spencer, 111-149. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. p. 117)

"[A] kind is not biologically real if the border drawn around it is biologically arbitrary[.]"

[S]pecifically racial borders are products of our conventions rather than elements in the architecture of the biological world. That, as I see things, means that race is not biologically real."

(Glasgow, Joshua. A Theory of Race. New York: Routledge, 2009. p. 83)

"Of course, most anti-realists are reasonable people. We acknowledge that people look different from one another and have ancestors who came from different places. So if we can endorse those truisms but still deny the biological reality of race, something else must be the issue of contention. Put one hackneyed way that we have inherited from Plato, the question at hand is whether a system that subdivides us into races based on our visible traits “carves nature at its joints,” or whether it instead breaks nature’s bones by imposing a gerrymandered classification scheme upon humanity, just as our political boundaries impose a contrived scheme upon the terra firma."

(Glasgow, Joshua. A Theory of Race. New York: Routledge, 2009. p. 86)

"The Arbitrariness Objection

Perhaps the most compelling argument—one that is at least as old as Blumenbach and as popular as any—against the superficial theory begins with the premise that the difference between alleged races is one of gradation, and so there are no biological lines between them. If we look at skin color, for instance, it is not as if everyone has one of five different skin colors. Rather, people occupy very many different locations on a spectrum of shades, from very light to very dark. Similar points are true of our facial features and hair types. Once we recognize this fact, which I will call the fact of continuity, it is hard to deny that any system of racial classification based on visible traits must be imposed upon nature by us. We can designate points on the melanometer as the locations of our borders, but those designations are not determined by our biology, and if that is true, then racial categories are, just going off of visible traits, arbitrary. Thus it seems that the superficial theory posits things that don’t exist, namely sets of visible traits that are differentiated in biologically non-arbitrary ways. So the fact of continuity generates the Arbitrariness Objection to the superficial theory.

Racial realists, and those interested in biological categories more generally, sometimes maintain that the presence of a vague boundary between two categories does not mean that the difference between those categories is illusory (…). The line between being bald and being hairy is vague, but, they say, we shouldn’t conclude from just that point that nobody is really bald or hairy. I think we shouldn’t be too quick to uncritically accept this controversial kind of claim, but I don’t want that to slow us down, for the point is commonsensical enough to at least be granted to the realist for the sake of argument: even when the boundaries are vague, that doesn’t by itself mean that there is no difference outside of those boundaries.

So we shouldn’t conflate the Arbitrariness Objection with the objection—the Vagueness Objection—that is the foil for this kind of realist response. The Vagueness Objection seizes upon the fact of continuity and argues that when the boundary between different points on a continuum is arbitrarily drawn, the difference between them is not real. The Arbitrariness Objection is more modest. It, unlike the Vagueness Objection, allows that we really have, say, different skin colors. What it denies is a more specific claim of the superficial theory, namely that we fall into non-arbitrarily demarcated groupings based on visible traits like skin color, and it denies this because our differences on these fronts are nearly perfectly continuous. Thus, just as the Vagueness Objection is arguably too quick to reason that, because the change is gradual, there must be no difference between the different parts on the continuum, the superficial theory moves too hastily from the point that there are real differences between individuals on the continuum to the conclusion that those different points can be bundled according to biologically non-arbitrary boundaries. So the central and distinctive claim of the Arbitrariness Objection, even when we focus on just one visible feature such as skin color, is that because there is no biological reason to draw the boundaries between racial groups that we draw, racial groupings based on distinctive visible traits are biologically arbitrary as groups (…).

Keeping our eye squarely on the Arbitrariness Objection, the problem generated by the fact of continuity is only compounded when we add in more than one visible trait, such as hair texture or facial structure. These additions are crucial for the superficial theory, since groups defined by only one visible trait, such as skin color, do not map very well onto our racial classification systems (…). However, multiplying phenotypic racial traits has the result, not only that considered in isolation they too gradually shift on a continuum, but even more problematically that, as has also been long pointed out, they correlate with one another in no particular order, throwing the alleged features for biological racial reality into an unorganized mess, one that highlights that we choose to organize racial categories around various similarities. In short, there is little if any concordance between skin color and other traits, a phenomenon that we can refer to as the fact of discordance (…). Once again, the discordance problem makes it hard to deny that the clusters of phenotypic features we select as the basis for our racial categories are set off from one another in a gerrymandered fashion, rather than a fashion decided by biology itself.

One feature of racial classification shines a particularly bright light on the superficial theory’s fault-line: different cultures sort the races differently, and no one criterion for sorting seems more biologically principled than the others. The old guard U.S. racial classification system used the one-drop rule, and this is biologically arbitrary, as advocates for mixed-race identity among others have long insisted: biologically speaking, those of mixed black and white ancestry could just as sensibly, arguably more sensibly in many cases, be classified as mixed race or white, and are classified as such in other societies (…). And it is not just mixed racial ancestry that illustrates the arbitrariness of local racial classification schemas; different communities can differ widely on this front (…). Indeed, it is readily apparent why the racial lines of demarcation that we draw onto our visible traits are set differently in different societies: they often arose under the influence of various social and political pressures that were not dictated by the biology alone. For example, the one-drop rule effectively increased the number of African-descended slaves and crudely attempted to rationalize a corrupt notion of ‘white purity,’ while a higher quotient of American Indian ancestry (at least a quarter) has been required for one to be officially recognized by the U.S. as an American Indian, effectively reducing the number of indigenous Americans (…).

Now it is worth stressing that, even if we choose where to divide humanity along lines that are not carved into the biology of the world, that doesn’t mean that traits like skin color are any less biological. Those are things in the world. They are not inventions, like basketball or journalism or airplanes, and they are not things we have merely imagined, like the powers of witchcraft. So anti-realism should not be interpreted as claiming that purportedly racial traits have no biological basis. Rather, anti-realism claims that even though these are biological features, races—racial groups—are not biologically real. Recall again this chapter’s favored analogy: even though political borders are superimposed on natural things—we can point to a piece of dirt and say, ‘There’s the line between the U.S. and Canada’—those political borders are not part of the natural world. Similarly, while racial borders are superimposed upon our bodies, those borders, and by extension the classes of things marked off by those borders, are not part of the biological world. Certainly, at least, that seems true when the boundaries of those groups are fixed according to our visible traits."

(Glasgow, Joshua. A Theory of Race. New York: Routledge, 2009. pp. 86-90)
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Re: Will racism ever be over?

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QUOTE>
"There are also views that challenge the broad strokes of constructivism while avoiding racial skepticism: Lionel K. McPherson’s deflationary pluralism (2015), Joshua Glasgow’s basic racial realism (2015, with Jonathan M. Woodward, 2019), and Michael O. Hardimon’s deflationary realism (2003, 2014, 2017). McPherson argues that “race” should be replaced with his concept of socioancestry, since “‘race’ talk overall is too ambiguous and contested to be salvaged in the search for a dominant understanding” (2015, 676). He aims to sidestep Appiah’s eliminativism by claiming that deflationary pluralism “does not maintain that ‘race’ talk is necessarily an error and does not take a hard line about whether races exist” (2015, 675). Socioancestry retains the possibility of “color-conscious social identity” without the burdens of assumptions or confusions about race and racial nature (2015, 686). This is because it is “visible continental ancestry,” rather than race, which is the root of color-consciousness (2015, 690). Socioancestry, then, focuses on visible continental ancestry alone to explain social group formation. Accordingly, socioancestral identities develop “when persons accept (or are ascribed) a social identity because they share a component of continental ancestry that distinctively shapes color-conscious social reality” (2015, 690).

Glasgow’s basic racial realism aims to capture our operative meaning of race: “the meaning that governs our use of the term, even when we are unaware of it” (2019, 115). Glasgow defines his position in the following way: “Races, by definition, are relatively large groups of people who are distinguished from other groups of people by having certain visible biological traits (such as skin color) to a disproportionate extent.” The position is therefore anti-realist, since it claims that races are neither biologically nor socially real (2019, 117). Glasgow’s position is grounded in judgments about our commitments, believing that we are more willing to give up on the biological basis for race than we are to give up on the idea that there are certain “core features and identities” connected to the idea of race” (2019, 127). In other words, disbelieving in the biological reality of race doesn’t lead to eliminativism. Glasgow holds, however, that it also doesn’t lead to social constructivism. Race is not socially made because, “no matter which social facts we attend to, we can always imagine them disappearing while race stays. And if race is conceptually able to persist across all social practices, then by definition it is not a social phenomenon” (2019, 133). This intuition is based in his focus on our ordinary usage of the term “race,” which is fully captured by visible traits.

Hardimon’s deflationary realism argues that we need four interrelated race concepts to coherently answer the question of what race is to human beings: the racialist concept of race, the minimalist concept of race, the populationist concept of race, and the concept of socialrace (2017, 2–3, 7). The racialist concept of race is the view that there are fixed patterns of race-based moral, intellectual, and cultural characteristics that are heritable, based in an underlying biological essence, correlate to physical characteristics, and form a distinct racial hierarchy (2017, 15–16). Minimalist race “says that people differ in shape and color in ways that correspond to differences in their geographical ancestry. Essentially that is all it says” (2017, 6; see also 2003). It aims to capture in “a nonmalefic way” what the racialist concept of race says that it captures. In other words, it admits of the nonsocial and biological reality of race but in a value-neutral way (2017, 7). Populationist race aims to do the same thing in a more robust and specific way by giving a genetic underpinning to the minimalist conception based on a “geographically separated and reproductively isolated founding population” (2017, 99). This concept is distinguished from cladistic race because it does not require monophyly (2017, 110). Finally, socialrace captures race in terms of its social relations and practices. It refers to “the social groups in racist societies that appear to be racialist races as social groups that falsely appear to be biological groups” (2017, 10; see also 2014). Hardimon argues that it is only through using all four concepts, with the rejection of the first being the basis for the construction of the latter three, that we can actually understand our concept of race."

Race: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/race/
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Re: Will racism ever be over?

Post by Good_Egg »

Consul wrote: December 3rd, 2022, 11:43 pm The racialist concept of race... ...maintains that races have intrinsic biological essences, are distinguished by normatively important features such as intelligence and moral character, and can, on the basis of these features, be objectively ranked as superior and inferior.
I suggest that the only problem with this is that it is empirically false. It describes a coherent world that is not the world we live in. In our reality there are intelligent and stupid people in all races, and morally good and bad people in all races.

Where then does the moral wrong of racism lie ? It is in pre-judging individuals as intelligent or not, or as morally deserving or not, on the basis of their race.

Whether such judgments are considered to favour minorities or favour the majority does not alter the racist character of such judgments.
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Re: Will racism ever be over?

Post by Pattern-chaser »

Pattern-chaser wrote: December 3rd, 2022, 9:14 am The best we can observe is that each succeeding generation is just a little bit less racist than the last. In only 1000 years, we might get there...
GE Morton wrote: December 3rd, 2022, 1:19 pm It depends upon what you mean by "racism" --- is a "racist" a person who believes there differences among the races, some of which are significant (such as differing vulnerabilities to various diseases), or a person who believes that some races are morally inferior (occupy a lower moral status) to others? Opponents of "racism" tend to conflate those meanings.
Consul has posted an in-depth dissection of "racism", but I offer this (not a better version, just a simpler one):
Wikipedia wrote: Racism is the belief that groups of humans possess different behavioural traits corresponding to inherited attributes and can be divided based on the superiority of one race over another.
Wikipedia wrote: Discrimination is the act of making unjustified distinctions between people based on the groups, classes, or other categories to which they belong or are perceived to belong.
To be a racist is to discriminate against someone on the basis of their 'race'.
Pattern-chaser

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Re: Will racism ever be over?

Post by Pattern-chaser »

Consul wrote: December 4th, 2022, 12:05 am In the most general sense, "race" can be a synonym of "class", "genus", "kind", "set", "sort", or "species".
In general, yes. But in the context of 'racism', it is used for rather more than just that.

A benign definition like this simply gives the racist an excuse to fall back on, if/when they are confronted about their attitudes. "Oh, no, I just meant set", when it is clear to all that they didn't, but they have achieved deniability (🤮).
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Re: Will racism ever be over?

Post by GE Morton »

Pattern-chaser wrote: December 4th, 2022, 9:05 am
Wikipedia wrote: Racism is the belief that groups of humans possess different behavioural traits corresponding to inherited attributes and can be divided based on the superiority of one race over another.
Wikipedia wrote: Discrimination is the act of making unjustified distinctions between people based on the groups, classes, or other categories to which they belong or are perceived to belong.
To be a racist is to discriminate against someone on the basis of their 'race'.
I agree. But not discriminating on the basis of race does not require denying the reality of races. Also, keep in mind that if there are no races, there can be no racists either (You can't discriminate against something that doesn't exist).
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Re: Will racism ever be over?

Post by GE Morton »

Consul wrote: December 4th, 2022, 12:19 am
"Of course, most anti-realists are reasonable people. We acknowledge that people look different from one another and have ancestors who came from different places. So if we can endorse those truisms but still deny the biological reality of race, something else must be the issue of contention.
If we acknowledge those differences we per force acknowledge the "biological reality" of race. It is implicit in the notion of "having ancestors."
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