Ask Lemmy

Everyone has different DNA and nobody refutes that, but the lines at which race are defined are completly arbitrary. Are you considered black if you have 50% sub Saharan African DNA? Most would say yes. Are you black at 25%? How about at 5 or 10%? The slew of different answers is a clue that race is just a social construct borne of perception rather than hard fact.

Similarly, a lot of groups that are considered “white” today would not have been in the slightest if you were to go back 100+ years. The Irish, Italians, Greeks, among others were not considered white until more recently than you might believe.

Thats the crux of it, race is only truly defined by these arbitrary lines in the sand that people draw, and these lines are different for different groups and individuals. Race is only real because people perceive it to be. We could divide up society based on hair color or if your ear lobes hang or are directly connected to your head and it would make just as much sense, which is to say not much.

Edit: I might add that there’s more genetic diversity in sub Saharan Africa than anywhere else in the world but they all get lumped together as black because “skin dark”. It’s stupid when you examine it.

Not Rick had a great answer, but I wanted to try to contribute simple examples:

True, skin color is a trait that can be traced by DNA, but so is eye color, or hair color. We could easily create "races" based on "Brown hair vs blonde hair", "brown eyes vs green eyes", "people who need glasses vs people that don't", "shorties and tall-os", "those who can roll their tongue, and the inferior swine that were never blessed by the Great tongue father."

All traceable in the same way as skin color, but we consider them "features", and not race defining traits.

Who decided that? And why?

Not_Rick has a great answer but I will add something. Your question about the quote you posted is based on a disagreement about what race is, between you and social scientists. The phrase "we can take a DNA test and get our ancestry, telling us what percentage of what races make up our overall ethnicity" already assumes that genetics = race, end of story. But this is an unfounded assumption. All the test can tell is our genetics. Not_Rick offered some good examples for the counterpoint, that genetics ≠ race. If you disagree with that basic premise then you will always be bothered by modern theories on the subject such as CRT.

Once you see that race clearly is not just genetics, you can start asking what it truly is and what things do determine one's race. These are much more interesting questions. For example, a new question might be 'what has been the historical relationship between ethnicity and "being white" in the US'? And let's not even start on the ridiculousness that is the census form.

The DNA test is just testing for genes which tend to be in certain groups - but that's not necessarily the case - and the lines they draw between groups are arbitrary.

You're conflating a few different concepts, and misunderstanding how DNA tests work. ...And the only thing any of this has to do with CRT is that these questions are a symptom of it.

Race, ancestry, and ethnicity are not synonyms.

Race is "A group of people identified as distinct from other groups because of supposed physical or genetic traits shared by the group. Most biologists and anthropologists do not recognize race as a biologically valid classification, in part because there is more genetic variation within groups than between them." (American Heritage)

Ethnicity refers to "people sharing a common cultural or national heritage and often sharing a common language or religion." (American Heritage)

Ancestry is biological lineage.

DNA tests approximate the location on the globe (overlaid with national borders) where your ancestors lived at some point in time. They do this by taking DNA samples of people from all around the world, mapping that with human migration patterns, and comparing your DNA to that data pool to determine the statistical likelihood that you're ancestors lived in a certain place within a certain time period in human history.

DNA tests do not determine race (social classification) or ethnicity (cultural classification). DNA tests can determine some physical traits, but not everyone with the same traits belong to what we might consider the same race. And not everyone who considers themselves to be of the same race have the same DNA.

There is no biological definition for the word "race".

we impose meaning on the world. even the idea that each of us is an individual instead of one unit is a construct. so while we can distinguish between different biological markers, the meaning we impart to that distinction is a construct. we can draw the lines arbitrarily (and we do). the distinction of race is no more natural or meaningful than a distinction based on country of origin.

There isn't even agreement on what the word means. When I was little my science book defined it as two individual are the same race if they can have offspring together. By that rule all humans are the same race.

Weird. My DNA test didn't tell me I am X% white, Y% black, Z% Native American. It told me my DNA was a majority match for people that hailed from regions A, B, and C.

Are you sure you know how ancestry DNA tests work?

Race is related to ethnicity but also relates to a lot of cultural factors. Race is also tied to people's perception of a person, and also tied to an individual's identity. There are more and different races than ethnicities.

Additionally, race is linked to discrimination. Two people can be the same ethnicity but different races, because their culture and ancestral nationality are different. This often leads to people of a certain race being seen as lesser than, even though there is no biological difference. I.e. the Irish, and Italians, who are considered white now but weren't in the past.

On top of that, people of different ethnicities can be lumped into a singular race and be discriminated against. Like Hispanic people, who have native American, Spanish, and many other ethnicities mixed in. Or Asians who have probably the most varied amount of ethnicities in their singular "race."

Conversely you can have someone who is mixed and is technically mostly genetically ethnicities that are considered white, and would be white passing, but because they are known to have a black parent or grew up in the black community, they are considered to be a person if color, and are discriminated against in the same way as someone who is more ethnically a POC.

This discrimination and racism can cause generational trauma and wealth disparity. Which is important to learn about so people can understand how systems, at least in the U.S., are literally built in a way that makes traditionally discriminated against races more likely to be born into poverty and less likely to get out of it. CRT strives to educate the our population on these issues.

CRT teaches about the fact that Black people and other POC in the United States have been discriminated against for generations, this discrimination is/was codified in law and local ordinances. Like laws limiting POC from getting certain loans, or moving into certain neighborhoods. Then building roads around those neighborhoods separating them from the rest of the town, making it harder for those individuals to get resources. Or the fact that, in the U.S.,public schools are funded by housing taxes in an area rather than by equal funding. Meaning that low income areas (usually populated by minorities because of the previously mentioned reasons) will inherently have less funding.

All this leads to the fact that even though a lot of the racist legislation in the U.S. is gone, a lot of minorities in the U.S. have been lower income for generations. Meaning a lot of them are starting from less and will have less opportunity to achieve because the just don't have the same resources and education available. And today, because of all this, we are seeing things like schools being more segregated than ever, even more than they were even in times where segregation was in law.

If our population is not educated on these topics, these things will never change. These people will never get the help they need. This is why CRT in a lot of experts opinions is sorely needed in the American education curriculum.

These concepts confuse me. There is clearly a range of variation in physical form of humans. Over time we've assigned meaning to some of those variations. Sure you can DNA test and try to correlate those variations to DNA but the underlying idea that assigns meaning to it all is purely made up. Historically, I can't see anything positive to come out of these constructs and I see nothing useful about them. Ultimately, what does that have to do with CRT (seriously, after all these years I can't even tell you what CRT is, it seems like an idea for judging bias in legal settings, not something 3rd graders will ever learn).

Your question has nothing to do with CRT, but with science (I am very critical to CRT if you want to know).

There is a scientific method to classify human beings by genetics. You can group by closeness of genetic code. When you do this you will arrive something similar to ethnicity NOT to race. Race classification is akin classification by eye color, while has some relationship to genetics - it has very little relationship and the genetic code similarities between two of ethnic groups, one has white skin, another have black skin, may be significantly larger than genetics similarity between two groups with black skin. This is why it is unscientific classification.

The social construct of race is which features we consider important enough by which to categorise people. So in the USA, this is white, black, asian or hispanic. Maybe native. Those categorisations are based on real observable traits, but we could choose other categorisations. It notably groups together traits which we can easily distinguish and pull out as subdivisions, such as south-east Asians.

We could redraw these groupings: we could for example together north Africans, middle-easterners and Indians, separating out those from southern and central Africa. We could separate Europeans so that Scandinavians, Finns and Slavs are together, separately from western and southern Europeans.

If you start from false premises, it's only logical you'll end with the confused incomprehensible racist rant that is this post.

I want you to understand something: what you're asking about is much more basic than critical theory. You're talking about the sociological theory of race. I'd avoid trying to understand critical theory without some more basic sociology building blocks because you frankly won't understand what they're talking about otherwise.

Responding so I can find this again since Lemmy won't show me my own posts.