lucern
Posts: 54
Joined: 11/13/2004
Status: offline
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: seeksfemslave
lucern: refering to your post 540
last paragraph first. I said racism not race.
As for paragraph 1 once again I am in mind boggle territory. My original point was that social cultural physical intellectual indicators have all been interpreted to mean that racial divisions exist within the human species by definition.
If those characteristics that we see in say Afro Caribbeans are defined as being racial identifiers then that definition cannot be refuted by recognising that the genotype of this group is similar to that of another group defined as being of another race with different identifiers
That argument transcends PC thinking and is logically true,
Whether that definition was enthusiasticaly subscribed to by those that made it simply because it supported their own sense of self worth or prejudice again is irrelevant.
Your posts are seemingly so calm and yet so opaque it worries me that I may well be not understanding what you are trying to say.
Know that I'm trying Seeks, and that I find your posts as bewildering in their brevity as you find mine opaque.
Racism vs Race. *nods*. For me, this doesn't change anything. How one can have racial practices (speech, ideas, etc) without a concept of race?
I'll try to clarify, but this medium does not promote understanding in some cases. You're right when you note that race has been defined by those varied indicators. My point was, however, opposite of yours - probably due to a difference in scale. When you take 1000's of concepts of race from around the world, they do not form some coherent backbone of a global racial definition. Quite the opposite - it highlights their artificial construction while raising it an an issue that needs to be observed, because it is so prevalent.
In regards to your logical statement, let me try to break it down.
1) If those characteristics that we see in say Afro Caribbeans are defined as being racial identifiers
2) then that definition cannot be refuted by recognising that the genotype of this group is similar to that of another group defined as being of another race with different identifiers
In this statement I see both face validity and the potential for misunderstanding - particularly with the first part. Who has done the defining? What kind of agreement exists about the definitions of characteristics? Are we going on popular understandings or those of the expert variety? There are a lot of conditionals here, from which I think much of our mutual confusion lies. The validity of this statement depends almost entirely on how one imagines the process of the definition of race - how it gets defined. In any case, you're right that the precept statement cannot be refuted by physical sciences unless race is being defined exclusively based on physical characteristics, or if the conception of race was raised to the level of objectivity rather than subjectivity. Nor can such statements as in #1 refute the findings of the physical sciences. Physical sciences have no way to deal with the subjects of social science - if they did we wouldn't have to differentiate between the two. The only refutation you'll find of physical science in the social constructions of race is that the physical sciences do not have a whole answer. Nobody does. Anyone claiming to have a whole answer hasn't thought about it enough. Physical scientific methods cannot easily test social variables in meaningful ways. That's why race in society is the domain of the social sciences, but until I know more about what your big ideas actually are, all I can offer are generalizations. I assure you, generalizations are not my favored tools. Lay bare your fullest view of race and I will offer as neutral and clear criticism as I can. That's the only way we're going to reach any understanding.
It's worth noting that the opposition between social and physical sciences is pretty much moot. There is occasional toe-stepping, but none of that lasts. The physical anthropologists in my department do not come after the social anthropologists studying race, even if it may have happened on this board. Anthropologists in the US have been traditionally trained to do both and more (archaeology, linguistic anthropology). With a bit of understanding of each, the conflict just isn't there. In the effort to understand the realities of race in mankind, the physical scientists have pretty much done their work already. It's been good and necessary work, too. It was, however, vastly simpler than the rest of the work that needs to be done to answer this question.
|
RE: There isn't such a thing as 'races' in humanity. - 
. 
Profile
New Messages
No New Messages
Hot Topic w/ New Messages
Hot Topic w/o New Messages
Locked w/ New Messages
Locked w/o New Messages
Post New Thread