Questions about the concepts of race and ethnicity

So you are saying there are two kinds of people, those who divide others into groups, and those who do not?:wink:

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Actually there are 10 different kinds of people: those who understand binary and those who don’t.

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“Race is a social construct” is a relatively recent idea and whatever its merits you shouldn’t leap to “race is exclusively a social construct”. Race as per the dictionary definition above is still a valid concept. If you take a typical person from equatorial Africa, one from Scandanavia, and one from Japan most people would have little hesitation identifying them as different races and assigning their roots to fairly specific regions of the world. Note I said a “typical” person. If we went to equatorial Africa we might well find some blonde, fair skinned, blue eyed people living there, but we would be quite justified to suspect that they or their recent ancestors migrated there and that their family originated in Europe and probably in Scandanavia.

The story of Philip and the Ethiopian in Acts is important precisely because the Ethiopian would have been identified as a black man, a different race, showing that the good news was for all races and ethnicities.

However if you are assigning race by the “one drop of blood” rule and classify someone as black because one ancestor 5 generations ago (1/32) was black then this would be a social construct; as would saying that some races are less developed evolutionarily or of inferior intellect or morals. Once these rules were used to disqualify people from rights or benefits, now they are often ued to qualify people to receive rights or benefits, such as preferential employment or additional government payments. Today if one of my great, great grandparents was Aboriginal or Torres Straight Islander I would be entitled to identify myself as such and tick the little boxes on government forms and employment applications.

Skin colour can have biological consequences. I have read that white skin evolved in northern regions to maximise vitamin D synthesis in the skin. As a white man living in sunny Australia I have the consequences in the form of solar keratosis and skin cancer. (I know, skin colour is not the only factor.)

I should also point out that black and white (and red and yellow) are relative terms since white as I am I am not pure white and neither are others pure black. We all have the same pigments, just in different proportions. (Incidentally I found out recently my blue eyes are the result of brown pigment.)

Today of course migration and marriage are blurring racial boundaries, sometimes with interesting results. There is more than one example but I know of one family in the UK where both parents are mixed race and they had twin daughters, one black and one white.

So where are we? Yes there is such a thing as race and it is not just a social construct. But we are all part of the one human family; God’s famiiy.

p.s. We often use terms like European or Asian as racial descriptors. Of course there is variability within the geographical regions, particularly a large continent like Asia; and neither is every black man is an African, despite what Peter Tosh says.

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Hello Chris,

To clarify, I believe that the “race is a social construct” definition is always true, but it is especially needed in the US-American context, because one can hardly discuss race there without talking about racism, prejudice, historical injustices and imbalances in power and socio-economic class, housing, criminal justice, the labor force — the whole nine yards. The “one-drop rule” is critical to understanding American concepts of race, and it is very much a social construct (and an unjust one). All of this is also bound up in our culture wars, because few people on one side of our cultural-political spectrum in particular want to embrace the fact of pervasive racial injustice and their implication in it (intentional or not).

I think one of the reasons this conversation isn’t getting very far is that sometimes our American context doesn’t translate to international audiences very well without some background being filled in.

Best,
AMW

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OK, We’ll just have to disagree then.

Regards, Chris

My main point would be that only a tiny fraction of the human genome plays a part in determining things like skin color, eye shape, hair texture or other appearance related traits that identify differences in racial identification. And you can’t necessarily identify someone’s race by looking at their genome. So anytime people refer to humans from different racial categories as analogous in some way to different species or “breeds” of human (which has happened on these boards more than once), that is just completely mistaken.

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One cannot understanding the meaning of “race” until one sees it in the context of slavery, segregation, prejudice, and discrimination. Racial differences did not produce these social/historical facts, they produced race.

Ethnicity. based on groups with different traditions, languages, and cultures is a much better view, but “race” is much easier stereotype and identify. Also White folks or European Americans fail to identify themselves as an ethnicity or “race.”

While racial or ethnic differences are real and should not be ignored, they are generalities and not absolutes. The Christian faith is very clear that we must treat people are people or persons, and not as members of a group.

Human diversity is one of the great gifts of God. We must encourage it unless it encourages hate, and discrimination. .

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Well, if you insist, but fwiw, I wasn’t necessarily disagreeing with you. I was just trying to flesh out why people seemed to be talking past one another.

I have found, in various non-BioLogos contexts, that non-Americans who haven’t spent a good bit of time in America tend to underestimate just how much anything that touches on our American “culture wars” becomes completely polarized in current American discourse. Jon Garvey (a sometimes-contrarian voice on the Forum) here regularly talks about the ways American political categories of “conservative” and “liberal” tend to skew discussions about theology in unhelpful ways. Race gets dragged into this as well. I was just pointing this out.

In America, they are still used to disqualify people from rights or benefits — like the right to drive around freely without worrying about being pulled over and shot by the police. This is the kind of thing that’s probably not on your radar if you live in Britain or China or Australia, but it’s very central to current American political discourse.

Amen!

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But if you took someone who had never seen an Indian (Asian) before, your classifier would likely classify the Indian with the African on the basis of skin color, when in fact the Indian is far more closely related to the Scandinavian than the African.

The point that you seem to be missing is that what most Americans define as race is in fact based on highly variable characteristics like pigmentation, not more fundamental or universal ones. I believe that’s why Christy is pointing out that it is a social construct.

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I agree completely.

(Ah post must be at least 11 characters)

If we were forced to divide humans into four ‘races’ on a genetic basis, it could be argued that a reasonable set of groups would be: (1) the Khoe-San of southern Africa; (2) Central African hunter-gatherers (pygmies); (3) West Africans (and their descendants from the Bantu expansion); (4) East Africans and everyone else. Which is to say, racial groupings have little to do with the actual historic structure of human populations.

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Interesting!

Growing up in Niger, the Hausa language was considered Chadic and Afro/Asiatic, not Bantu. (there was no beginning the words with an Mb, for example, though we do have clicks, a bit like the Khoe-San, sometimes, that change the words’ meaning). However, Hausa generally look more Bantu than Berber/Arab. Goes to show you that there is a big variation–sort of like the Franks became both German and French, I imagine.

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