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I don’t know who needs to hear this (probably Somalis) but race is an arbitrary human classification that does not have its roots in biological reality. Biological characteristics do exist but our decision to designate social groups according to them is entirely arbitrary. https://twitter.com/xahlimo/status/1361656590051536899
Prof. Ian Haney Lopez ( @IanHaneyLopez) talks about when people from West Africa were first brought as unfree labour to the U.S. in 1619 there was not yet a conception of a “Black race” and over the 1600s we moved to a system of slavery—what could be used to justify it?
He said initially, the justification was that people who were not Christian but instead “savage” could be deprived of any right to control their bodies and labour but that turned out to not be sufficiently stable because people could convert; people could become Christian.
And so by the 1670s, you began to see laws around slavery that moved from the language of “Christian vs savage” to the language of “Black vs White”
That is what we mean when we say that the modern conception of race as a social construction and ideology was invented in order to give ideological justification for the economic necessity of slavery. Why should any of us be forced to identify with it?
This is not to say that racism, belief in categories and the implications of race structurally aren’t real but that race is obsolete and should be substituted with more useful descriptors such as ethnicity which actually reflect people’s historic origins and patterns of migration
We can have a conversation about racial identity with regards to your outward appearance and how you're perceived by others—but the insinuation that one’s appearance single-handedly determines their standing in society without regard to ancestry is absurd and risible on its face
Is it really so demanding to understand that I would rather identify as a Somaliyyad than with something such as race that does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation? Why does the way one is perceived override a more precise self-identification?
