In a message dated 00-04-09 12:38:32 EDT, you write:
<< the
sentence that includes the categories "Black people" and "whites"
uncritically assumes that these term themselves are unproblematic with
regard to the very issues the sentence is discussing. which individuals end
up in the "Black" category and the "white" category depends. so it is true
that the shade of one's skin is biological but the categories that are
mediated by this are not, and either is the social meaning assigned to them.
>>
Don't assume any such thing. Of course I am aware of the social contruction
of race, and I don't uncritically assume anything. I also don't need to do
the dance every time I use a loaded word,a t least, I hope, in this context.
Among people to whom the social construction of race might bea new thought,
I'd emphasize it. Here, I might have hoped that I could take it for granted.
How very foolish of me.
I might have said, I briefly contemplated it, that malinin content avrirs
with geographic origin; that genetics explains why people from subSaharan
Africa have darker skins, because of higher melanin content, on average, than
people fron Northern Europe. But it is tiresome, particularly when one is
talking about race, to pretend that one is not. Political correctness is very
boring.
Incidentally, when I use the word "group" or "race"; I am not implying
anything about a class of persons constututed by some feature entirely apart
from human choice and conventions. I am not, in other words, being
"essentialist." (Boo, hiss.) Racism is not a matter of talking as if people
are divided into differenbt groups,a nymore than it is natioanlsit of me to
talk about Americans, Sudanese, French. It is a matter of buying into certain
assumptions abour superiority, inferiority, entitlement, etc. These
assumptions need not be tied to any beliefs about genetics or
"blood"--cultural racism is pretty common.
--jks
