Why is gender fluid, but race isn’t?

Race is not fluid because an important component of race is ancestry and history. You cannot feel your way into the legacy of racism and slavery that is in the ancestry of most black people.

Also, Rachel Dolezal and that Jessica Krug professor were not really identifying as black or Latinx. They both had scholarship and life experiences that were centered in black and brown communities. They found that there were career advantages if they portrayed themselves as being black or Latinx. They were zeligs. If you talked to any friends or family, you would not here anything about people thinking that Dolezal or Krug had always acted more black or Latinx than white. It was a conscious decision to take on the identity for personal gain.

Mr. Pedantic wrote:

Let me throw this out there.

"Gender" is to "sex", as "race" is to "culture".

Annnnnnd, discus.

LOL

Complete fail. Facepalm

raceisnot wrote:

Race isn't "completely an invented thing".

Sure it is. Skin color variations are due to differences in melanin, just like hair color variations are due to differences in melanin. We don't call caucasian brunettes a different race than caucasian blondes.

Sure you can classify & group people by skin tone but it is meaningless beyond that superficial difference. Brown labradors and yellow labradors are not different races of dog. They have different color but that's it, they are not a different species. It would also get murky if you had a half brown / half yellow dog. If you were classifying by color your choice of organization would be arbitrary. Completely an invented construct.

Corrector wrote:

Mr. Pedantic wrote:

Let me throw this out there.

"Gender" is to "sex", as "race" is to "culture".

Annnnnnd, discus.

LOL

Complete fail. Facepalm

Totally true. But the concept I was trying to bring up was prescient.

Precious Roy wrote:

It was a conscious decision to take on the identity for personal gain.

COMPLETELY disagree. Both were/are black because they felt/feel black. I don't think any of it was a conscious decision for their careers. If being black was such a great secret to success, why aren't more of us successful?

It was amazing to me the difference in opinion among Rachel Dolezel in the black community. The NAACP supported her position in the organization. The BLM types caused her to resign from the NAACP and the university.

If it’s unacceptable for a white person to claim to be black because they can’t fully understand the history of racism blacks have endured, why can a man claim to be a woman? He cannot fully understand the history of sexism women have endured.

Throughout history, women have been enslaved, persecuted because of their gender, suffered segregation and discrimination, denied basic human rights, denied the right to vote, etc.

Why then can man claim to be a woman but a white woman can’t claim to be a black woman?

What if a white man claimed to be an Kenyan man? Kenyan men don’t have a shared history slavery and racism.

Is that more acceptable than claiming to be African American, who definitely have a shared history of slavery and racism.

interesting point of view wrote:

raceisnot wrote:

Race isn't "completely an invented thing".

Sure it is. Skin color variations are due to differences in melanin, just like hair color variations are due to differences in melanin. We don't call caucasian brunettes a different race than caucasian blondes.

Sure you can classify & group people by skin tone but it is meaningless beyond that superficial difference. Brown labradors and yellow labradors are not different races of dog. They have different color but that's it, they are not a different species. It would also get murky if you had a half brown / half yellow dog. If you were classifying by color your choice of organization would be arbitrary. Completely an invented construct.

Lol. And differences in melanin are due to racial variations. I know you liberals are dumb but the rest of us know there are significant differences in DNA in the "races" . As if we don't know there are skull and facial differences. Jeez you people are ridiculous.

lol. Love it when two anti white extremist leftist multiculturalists ponder how we should best get rid of the term race.

lolloldumb wrote:

Lol. And differences in melanin are due to racial variations. I know you liberals are dumb but the rest of us know there are significant differences in DNA in the "races" . As if we don't know there are skull and facial differences. Jeez you people are ridiculous.

Google the concept of black and white twins. Here's an article below. We call one white and one black based on their shade of skin. Does this not seem like a case of race being a social construct to you? There's certainly no genetic basis for saying that full-blooded siblings (twins even!) belong to different races. That would be absurd.

Lol. Is this article how you justify cancelling races? This changed your whole world view. I don't know the details of this and I don't care but genetic freaks do happen. Google elephant man.

https://news.softpedia.com/news/12-of-the-DNA-Differs-Amongst-Human-Races-and-Populations-40872.shtml

NYTimes today talked about people identifying as being of color:

https://ibb.co/qMp2WkN

Yes, the article is about people with actual racial family history to accurately claim being of a particular race.

It’s not about people identifying as being a race which they are not.

What if I am a white man, and I want to identify as a black woman.

Will the SJWs accept me as woman but not allow me to be a black woman?

Seems hypocritical to me!

Someone mentions Kmele Foster below.

His friend Thomas Chatterton Williams has written a lot of about race and doesn't have a problem with race being fluid. He is biracial and has a daughter who has blonde hair and blue eyes. What "race" is his baby?

What is race anyway? How much Black blood does someone have to have to be Black?

raceisnot wrote:

Race isn't "completely an invented thing". You can't be white and be black. You can be mixed race.

Obama was 50% caucasian and 50% black. That's not "completely invented" and a social construct.

Gender is definitely a social construct though. Sex is not.

Therefore you cannot "identify" as a sex or race because it makes you a liar. You either are black or partly black or you aren't. You can say you're black if you're partly black but NOT if you're fully white.

Same with sex. If you have testes you can't say "I don't have testes". But you can say I identify as female if you have testes.

I think race is still a social construct, it's just one that is somewhat rooted in biology.

In the US, most people will call all people from Asia, Asian, with very little distinction almost all of the time. In Asia though, Chinese people, Korean people, and Japanese people all consider themselves different races. That's an example of two different societies that see races differently, therefore race being a social construct seems pretty obvious.

We can even look back in history and see how in the 1800s, Irish people coming to the US were discriminated against, and not even considered white. They were called "Inside-out Negr*s" and couldn't get certain jobs or live certain places. Nowadays I think everyone would consider an Irish person white.

And for a though experiment, say you were walking down the street and passed Obama (without knowing who he is). I think everyone would consider him black without knowing that he was mixed. On the other end of the spectrum, if you passed Logic in the street, (and didn't know him) I think everyone would consider him white without knowing that he was mixed.

Making those assumptions makes total sense, but they are technically incorrect assumptions biologically. Since we feel comfortable making assumptions about a person's race without being able to see their genetic makeup, it seems like race is a social construct.

All of that being said, maybe race is fluid? I'm not totally sure, but if a black person decided they wanted to be white and bleached their skin to look white, society would probably consider them white. I don't know if there's any psychologically studied element of transracialism, but if someone really wanted to it seems like they could.

White people have tried to transition to black by getting a tan and a perm. They were ridiculed, harassed and forced to resign

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8701211/amp/White-professor-African-American-studies-faked-black-replaced.html

She could have transitioned to being a man and seen as a hero but transition to black, she’s evil.

Hypocrisy!

Called out as a “race faker!”

Why isn’t Katlin Jenner a “gender faker?”

Hypocrisy!

interesting point of view wrote:

lolloldumb wrote:

Lol. And differences in melanin are due to racial variations. I know you liberals are dumb but the rest of us know there are significant differences in DNA in the "races" . As if we don't know there are skull and facial differences. Jeez you people are ridiculous.

Google the concept of black and white twins. Here's an article below. We call one white and one black based on their shade of skin. Does this not seem like a case of race being a social construct to you? There's certainly no genetic basis for saying that full-blooded siblings (twins even!) belong to different races. That would be absurd.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2123050/Look-The-black-white-twins-turn-seven.html

No, it's not a social construct here, and yes there is a genetic basis for this. That's NOT to say that some elements are hard to define, but that doesn't make it a social construct. We can naturally say any definition we apply to anything could be a social definition by it's nature, but that's a very different thing.