Coombs wrote:
Gurgen wrote:
There's no such thing as race.
Beat me to it. Race as a concept is a thing, sure, but it's an insidious cultural weapon, not a gereralizable scientific fact.
We're talking at cross purposes, Gurgen's statement is aspirational—as in, since there's not much genetic basis for the concept of race, we shouldn't pay heed to it. Meanwhile back in the world, the actually existing manifestation of race in society and culture has had a huge and real effect.
Personally I don't thing "there is no such thing as race" is as useful as pointing out that "race" has a historical starting point and changes dramatically over time. You can go back just a little way in history and find people (including, say, Friedrich Engels) talking about the Irish as if they were a separate species from the English.
Race really took hold in western ideology when it became the political basis for large scale dispossession and genocide, and slavery and other forms of economic abjection. I can still walk down the road in Darwin and see groups of socioeconomically dislocated and disenfranchised Larrakia and Tiwi people, or walk into an airconditioned apartment block and notice all the residents are white, all the cleaners are people of colour. So on that basis, I'd say race exists, race is real—but race changes over time and things don't need to stay this way, perhaps it can be "abolished" …
