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What are your opinions of race denialism?
I’d like to see peoples opinions of this here first before sharing my own.
Race denialism is what it sounds like, basically the denial that race exists/is real, the notion/idea/belief that race doesn’t actually exist, is a false concept, is pseudoscience created by ignorant & racist people that serves to divide society etc.
I’d share a Wikipedia or dictionary definition of the term “race denialism” here but I can’t seem to find any online, so I had to explain what it is above. Shouldn’t there be a Wikipedia on race denialism already?
The term & concept of race is often considered politically incorrect nowadays (if you don’t know what that means, look it up).
In some forums I’ve been on, I’ve often been criticised & corrected for talking about race, “correcting me” often involves explaining that race doesn’t exist, & I’ve sometimes been told by moderators there not to talk about/mention it because it can cause problems & fights among people even if I didn’t intend it to.
There seems to be a spectrum of race denial, with some people more to less supportive of it than others.
Race denialists seem to acknowledge variation in skin, hair & eye color & hair type, probably because those things are impossible to deny, but that seems to be as far as they’re willing to go, & they seem to claim that superficial variation doesn’t qualify as race. A lot of them often like to say that “we’re all one race, the human race”.
I’ve attached a few links to the etymology (origin) of the term “race” below. It looks like the term “race” that refers to distinct groups of people originated in the late 16th century (1500’s), around the time Europeans begun colonising & having contact with other “races” overseas.
I think it was always a very broad term & concept for physical variation, it was usually used very generically, unless say by scientists, who tended to be more specific in determining what constitutes a race.
I can’t seem to find out when exactly race denialism arose. I want to say that it had its origins in the 1960’s civil rights movement. It seems that before that, race was generally universally accepted as true/real.
The classical physical anthropologists of the 19th & 20th centuries certainly seem to have believed in races. I think I’ve noticed that physical anthropology books seem to have started to have stopped being produced/published in the 1970’s, maybe a few came out in the 1980’s (I can only think of Carleton Coon’s book “Racial Adaptations” that was posthumously published in 1982), but by the 1990’s there didn’t seem to be any physical anthropology books published anymore & it was clear then that the era of physical anthropology, that is, the study of human races & variation, was over.
So maybe that suggests that race denialism started becoming widespread in the 1970’s, which is also when the terms “negro” & “Indian” for Native Americans started to decline, & when colored people started having more rights in America.
What is the future of physical anthropology, that is, the study of human races & physical variation? Is it over/doomed? Could it ever make a comeback?
Nowadays it seems that the terms “ethnicity” & “background” are being increasingly preferred & mandatory over “race”. In fact it’s becoming increasingly discouraged to talk about variation in physical features among populations other than skin color & hair type, again probably because those things are impossible to deny, & even then probably only when discussing certain relevant subjects, otherwise if you do it causally people might start thinking that something is wrong with you & that your racist in some way, something that’s frustrating to me as someone who is interested in topics regarding it like science, human evolution, history etc.
The thing about ethnicity vs race is that race is a broader category than ethnicity, numerous ethnicities can be part of the same race.
The only area where race seems to be acknowledged, where it may already be called “ethnicity” & “background” instead, is in forensics & law enforcement, & maybe archeology too, because they often need to identify victims & suspects.
I can’t really think of any other area where race is acknowledged.
Is race denialism ever likely to decrease & maybe replaced with race acknowledgement?
https://www.etymonline.com/word/race
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hist..._race_concepts
Something I’m wondering, if we can agree that the term “race” basically simply means physical variation in phenotype based on geography/geographic ancestry, then doesn’t it basically exist, whether it’s known by the term “race” or any other term? & if it does, is it really something so bad?
Have a good day.
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Originally Posted by SouthDutch7991
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