Ethnicity not race.

[hammer and sickle]

I completely agree that race is a social construct because race is just the color of someones skin. However ethnicity DOES exist you can't deny the diffrences between people culturaly and genetically thats like saying gender doesnt exist! Sure you shouldnt treat people diffrently based on their gender but saying gender doesnt exist is ignorant.

[bellyscratch]

I completely agree that race is a social construct because race is just the color of someones skin. However ethnicity DOES exist you can't deny the diffrences between people culturaly and genetically thats like saying gender doesnt exist! Sure you shouldnt treat people diffrently based on their gender but saying gender doesnt exist is ignorant.

There are of course very minor physical differences, but because there is no fixed differences and the line is blurred between one ethnicity and another (especially people from mixed heritage), its pointless making a big deal about the differences.

[Hiero]

Ethnicity is still a social construct. It is built in the social understanding of people. It is expressed in different ways to create the idea of commonality between people who on a individual level may have nothing in common.

Groups of people do share common culture and langauges (dialects, vocabulary) etc and their are groups of people with similar looks, such as skin colour. However to say that this is ethinicity is a social construct, because you emphasis these things beyond a point of the lived culture into a prescriptive culture. So some people may feel outside their appointed ethnicity because they have more in common with people who are a neighbhouring ethnicity. Or ethnicities are broken down even more for the sake of political reasons.

Culture and language is such a blured thing that streches across people. Ethnicity is really a modern construct a part of the nation-state building of the 19th centaury. The way people live is really too complicated to fit people into ethnicities. In some cases opposing ethnicities, such as settler ethnicities and indigenous ethnicities may have some point of commonality. Even if this is through an oppresive system like colonialism.

[Kwisatz Haderach]

The fundamental problem with the idea of ethnicity is that it is trying to force discrete categories on top of a continuous natural variation.

Or in other words, it's forcing people into black and white categories, when in reality everyone is a shade of gray. Sure, there are cultural and genetic differences between people. But there are no clear dividing lines. There is no point where you can say "this is where one ethnicity stops and another begins."