Race does not have anything to do with "phenotypical descriptors."
That's almost the ONLY thing it has to do with.
Especially since most of the time you cannot specifically tell someone's ETHNICITY just by looking at them, which is why the racial groupings are as arbitrary as they are.
So if I wanted to describe Jean Luc Picard, I would call him "the tallish bald white guy in the red uniform." If I wanted to describe Geordi, I'd call him "the short black guy with a visor across his eyes and the yellow uniform." If I wanted to describe Chief O'Brien, I'd call him "The heavy-set red headed guy in the yellow shirt, looks Irish maybe." And somebody who'd never seen any of these people would be able to turn on Star Trek and immediately know who I was talking about.
On the other hand, if you set down to watch Star Trek Into Darkness and I told you "Wow that Puerto Rican girl is cute!" would you immediately realize I was talking about Uhura?
No, no, you're completely wrong.
Race is a
social construct. The human races have no basis in biology. A black person is not made black by "phenotypical descriptors," nor is a white person made white, etc.
Partially true, except that when you say that someone is "a black person" all you're really doing is narrowing down the range of possible skin tones that he probably possesses. As we've spent the last sixty years learning (and legislating) it's not generally meaningful beyond its utility as a description, despite the lingering belief among many people that you can make certain immediate assumptions about what kind of person he is without knowing anything else about him.
To be sure "Black" or "white" are racial groups; they may be social constructs, but they're still distinct and meaningful in and of themselves. "Zulu" and "Irish," on the other hand, are ethnic groupings that are meaningful for entirely different reasons and in entirely different ways. For example: my five year old son is one quarter Zulu, one quarter Ashanti, one quarter Irish, one eighth Choctaw, one sixteenth Dutch, and one sixteenth Greek. He could, to various degrees, claim any of those ethnicity as his "origins" but in the United States of America, he would be described as "black." In in the 1940s he'd probably be called "Mulatto" while in Mexico, he would probably be described as "Mestizo" or some other sub-category.
The categories THEMSELVES are social constructs, but they're really nothing more than descriptions of a person's visible phenotype.
No we're not. Any more than we're all the same
height. Race is only socially relevant when a large and influential social movement decides that certain races in particular should be singled out for special treatment or special punishment, and it is entirely because of the existence and continued widespread political influence of such people that race is anything more than a phenotypical descriptor.
I didn't say I have an issue with tracking/monitoring and preventing advantages/disadvantages based upon Skin Color. What I said is that I am not in favor of using the same word "Race" to describe the entire Population (Human Race) and also to describe Skin Color (Black Race, White Race). It gives Racists, IMHO, more power to influence their young to continue in their Racist mindsets. It makes it easier to convince someone naive, that there is an actual difference between a White Man and a Black Man.
I don't know that that's actually true, considering most people in my generation (and my daughter's generation) grow up with people of various races all around them all the time and are accustomed to defining "race" as just a convenient subset of attributes used to tell each other apart. The simple fact is there aren't ENOUGH racial categories to describe what's really going on, precisely because the older categories were defined by racists and we haven't done the hard social work of creating new ones as demograpgics have shifted.
If racists are going to reach their children to also be racist, your personal discomfort with racial semantics probably isn't going to change that. On the other hand, an effort to use more fitting categories to describe different racial groups and sub-groups would make life easier for just about everyone else.
For Example, The Human Race is made of Black Ethnicity...
Which is exactly the problem: that would imply that a black man from Nigeria is basically the same race as a black man from the Dominican Republic. They have absolutely nothing in common OTHER than skin color: they don't speak the same language, they don't come from the same culture, and they DO NOT have the same ethnic background. It gets worse when you consider that there are recognizable racial subgroups even among Africans, with differences strong enough to have triggered at least two civil wars in recent history.
I think you're not really appreciating the extent to which "the black ethnicity" or a similar umbrella term would be the
preference or racists, who would rather pretend that no meaningful differences exist between any two groups of black people and therefore they should all be treated exactly the same.
And again, Kirk/Uhura was a big deal because it was a big deal to see a White/Black kiss on TV. But, just because it wasn't as big a deal to see France Nuyen kissing a White Man, doesn't mean it wasn't an Interracial Kiss.
It kinda does, actually, since that's not what "interracial" meant in the context of 1960s white supremacist culture. Otherwise, you'd have civil rights workers walking through Connecticut, pointing out a group of Italians, Greeks, Norwegians, Anglos and Russians and saying "Wow, look at all this racial harmony!" You'd have black panthers holding meetings in storefronts saying "Italian power to Italian people, Russian Power to Russian People, Greek Power to Greek People..."
Racial identity in the 1960s was overly simplistic BECAUSE the dialog was primarily dominated by racists, most of whom drew the racial lines as "negro", "caucasian", "mongoloid", "don't even know."
Though, I think you're overstating how little a deal it was. WWII ended barely more than 20 years earlierthen these kisses we're talking about, it's been double that time since Black Civil Rights were granted
Failure of comparison: with the highly notable exception of Japanese Americans, institutionalized racial oppression of Asians wasn't that intense during World War II either. Significantly, France Nguyen was
not Japanese.
I don't think you say people got over their "hatred/Bigotry of Asians in such a short time
The historical track record says otherwise. Again, most western states had, of their own accord, lifted the standing bans on marriage between whites and Asians by the mid 1950s, which suggests that their hatred or bigotry had subsided to the point that they were willing to tolerate Asians as members of their communities even then.
Consider that right around the time Asians were being accepted into white communities, Emmett Till was getting dumped in the Tallahatche River for whistling at a white woman.
A racist isn't going to care if an Asian is Japanese or Chinese, or any other Nationality
Unless, of course, that racist is himself Japanese or Chinese.
)
The Liar's Paradox is such a famous logic problem that my college textbooks actually cited this episode as the archetypical example:
I'm still amused by how much that one incident seems to fixate you.
