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Originally posted by 4MYPEOPLE
Hmmm...I did not read the chit chat posts, but I can say, that people naturally try to group themselves by common denominator.
Every thing is a construct of human beings... so if that makes it BS then skin color, ancestry, nationality, are all "BS" I will tell you why... What makes someone Nigerian vs. Ghanian? For many there is nothing that makes them different, same tribe, same last name, same custom, same language, just the dividing line was drawn through their village... Nationality is a social construct.
African American, you cant get more socially constructed than that.... we were not born in Africa, so what makes us African American, its because we want to have a link to our past... a construct we created that has nothing to do with direct lineage, more of an understanding of our lineage...
Now with race as a concept itself..it does exist. There are definite bone structure differences that make people of different races that have nothing to do with their skin color. There are people of the Caucasoid (white) race that are North African.
My point is..because it has been used in EVIL ways, does not make the concepts mute... there are races, there are ethnicities, there are nationalities, all created by human beings to have something in common or differnent by another....but the differences do exist and because they have been used to enslave, rape and abuse us do not mean they dont exist. As women our sex classification has been used to oppress us, are we not still women?
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EXCELLENT POST!
However, I beg to differ that the concept of race was created along the lines of physical characteristics. Maybe VERY early on (with Cro-magnon, homosapien) but not in the present (and I mean human civilization as we know it). Maybe that is used as a JUSTIFICATION for why the concept of race ws created.
As for your analogy, it is a bit more complicated. Yes, women have been oppressed due to their gender. But there are not several classifications as it related to gender. You are either a woman or you are a man. (Transgender folks NOTwithstanding, we are talking natural here). In "race", there are several varying degress and many in-betweens.