CMV: Race is an unhelpful concept and can never be well defined

Race is a social construct. It’s the grouping of individuals based on shared or similar physical characteristics such as skins tone, facial features, build and hair texture.

Over the years how we define race has changed multiple times. Still to this day how race is defined will change from country to country.

This brings me to my reasoning that race as a concept is unhelpful.

The idea of race is dependent on the fact people come from different regions (meaning people have different physical characteristics) Therefore it often plays a role when discussing international issues, immigration etc. But these discussions cannot be effective when different groups define and understand race in different ways.

Race is not well defined what so ever, no matter what country you go to.

Let’s say you feel you can define what classes someone as White and what classes someone as Black. (As in the western world these tend to be the two most heavily discussed racial groups)

Other than these two groups can you define other racial groups? What are the racial groups within Asia, North Africa, South America etc?

Past these two groups people start conflating ethnicity, genetic ancestry, nationality and entire continents with race.

Even when it comes to these two races things aren’t cut and dry.

Let’s say someone is mixed, one white parent and one black parent. Mixed people can appear in all different ways.

Depending on what country they are in they may be viewed as white, black or mixed.

Take Megan Markle for example, She was born and raised in America and married a member of the British royal family. So has received public attention in both countries.

Comparatively I saw far more people in the US refer to her as a black woman and far more people in Britain refer to her as mixed.

There are also many groups that may or may not be considered white.

For example there are Arabs who have a skin tone that would be considered white. But their facial features, hair texture etc would lead many to not veiw them as white.

In reality race is an extremely badly defined concept. Ideas and views on it can change depending on the context. It’s been so heavily conflated with things like ethnicity, nationality and continents.

Not to mention, as a world, over the years we have mixed more and more. The concept of dividing people based on shared or similar physical characteristics falls out of favour as we see more and more people who no longer fit these groups.

There is a reason race is so badly defined. Because the concept of grouping people based on shared physical characteristics is illogical. It’s not a concept that could ever be well defined.

It’s an unhelpful concept because the basis of the concept is completely floored.

There is so much more to this, it would be unreasonable to cover it all in this main post.