🎵 The song for this post is any of the ones embedded below 🎵
A cool thing college-educated liberal arts majors say is "race is a social construction," which is a fancy way of saying "it's a made-up thing by society." Definitions and boundaries about race and races change all the time with geopolitics and zeitgeist; if humans were wiped off the face of the Earth and aliens dug up our bones, they wouldn't look at one skeleton or another and have any conception of "races" in the way we talk about them. Which isn't to say it's not "real!" Obviously race and racism have very material impacts on our lives, even if it's just a set of fuzzy ideas that we fumble around in, it becomes a major driving force that can take the whole potential of a human and put it in prison for stealing socks, letting someone else to profit on their caging largely because enough powerful people collectively believe in it.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://morepablo.com/2020/03/money-sunglasses-cooking.html