Edit: this question has been answered now. Thank you to everyone who took the time to help me understand.
the premise that race is not a natural, biologically grounded feature of physically distinct subgroups of human beings but a socially constructed (culturally invented) category that is used to oppress and exploit people of colour.
Okay… But we can take a DNA test and get our ancestry, telling us what percentage of what races make up our overall ethnicity. So how is race a social construct and not a biological feature, when we have a scientific method to determine our race? This part of the philosophy has been bothering me ever since I read it, and I’ve been hesitant to ask because of how offensive people get when you question this system.
Not Rick had a great answer, but I wanted to try to contribute simple examples:
True, skin color is a trait that can be traced by DNA, but so is eye color, or hair color. We could easily create “races” based on “Brown hair vs blonde hair”, “brown eyes vs green eyes”, “people who need glasses vs people that don’t”, “shorties and tall-os”, “those who can roll their tongue, and the inferior swine that were never blessed by the Great tongue father.”
All traceable in the same way as skin color, but we consider them “features”, and not race defining traits.
Who decided that? And why?
Yeah that’s clear. As to the why, I suppose it’s because our brains are wired to categorize things and find patterns everywhere. It is useful to have labels for groups with common traits, although I do recognize the issues with that when it comes to systemic discrimination.
Edit: thanks for the answer!
The thing is, hair is equally as heritable, and immediately visible. As humans, we can see and categorise skin equally with hair.
The fact that we don’t use hair as a major defining trait though is arbitrary. That’s just social norms, nothing more.
We kind of do though. There’s nothing official about hair types, but there’s all kinds of stereotypes about people with certain hair colors, like blondes, or redheads. There’s even some scientific evidence that people with red hair have higher pain thresholds.