Comment by LocalH
20 days ago
You seem to be viewing this through a modern lens, and treating this like it's "new" terminology being used to gaslight people.
Some would say that the modern definition of "race" is what's not real, what is socially constructed. And that the "human race" is the only one with clear ties to biology.
"Human race" has never had anything to do with "racial identity" or "identity politics" or anything related to any of that. It has always just meant "human species" since the 1500s.
That is factually incorrect. The earliest record of the related use is from the 1560s when it meant “common ancestry; bred, family, lineage”. Later scientific organization simply formalized the implied, that it is a subunit and, arguably even, a sub-subunit of order along the lines of a regional ethnic group, e.g., Appalachians, Swabians, Basques, etc. …lineage, breed, family… for which no logical argument can be made that e.g., the Northern Europeans of various regional ethnicities who have high rates of Neanderthal DNA are the same as black Africans that have zero Neanderthal DNA but have even higher rates of DNA from an unknown species. We are quite literally, objectively different species, not just races, and that should be ok … we should be ok with that.