Well, steelmanning your Chomsky sentence, I assume you mean treating someone's race as the only meaningful information about them. In that case you might want to actually read what I wrote.
No. I mean treating race as a meaningful property of a person in the first place.
In that case what did you mean and how was it relevant to my point?
You start from where you responded to me - the conversation began before that, so my context for this conversation is apparently different from yours. Which is to say - the problem is not the relevance of what I say to your point, but the relevance of what you say to mine.
Do you agree that there is a fact of the matter on the questions relating to race?
No.
Not as a statement of solipsism, but because "race" isn't a well-defined category system, but a product of people's absurd need to draw well-defined boundaries where no well-defined boundaries exist. There's far more difference between a black-skinned person whose ancestors have lived in America for five generations and a black-skinned person whose ancestry remains rooted in Africa, than there is between the black-skinned American and a white-skinned American - yet these two are grouped together in "black" as if that were a meaningful category.
And then the concept of mixed-race; the insistence on treating edge cases as between categories, rather than demonstrating that the joints can't actually be carved there. It's a bit like insisting that the two ends of ring species are, in fact, distinct species - and the middles are mixed-species. If races can mix - and, indeed, if they've spent the past few centuries doing so - there aren't races anymore, just a spectrum of individuals who can't be sorted in any meaningful way. At which point, well, you might as well just treat people as individuals.
Am I from a small tribe in Polynesia because I have an unusual crown formation? Maybe I'm American Indian because of the way my roots wrap around my jawbone? Well, what about my blonde hair and blue eyes? What about my red beard? Where the hell am I in that spectrum? Well, today, I'm "white", because US slavery made that distinction important in our culture, and nothing else. And the fact that I'm "white" instead of a convoluted mess of a dozen different races - mixed race, in point of fact - means that the categorization at play is the product of cultural historical accident, rather than anything resembling truth.
There's far more difference between a black-skinned person whose ancestors have lived in America for five generations and a black-skinned person whose ancestry remains rooted in Africa, than there is between the black-skinned American and a white-skinned American
Genetics science says otherwise. Or do you believe that genes have no impact on who someone is?
Am I from a small tribe in Polynesia because I have an unusual crown formation? Maybe I'm American Indian because of the way my roots wrap around my jawbone?
I don't know, are you? You can trace your ancestry or get genetic tested if your curious.
This sort of thinking seems bad:
This sort of thinking seems socially frowned upon, but accurate:
Similar points could be made by replacing a/b with [group of people]. I think it's terrible to say something like:
But to me, it doesn't seem wrong to say something like:
Credit and accountability seem like good things to me, and so I want to live in a world where people/groups receive credit for good qualities, and are held accountable for bad qualities.
I'm not sure though. I could see that there are unintended consequences of such a world. For example, such "score keeping" could lead to contentiousness. And perhaps it's just something that we as a society (to generalize) can't handle, and thus shouldn't keep score.