I am several hundred opossums in a trench coat
I agree, it feels like we’ve been arguing over semantics. When I (and I’m assuming the person you originally responded to) say “real”, I don’t mean to claim that it doesn’t have material effects, I mean that it has no biological basis - i.e. it is socially constructed.
You do not need to believe race is a biological reality to acknowledge that the perception of others as you (+ your ancestors) being a member of a race has materially affected your identity
I don’t really think I can come up with a more concise way of summarizing the idea than anthropologist Audrey Smedley did on the first result of the Google search “race social construct”
Race is a culturally structured systematic definition of a way of looking at perceiving and interpreting reality.
I would recommend you read something like “Feminism and ‘Race’” from Oxford Readings in Feminism or some of bell hooks’ work to understand the idea better.
Saying that race isn’t real is not the same as saying that we live in a post-racial society.
Oh yeah no fair enough, thanks for hearing me out. Those kinds people are exhausting