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.
My go-to examples are Melanesians and Indigenous Australians. They sometimes have darker skin than people we in the West call black, and if we saw one of them walking down the street in a Western country, we would think they were black. But they are quite genetically distant from Sub-Saharan Africans. They just also have very dark skin pigmentation.
So are they both the same race? If not, what are we calling race here? Because I’ve only ever heard it described in terms of skin color.
(throw in blond-haired melanesians)