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Now, as a genuine follow-up question, start asking it about how that social construct is defined: - How was race constructed in the US in 1850, and what was the hierarchy? - In Germany in 1940? - In Japan in 1940? - In colonial Britain? - Etc. What was the scientific evidence at the time? There was a genuine area of study, eugenics, which addressed these issues. Although the conclusions reached were inconsistent between the four above, and nonsense with what we know in today, they were addressed with a great deal of scientific rigour for the respective eras and there were scientific conferences, papers, and journals. There were real hierarchies, placing some groups above others (much deeper than just "X good / Y bad"), and with many axes. If you read eugenics literature, there are scientific anatomical measurements, p-values, and error bars, and the language has all the intellectual trimmings one expects from quality research. This comes from scientists speaking with complete confidence, coming from esteemed institutions like Princeton and Harvard. If you put yourself in a 1930 mindset (for example, pretending you've never heard of DNA, let alone gene sequencing), complete nonsense reads like robust, scientific fact. Those are genuine and interesting social science and scientific methodology questions and important if we don't want to repeat mistakes of the past. It's almost ridiculously easy to do this kind of bad science reaffirming our stereotypes. Understanding how that was done before can help us not do it again today. As a footnote, I think there are a few domains of science where we are doing this again, which will embarrass us in another hundred years or so. |