In another case of caste-based violence among school students in Tamil Nadu, more than 20 caste Hindu students belonging to the Urali Gounder community attacked a Dalit student and his grandmother in Karur district on Saturday, August 26, for laughing inside a bus.
This is the third such attack in the state in 20 days.
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No, I intentionally used the word race instead of ethnicity. I’m well aware that India is diverse and has thousands of ethnic groups. I used race because many of these groups still share many phenotypical characteristics. In places like America there is more of a physical distinction between people of different races.
So, it’s interesting to me that humans can find ways to discriminate even when they look similar (or at least more similar than some other countries). This is probably not even unique to India. I’m sure other racially homogeneous nations experience similar types of discrimination that isn’t obvious to outsiders.
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You’re being needlessly pedantic and you’re trying to convince me of something that I already accept: race is a social construct that doesn’t scientifically exist. I know that. However, when I want to talk about Indian people looking more similar to each other than American people it’s kind of hard to simply say that without using race. Under your system I can only refer to every individual ethnic group of India or those of Indian national origin. Neither is what I want to refer to.
Also, since race is a social construct, you are incorrect that Indians must fall under the broader term Asian. They can be considered as Asian when appropriate to the discussion but they can fall under narrower or broader classifications when it is relevant to the discussion.
While ‘race’ (as a social construct) is a way of classifying people into groups based on physical traits, ‘caste’ is a system of social stratification, where groups are assigned a way of life defined primarily by occupation.
Caste has no distinguishable physical feature and members of the same ‘race’ group may be of several different caste groups. In Britain for example, Dalits have progressed economically and do not follow their traditional occupations of cleaning toilets and skinning dead animals, but they encounter caste-based discrimination in social interactions. Unlike race discrimination, caste discrimination is intra-racial and is practised among those of the same nationality, ethnic origin and/or cultural background.
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Look up what phenotype means. I’ll help you, it’s the observable characteristics of an individual. The way a person looks can be part of the social construct that defines them as a race.
Race actually is based on phenotypes. It’s in the definition of race. Race is also based on ethnic/cultural/religious differences, but physical characteristics absolutely are part of what people call race.
Yes, there is no science backing the idea of race or humans being different based on race, but there is science backing the idea that humans distinguish other groups based on physical characteristics. That is the conversation we are having, not whether people actually are different based on where they grew up or what they look like. Just that humans will use looks to distinguish groups of people, along with other differences.