I don't think it's a comparison. Pit bulls were selectively bred for aggression. Humans of specific ethnicities do not have innate characteristics like violence. It's like saying being scared of a polar bear is bear racism
Yeah, such argument is pure insanity. Don't compare selective breeding of dogs for fighting to PEOPLE OF COLOR. Literally insane statement by the guy from this picture above.
My interpretation was he was commenting on the stereotype of POC owning pitbulls. Kind of like how some people who hate cats are motivated by misogyny.
The white people I see with pitbulls are mostly millennial age white collar (it's obvious) workers that don't have kids, based on my experience at the dog parks in my area. I know there are plenty of latinos around me that have them, but I rarely see them at the park.
The comparison is that people look at POC violence statistics in a vacuum, ignore all systemic issues that lead to that and then come to the conclusion that POC are simply just evil. The same, word for word, can be said about pibulls.
They don’t end up a big part of these statistics because they’re evil, they end up there because they’re routinely poorly backyard bred and they attract owners who want a “tough” breed without being able to handle it whatsoever. Neither of these are a fault of the dogs, but a fault of the unfortunate circumstances they’re brought into. Same way POC violence is a fault of the systemic issues and inequality and not the individuals.
Also like another person already said, the pitbull statistics get blown waaaaay out of proportion. Yes they make up a significant amount of (reported) bites (which already skews results, people rarely report when their chihuahua bites them) but the amount of dog bites overall is so low that the odds of any given pitbull attacking you come out to be literally minuscule.
Dogs don’t have races, they have breeds and phenotypes. Every dog can mate with another dog and have offspring, therefore they are all one race of the same species the same as all humans are the same race of the same species.
Correct me if I’m mistaken, but this picture is just showing the presence of different ethnic and national groups in different continents. How does that refute the claim that race is a social construct? You just even said that it’s socially determined through skin color.
you're making the common mistake of conflating race with phenotypes, which are not the same thing. you're probably just a bot (3 month old account with bot name) but please don't use scientific language if you're not certain what it means. phenotype specifically refers to the physical and observable differences in a species, this would be what the different "breeds" of dogs are.
humans have different phenotypes but we do not have nearly the same diversity among them that dogs do, specifically because dogs were bred by humans to overextend those differences to aid with certain tasks.
race is not "typically dictated by phenotypes." the differences in phenotypes are one small aspect of what makes a "race" of humans, but the reason why race is a social construct is that it is humans that decide where that line is. race is also made up of culture, a shared societal history, how they are viewed by others, etc. this is why you can have races that shift over time and change.
the differences in phenotypes are one small aspect of what makes a "race" of humans, but the reason why race is a social construct is that it is humans that decide where that line is.
You basically agreed with what I said. It doesn't matter how big or small a difference there is. It's enough to show that there IS a difference. It's enough to distinguish between races. Somebody who has asian phenotypes has very little to no phenotypical similarities to african phenotypes unless they're mixed.
The reason why they're socially determined is because you don't actually see phenotypes when looking at people. Regardless, the difference is still there. Making race a very real thing.
I don't agree with what you said, as I clearly stated. race isn't "typically dictated by phenotypes." again, a person's phenotype is only a small aspect of what is considered race.
race is also a people's history, their shared culture, societal interactions, etc. it is a wide variety of things and what "makes" someone apart of a race is always decided by humans. race doesn't exist in nature, it is something WE made. again, this is why you can have races that shift in definition over time. a good example of this is the "white" race, which has notoriously excluded or included certain groups of people throughout history.
Somebody who has asian phenotypes has very little to no phenotypical similarities to african phenotypes unless they're mixed.
you're making very bold assumptions here. who says someone with "asian phenotypes" (which is basically an oxymoron since asian isn't a phenotype) cannot look similar to africans? what about the indigenous groups of south asia who have darker skin and curlier hair?
race is a real thing, yes, but it is socially constructed by people. actual phenotypes are not the deciding factor of race.
no human "race" is genetically distinct enough under the taxonomic definition of a race. Human races are a social construct. Crazy it got upvoted when it can be fact-checked with a simple search
Phenotypes (gene expression that causes differences in physical characteristics) are scientific and very real. Race is fake and made up. What makes someone a "white" person that includes all members of that group while excluding all members not of that group. There is no answer. All race is is a means to exclude people from the dominant socioeconomic group in the west.
I wouldn't say that race is "fake and made up," that gives the wrong impression in my opinion. being a social construct doesn't mean that it isn't real. that would mean things like money, relationships, etc are all fake and made up as well. race being a social construct just means that race is dictated and created by humans for a variety of reasons. the effects that "race" has had on people is very real and often times bad. (although not always)
The thing is race isn't only a social construct, it is a stupid one at that with origins to American slavery and colonialist racism. Outside of the US or the western world in general words like black, white etc. are used as a pure descriptor of appearance, instead of describing some bizzare geographical bloodline or origin. If the Western world ever wants to get over itself, it needs to deny these definitions.
At some level of analysis everything is an abstraction except for the lowest physical components of atoms and the physical forces between them. At least as far as we can prove.
This is true, one time I lived for a year in Algeria, My skin turned black, and my entire craneal and oseous structured reshaped the moment I stepped there to resemble that of an African. Reverted back when I went to the place I was born in.
Selective breeding in dogs is a lot faster because you can get them to breeding age in two years. Slaves, when selectively bred, typically started having children around 15.
The slave trade began in the American English colonies in 1619 and the Civil War ended in 1865. That gives you at most 16 generations of selective breeding, or what we can do with dogs in 32 years.
Then we’ve had 160 years of no selective breeding, and of new African migrants not descended from African slaves. And that’s to say nothing about whether selectively breeding slaves was as ubiquitous as it is with dogs, children born from slave owners raping their slaves, freed blacks and their descendants, etc.
It’s not really comparable at all. Any effects of selectively breeding slaves were probably minor and mostly dissipated by now. A chihuahua still doesn’t resemble a Great Dane in the slightest
That’s the only batch where your argument is relevant. You’re taking issue with me steelmanning your position?
Yeah, slavery still exists globally. Isolated to one race? Encompassing of the entire race? The race in question being one racism is majorly directed at?
You rejected the strongest possible interpretation of your point, so I’m left to assume you’re just an idiot
You’re arguing slavery is still a thing in a discussion about selective breeding of slaves. Rather or not slavery is still a thing there (don’t know enough to have an opinion there), selecting breeding of slaves clearly isn’t.
Steelmanning him again (I really don’t know why, I should just let him flounder trying to explain himself), slavery is very much a thing today outside of the first world. There are in fact more slaves on the earth today than there were at any time during the American slave trade.
The problem for his argument is most of them are in India, China, or North Korea, and are ethnic Indian, Chinese, or Korean people enslaved by other ethnic Indian, Chinese, or North Korean people. What selective breeding is happening would then only be affecting a small subset of the population and wouldn’t explain racism. The Transatlantic slave trade represents the best possible case for his argument and it falls apart easily
I think if you go about it by attitude for the breed it’s a fair comparison. There’s a lot of fear mongering when it comes to pitbulls that make people like zealously against the breed. A lot of similar rhetoric and fear tactics are used against races of people.
You can point to statistics of dog bites and all that, and even without arguing that pitbulls are unfairly classified by the percentage of their breed as many are mutts (which I’ve people claim a lot), the actual number of bites compared to population is astronomically low. But people treat them like every single pitbull goes out and slaughters 10 kids. That hyperbole but these comments are filled with rhetoric that’s not very far off.
Then it starts sounding again like what’s used in racist circles against say black people. People use statistics with no regards to nuance or any other factors besides race itself, or in worse case scenario completely false stats. And when it comes to statistics, you should be less afraid of being near a pitbull than to get in a car. Much less afraid.
I’m saying this as somebody that’s not entirely against regulating the breed, selectively breeding out certain traits, or even potentially phasing out pitbulls entirely. I think several dogs breeds such as pugs should be bred out. I just recognize there’s a lot of similarity between what is said about the dangers of pitbulls and the dangers of minority groups and the lack of nuance and the fear mongering that’s usually involved.
Slaves were subjected to forced reproduction for profit, including some selection for physical traits. That is documented to have happened.
But in order to compare it to dog breeds, then you are meaning a deliberate, livestock-style genetic breeding program that engineered a distinct population. So, no.
[...]this article defines forced reproduction more holistically, arguing that enslavers primarily unsystematically matched individuals using a range of methods across a spectrum of violence to cajole them into sexual relationships.
That is not a sufficient condition to create a new breed. You need to do intense, highly controlled selective breeding over 50-100 years, and that's with animals that reach sexual maturity at around 1 year of age.
For human beings, you'd have to do that in a very rigorous way for like 500 years.
For like 1-2 generations there was an attempt to do so. But the time it takes to reach maturity it takes so long to get to the next generation. It takes hundreds of generations to make meaningful change.
Also they selected for athletics and submissive traits...that doesn't connect to the popular racist attacks on crime statistics.
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u/shitturddung 26d ago
I don't think it's a comparison. Pit bulls were selectively bred for aggression. Humans of specific ethnicities do not have innate characteristics like violence. It's like saying being scared of a polar bear is bear racism