Sheena Michelle Mason on Ending Racism by "Ending" Race: The Same Old Progressive-Left Race Nonsense

I haven't read the book, but I can tell from the review that it's just the same old nonsense again. The left just repeats slight variations on the same arguments over and over. I'll probably go through the arguments yet again. Most of it turns on:

[1] The mass of confusions called "social constructionism"

[2] Political correctness, the idea that facts/evidence/science should be subordinated to politics

[3] Confusions about natural kinds

[4] Some textbook fallacies including the continuum fallacy.

Races are real. They are natural biological kinds. That is: they are something roughly like generally phenotypically distinguishable groups with different most recent common ancestors than other such groups--or, maybe, something like homeostatic property clusters. They're clusters with fuzzy boundaries and borderline cases--so most of the alleged counterexamples (like Barack Obama) don't matter at all. And racism is irrelevant to the question. And, without a doubt, races do not depend on racism. In fact, the left's entire understanding of racism is as confused as its ideas about race...but I'm not going into that now.

   Anyway. The Left (i.e. the intellectual/cultural/political left) is radically confused about an astonishing number of things. None more than this stuff, I'd say.

   One last thing: note that Mason is a lit prof. She's not a biologist nor an anthropologist. She's not a philosopher of science. Her training is in a discipline known largely for two things: sloppy reasoning and intellectual capture (it should go without saying: by the left...)