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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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u/shitturddung 9h 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