zomgwtf said:
Well firstly racial classification needs to be broken down. Two different meanings, one generally accepted in society and one strictly biological.
People believe there are people that have different skin colour than they do. They could be justified in this belief. People do have different skin colour, therefore they know that people have different skin colour.
People believe that people with different skin colour are a different sub-species from their skin colour. They could feel justified in this belief. People with different skin colours are not sub-species from other skin colours, therefore the people with those beliefs do not KNOW that people of different skin colour are a sub-species.
They CAN'T know it because it's not true, they can only believe it. One of two possibilities, they don't know the science (which necessarily means they don't know... THINK ABOUT IT. 'They don't KNOW the science'. They just believe in non-sense) or they do know the science and just believe based on faith, (they still do not know anything and their beliefs are questionable now).
But they don't know that their beliefs are questionable. And they don't believe that the science that disproves the biological basis of race is valid. So, for themselves, they continue to "know" that race is a sociobiological reality - because in their minds the claims to knowledge that race is a fiction is nothing more than anti-racist propaganda. In other words, they no longer trust science to be objective and politically neutral. So in that sense, they know what they believe, the justify it by reference to their belief that they are not politically brainwashed to denying "truth" as they recognize it, and the social-reality of race is indiscernable to them from the attribute skin-color, or whatever bodily trait they are interpolating in order to racialize bodies.
I can certainly take a side and say that such people can't know someone's race in that it is not a valid classification, but I can also see how their regime of truth allows them to sincerely believe that it is. These two truths are not incommensurable, as relativists once liked to claim. They are certainly commensurable, but I think for many people, the stakes are such that they avoid commensuration. So it depends on which regime of truth you recognize what you can claim to "know," but from one authority you can also say that it's impossible for someone to know something at all because it's not true.
Basically, I think you have to decide whether one can know different regimes of truth or whether only true things can be known, and there is only one regime of truth that makes things knowable. If you decide to "know" that only one regime of truth exists, can you provide a defensible basis for going beyond "believing" it to "knowing" it? Are you capable of being proven wrong that things you know are true and knowable?
If you know something according to one truth-regime and you know its wrong according to another, is it possible to avoid reconciling the conflict by assertion of one truth as true and the other one as false? Or do you simply KNOW that one is false and the other is true based on whatever reason is available to you?
Now why is this important? Because you are using two different definitions of race in your description here. The general population does not use race in the biological sense of 'sub-species' to my knowledge at least, and if they do they you can see from above they have no knowledge of the science, they can't because it's not true. Then you talk about a specific biological word race and apply it to the social word race, two different meanings. You have to be more specific with your words if your going to use examples like this friend.
How else could "race" be used except as sub-species? What else would it be other than a biological classification? If it was simply a social category, would membership be conceptualized in terms of body traits? I will give you that I have actually noticed that it is possible for people to "belong" to a racial category despite body-trait deviance due to blood-ties, but that is highly disputed in everyday discourse. Many people see people who fail to pass "the brown paper bag test," "one-drop rule," or whatever other criteria is used to be lying about their race, since they see them as factually part of a different race than the one they claim. It is possible to know that such people are wrong, but they don't know they're wrong - nor are they planning to "know" anything except what they "know" aside from psychotherapy to "cure" their political epistemology.
This also questions accepting science as well. Are all the answers that science gives true? Nope. Hence kote has told you that he doesn't know a whole lot of different things about reality.
He does, but he doesn't know what he knows because he denies recognition of his power to justify his own knowledge. So he wastes his power by using it to "know" that he doesn't know anything he doesn't justify to himself. If he would justify what he knows as knowledge, he might be able to engage other knowledge in evaluation and take steps toward greater truth. When you assert what you know and find out you're not justified in knowing what you knew, you learn something and evolve.
