Culture and race are as real as body parts and geological features are.
There’s no (precise) border between cultures and races.
There’s no (precise) border between body parts like shoulders, arms and hands, or geological features like hills and valleys, deserts, forests and plains, doesn’t mean body parts and geological features aren’t wholly, mostly or in some important sense, separate, their own entities, doesn’t mean it’s not meaningful to give them names, think of and treat them differently.
Race is as real as dog breeds, more real in fact, in some cases human populations have been totally separate for dozens of thousands of years, according to scientific estimates, whereas some dog breeds have only been relatively separate for centuries or even just decades, but for ideological reasons, scientists don’t have a problem with dog breeds.
Science doesn’t operate in a political economic vacuum.
Science is big business and politics (as well as social mores).
If you look carefully enough, you can spot where big business and politics has contaminated science and separate the wheat from the chaff.
For example, you’ll hear them say our existing racial categories are rough, insufficiently rigorous and systematic for science.
So what?
Do what you do with any other field of inquiry, refine the categories.
Planets are social constructs, there is no (precise) border between where asteroids end and planetoids begin.
They had a vote on the definition of a planet and recategorized Pluto as a dwarf planet, because they discovered too many other planets in the Kuiper belt for their tastes (shit we can’t have dozens or hundreds of planets, right?), very scientific.
But that’s how science has to operate, it can’t separate itself from human cognition, customs and language (not at all and at least not fully respectively), which vary from person to person and people to people, which’s why we sometimes find scientists believing one thing in one country and the contrary in another.
Practically everything is in some senses a social construct, and really they know that, but they still won’t go any where near race.
Racial categories are sufficiently rigorous and systematic for forensic anthropologies to make use of, since they can tell a Negroid apart from a Caucasoid just by examining a single tooth, 98 times out of 100, which’s why law enforcement employs them.
Take any two native Irishmen and lo and behold, they’ll have significantly more in common with each other than a native Irishmen and a native Nigerian or a native Irishmen and a native Chinaman will have, who would’ve surmised?
While they’re a minority, scientists like Philippe Rushton and Richard Lynn have done good work on race science.
All that being said, I’m not just a racist because of my interpretations of science, but because of my interpretations of my experiences and how I feel.
Race is instinctual, intuitive, we’re born with a racial sense, a way of separating the (extended) self from otherness.
For example, some progressive mothers raised in progressive homes have mixed race babies and can’t identify with or care for them, because they don’t look, and presumably behave like them.
They feel terrible about it, but some of them can’t get over it.
Even progressive blacks seek black friends and neighborhoods to live in, and the same is true of progressive whites, Hispanics and Asians.
And much to their chagrin, scientists are starting to discover that diversity in fact leads to social breakdown and decay.
Racism isn’t (strictly) a social construct invented by white capitalists in the early modern period, many population groups from antiquity such as the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians and Babylonians had all sorts of theories about race.
They believed Africans, Asians, Mediterraneans and Nordics had certain physical capabilities and psychological characteristics.
And there’s nothing, hateful about any of this.
Israelis want to go on being Israelis, Koreans want to be Koreans, Japanese want to be Japanese, not because of hate, but because of affinity.
White Americans and Canadians wanted to be white until 1965, when they opened the floodgates and let the 3rd world come pouring in.
And many of them still want to be white.
Many Europeans want to remain white, but their politicians had other plans.
Both culture and race, and class are important, not arbitrary.
They matter, and you don’t have to focus on one to the exclusion of the other.