[RonaldDump]

But if I understand the angle of "social constructioners" correctly, they're not disputing that what we might call 'ethnicities' or 'tribes' exist (ie. a group of people of common ancestry and with a distinct genotype), it's just that trying to lump the thousands of these into a few broad categories, like "black", is far too crude to be useful.

But ethnicities still exist. So would it not be valid to be "ethnicist" (ie. very specifically racist), like "Those Sami people are so x" or "Gosh those Bantu people are y"?

[asveikau]

Ethnicities and tribes and inclusion therein are ambiguous, and it changes over time. Look at any society and its history. They're not homogeneous. All the historical countries and tribes were multiethnic.

One example is Rome. Every region or province, even Italia, consisted of different ethnic groups. At one point there was a diverse group in a small area called the Latins. The Romans were a single ethnic group in Latium who first took over and assimilated the other Latins who were distinct, then whole peninsula absorbing Etruscans and celts and Greeks in the south and others, absorbed people from all over Europe and north Africa and Asia minor...

But it's fashionable among young internet white supremacists to say these were all pasty white dudes.

The truth is it's an anachronism to compare racial categorizations from two different time periods where differences were not seen in the same way or with the same context. Afaik the Romans didn't really have a construct of race that was the same as our modern ones. And they assimilated and erased many distinctions over time.

[RonaldDump]

What's that got to do with anything?

What's stopping me from identifying variation in the frequency of different traits between ethnic groups in the current day? It's not a virtue to pretend not to notice such things (or, indeed, to be truly incapable of the most basic pattern recognition).

I think the argument could then be made that if you identify traits common to closely related tribes (eg. indigenous East African) that are noticeably different from the frequency or magnitude of these traits in a different cluster of closely related tribes (eg. indigenous Scandinavian) then there should be no reason to pretend to ignore them.