Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of a Left Podcast.

This is a sample of our recent bonus episode every couple of weeks or so, our crew of researchers,

Amanda and myself get together for a roundtable discussion.

So here's a few minutes for free so you can see what all the fuss is about.

I've been reading this book Words Matter that I want to keep referencing probably pretty frequently.

And the lesson for today is about the difference between race or races

and the idea of racialized groups as a much better phrase to describe the concept of race.

And this is one of those things that I think is long overdue because we have known,

I mean many people have known for a long time and then I think it was maybe the 90s or something

when we cracked the human genome that we knew scientifically that there is no such thing as race

and it's total bullshit.

But for decades since knowing that we have still continued to talk about races as though they're true

or as though they're real because in one sense they are, they are real because we decide that they're real

like money.

But to talk about race as a real thing without describing it in a way that makes that distinction

is I think counterproductive.

And so I found that a really interesting distinction to say that there is no such thing as race

but there absolutely is such a thing as a racialized group.

And then even a step further than that is socially assigned racialized group which is not what

you actually are based on your heritage but what people perceive a person to be.

That's the race that is socially assigned or the racialization that is socially assigned.

Does anyone have thoughts on that they want to jump in with?

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