Chateau Heartiste is a very entertaining “Game” blog, which has just discovered one of the Stupid Professor Tricks.  On substituting various euphemisms for the word “race:”

What is it with lunatic libs and their pathological compulsion to deny the reality of race? “Red” and “blue” are social constructs to describe real world differences in colors, but that doesn’t mean the visible light spectrum is imaginary or a tool of the oppressive White patriarchy. All words are literally social constructs — labels created by social humans — to describe real world phenomena. Leftoids can call it “ancestry”, “population locations”, “human migration patterns” or “geography-based groups” that “correlate” with “sociological concepts of race”, but it’s all just legerdemain-slash-poopytalk meaning the same as race.

Times like these make the whole Explaining Academia series worthwhile.  I often wonder if anyone even cares about this nonsense…. but then some of it slips out into the real world.  So, for the benefit of PUAs everywhere:

In academese, social construction means “an incontrovertible, easily observed part of Reality that we wish to deny, for fun and profit.”  You’ll notice that, say, Marxism is never referred to as a “social construction,” though it’s the very definition of a community-based reality.  Nor are conservative, Right wing, nationalist, or any of their synonyms, though again, they are entirely the creation of social groups, for social purposes — every theology requires its devil, after all.   Ditto capitalism, for the same reason — if it weren’t empirically real, they’d too obviously be tilting at windmills.

But race? Gender? You can’t get tenure saying “boys are boys and girls are girls,” and the ivory tower would be about as diverse as a Huffington Post editorial board meeting if they admitted that race is a real thing.  Thus, they are “social constructions.”