I know this question sounds incredibly ignorant but i have been trying to understand for some time. My main reason for asking is because if we have dna testing that can show someone’s ancestry is this much % Italian and this much % Korean, how is that a social construct if it’s in our dna?
Please understand I’m not saying race isn’t a social construct, I am just trying to understand how it is a social construct.
In: Biology
The idea that a person is “White” or “Asian” or “Black” is a social construct, because those categories are made up by people, and what counts as “white” varies from culture to culture, and from person to person. The idea of dividing humanity into sub-groups based on ethnic origin is a social construct, something that humans invented. The idea that certain humans whose ancestors came from specific regions are going to have minor genetic differences is science, but how we divide people up into groups is based on social norms and ideas.
So there are three concepts: nationality, ethnicity, and race.
While there can be overlaps, they are each their separate and own things.
Nationality denotes “legal” citizenship, whether born or naturalized. Ethnicity denotes cultural aspects of a specific group; traditions, language, foods, clothing, hairstyles, etc. Race denotes physical, or phenotypical, traits that people of the same group may posses; skin color, facial features, hair textures and so on.
While the above are simply truths, the concept of *identifying* race in itself is a socially constructed idea and is purely divisive in nature. We are all the same species, though we have different cultures, lands, and practices but despite those variances, when it come down to it we are all the same. So back to race, it is obvious and true that we all *look* different though! People who have unfair and ungrounded biases like to use race as a divisive tool to set people apart. Example: Asians are smarter and more strict than other races, instead of; it is a *cultural* difference and the way they are raised. Or: Black people are more likely to be poor, instead of; they and the countries their ancestors are from have been exploited for resources and labor.
While race *inherently* is not bad or fake, it’s morphological concept *is* bad and fake.
(I hope this was eli5 enough??)
there are genes more common in certain areas of the planet, but all that shows is where some of your genes originated.
think about this, why is it italian? Italy wasn’t unified until the 1800s. So, why is that report showing italian and not something like sicilian or roman? Or even Etruscan (iron age) or Remedellian (copper age). If it wanted to show where the genes originated, it would be something like 42N 12W (the approximate location of Italy), the alps, or the Tiber river (major geographic landmarks).
“Italian” is a label that the people currently living in the areas mentioned call themselves. It’s just made up. If you reset italy from back before the copper age, you’d end up with a completely different group of people with a different history that all called themselves something different. Your genetic makeup would be the same (probably), but your report wouldn’t say italian.
I read the comments, sounds like all the answers are confused. The take away is that race is a broad generalization based on geographic evolution. It’s not simply a construct. Skin colour, hair type, eye color, susceptibility to disease, these all form the generalization of race. But I think people are leaning on post modern interpretations when they say race doesn’t exist. It does exist, it exists in the same way breeds of dogs exist.
We know that race is a social construct because it’s constantly changing. Depending on who you talk to, and what year it is, various groups have been white or non-white, for example. Irish people were considered non-white for years. In Britain, Irish people were considered “brown” people because they were so dirty. It didn’t even matter that they were more or less the same skin color as British people. The British saw them as a “degenerate, savage” people who couldn’t be considered white. The same was true in America for quite a while. And it’s notable that part of the way that the Irish “gained” whiteness was by engaging in strong anti-black discrimination. The Irish were then accepted as white because they were allies in continuing the slavery of Africans.
Similarly, Jewish people have sometimes been considered white. Other times, they’re not.
Why are Mexicans non-white, yet Spaniards who they’re descended from ARE white?
Sometimes Eastern Europeans are white. Other times they’re not. It’s kind of baffling.
Lots of people say, it’s about geographical difference, yet why is the whole of Africa black when Africa is a HUGE continent, and yet Europe can sustain these fine, fine delineations?
The more you look at race, the more you get the feeling that it’s just all made up to suit whomever wants to oppress somebody.
Another example of the Social Construct of race relating to the ‘Asian’ catagory.
I have met a few Japanese people who are from Japan and are 100% ‘ethnically’ Japanese. When asked if they consider themselves ‘Asian’, it is a definite NO. They only consider themselves Japanese. The rest of the world lumps them together with other “Asian” ethnicities.
Another interesting example was the planning of a major Asian Art Museum.
At the time there was a great debate [some scholarly], as to whether India should or should not be included. In the end India was included.
EDIT: Removed US Census information relating to Asian people. Believed to be erroneous.
Focusing on the DNA tests, they don’t measure the amount of “Korean-ness”. They measure the presence or absence of hundreds of different harmless mutations. Some of these mutations are most commonly found in people from a particular region, so the more of them you have, the more of your ancestors probably came from that region.
But those mutations didn’t necessarily *originate* in that country. For example, the DNA test might associate “Korean-ness” with one gene that originally mutated in China and was brought to Korea through migration 2000 years ago, another that was brought by Mongol invaders 800 years ago, a third that originated in Korea but is also now found in Japan and Manchuria, and a fourth that originated in Japan and was brought over during their invasions in the 16th century.
None of these genetic tags are uniquely Korean, they’re all found in other parts of northeast Asia. All the genetic test can tell you is that that particular combination of genetic tags is most often found in the modern people who’ve chosen to call themselves “Korean”. But those people have ancestors from all over the map.
Nobody’s a pureblood, everyone’s a mongrel, and it’s been like this for thousands and thousands of years. “Race” is nothing more than a set of sharp-lined boundaries we humans have chosen to draw across the blurry mixture that is human variation.
There are real differences between people, but which ones are considered important and worth classifying, and how they are classified are up to humans entirely. One person may be considered different races depending on who’s judging, for example. Who counts as which race has varied quite a lot over time.
>because if we have dna testing that can show someone’s ancestry is this much % Italian and this much % Korean, how is that a social construct if it’s in our dna?
Italy and Korea, and any nation, is a construct of humanity. Nothing is fundamentally different in the planet itself on one side of a country’s border or the other. If the land were divided in a completely different way, you could still pick out alleles (gene variants) more common in one area than another and classify people that way. Also, some people have tried sending their DNA to multiple DNA testing companies and got results that were different! A lot is up to subjective, human interpretation.
There is no scientific definition of race. Human is a species. There are no sub-species or “breeds” of human. And the socially constructed definition of race has changed significantly over time. For example, you’ll never hear anyone say a person is of the Irish race anymore, but 100 years ago you would have. Just as nationality is a social construct defined by made up borders, so race is a social construct with rather poorly defined borders. For example, is someone from Egypt a member of the African race? After all, they live on the African continent. Or are they of the Arab race, because of their culture? If it’s because of their culture, then if an child whose parents were born in Sweden were raised in the Arab culture of Egypt, would they be of the Arab race even though their ancestry is nordic?
There’s a whole lot of paragraphs in here when the answer is pretty simple. Race is genetic, it’s not “socially constructed”.
Although to help your confusion a bit, when a dna test says you’re %this and %that, what it’s really doing is looking at certain genetic markers that are associated with certain regions in certain time periods.
Here’s an article about it: [https://www.livescience.com/62690-how-dna-ancestry-23andme-tests-work.html](https://www.livescience.com/62690-how-dna-ancestry-23andme-tests-work.html)
And here’s a relevant quote: So, if your 23andMe test says you’re 29 percent British, it’s because 29 percent of the pieces of your DNA were most likely to have come from a group that 23andMe’s reference library has labeled “British.”
So the biggest stretch you can make is that how we identify someone’s genetics is usually an association with their cultural and regional ties, and that usage of language is “a social construct”. But race inherently is just genetics.
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