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
First of all, Italy and Korea are social constructs too. All of those ancestry reports specifically refer to particular regions, and often lump large land masses together; as such, referring to a person’s race by a particular country is generally imprecise at best.
The way genetic variation is distributed across the planet is *not* random, which is why many eastern Asians have a similar appearance, as do western Europeans, northern Africans, etc. The problem is, those variations are not discrete. As you move continuously from one place to another (particularly if you go back in time before colonialism and fast global travel), you will see people’s “race” change continuously as well. When do the people you see stop being (eastern) Asian and start being middle-eastern? Then stop being middle-eastern and start being white? There’s no hard line. The same thing exists for colors, where different cultures have drawn different lines between which colors are which. It’s not that color is a social construct, but “blue” is. Similarly, genetic variation based on location is a real, demonstrable fact, but the racial categories we use to delineate people based on those variation are entirely constructed.
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