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 way you know that race is a social construct is that (at least in America) it was…socially constructed. A White Protestant American in 1900 would have been horrified by the idea of an Irish-American or Italian-American or Jewish-American being considered white, and yet each of those groups is considered unquestionably white today.
What whiteness is instead is a club that everyone wants to be a part of – what James Baldwin called “a metaphor for power.” Nobody wants to be powerless, so joining the white club is about climbing the rungs so you aren’t the bottom group. If there’s someone with less power than you, you’ve made it. Any category whose membership changes that drastically must be socially constructed.
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