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
Those tests don’t necessarily show what you think they do. They aren’t saying that you absolutely have X% of your ancestors coming from Y. It’s more along the lines of: if you took a large number of unrelated people with similar genetics they would expect X% of all their ancestors to come from Y. It’s a matter of probability.
Even then those genetic tests are somewhat questionable in how accurate they are for broad heredity. It’s better for detecting relatedness to specific other people or detecting specific traits.
There certainly are variations in genetics related to where people or their ancestors are from, but it’s all blurry and uncertain and a matter of probability, and it always has been. When people say that “race is a construct” they are saying that the idea of discrete “pure” races is what’s made up.
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