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
Skimming through the other comments, I see one major factor being overlooked: Tribe.
A few thousand years ago, many people rarely traveled more than a day from home, limiting their world to about a 25 mile/40 km circle around where they were born. There were also people who had figured out horses and other pack animals, who traveled much further, and explorer types who migrated to new lands. The point is that many people were isolated or insular, or both, so their genetic pool led them to a similar appearance to the others in their pool. Tribes are an extension of this familial relationship, and the Nation (Sioux, for example) is a greater collection of Tribes.
European nations like France, Poland, Italy, and so on aren’t tribes. The tribes are Gaul, Teuton, Pole, Slovak, Croat, Angle, Saxon, Norman, Dansk, Finn, Scot, and so on. Many political Nation units are comprised of many Tribal Nation units, and there’s plenty of ancestral history and friction between those units.
The Origin of “Race” as a thing to describe people originated as a way to understand peoples by creating groups, but the edges are very flimsy. Further, considering how you define race, you can get many more than three: Mongol, Caucasian, Negro, Amerind, Polynesian, and Melanesian, for example.
High latitude/low sun peoples will tend to be pale, low latitude/high sun people will tend to be dark. That’s an ancestral/genetic adaptation to sun and how the skin reacts to it. But saying dark skinned/curly haired people from Borneo or Australia are directly related to similar people in the Seychelles or Africa via “race” is an error.
Delaware, Algonquin, Pawnee, Apache, Zuni, Navajo, Choctaw, Seminole, and Paiute are all different tribes/nations from very different parts of North America. They’re different. Likewise the peoples of North, East, Central, South, and West Africa are all different. Presuming the 200+ tribes of North America are all the same is as silly as presuming the 2000+ tribes of Africa are all the same. Somali is not Zulu. Egyptian is not Yoruba.
People have in the past divided types of people since forever. We use labels to describe things. Race is one of them. But at what point when the blend between them become a change of label? Your guess is as good as mine, and the definition you use.
Edit: Spelling
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