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
“Race” is a cloud of ideas about groups of people. Sometimes the test that people used to demarcate a “race” was based on skin color or other physical traits, sometimes by geography, sometimes by lineage or “blood”, and probably others I’m not thinking of.
Already you can see we have a problem with “race” as a concept: it’s pretty blurry and impossible to pin down what a “race” is and what it is not, who is in it and who is not. Those decisions are subjective and cultural. How do you categorize people of mixed “race”? That’s decided subjectively and culturally. How do you categorize areas with widely varying genotypes with lots of mixing like the United States? Subjective and cultural. And how can you categorize anyone anywhere once you see (in DNA for example) just how “mixed” all populations really are, even ones that look, superficially and subjectively, homogenous?
Also, crucially, “race” always assumes essential qualities of the group being defined, and (coincidentally? Hah!) always assumes better qualities for the race of the racist. None of these claimed differences in quality have survived honest examination.
On the other hand, DNA variations can be linked to geography. Right now, I might be able to find ten rare variations in my genome that only commonly appear together in a small population in a village near Minsk, and a different group of genes that appear together very commonly in a fishing community in Ivory Coast. These facts suggest (maybe strongly, maybe not) that my family tree includes people who lived in those areas, or at least that I share a common ancestry with those people, wherever that common ancestor might have lived. But remember, geography and the history of human migration, mixing, mutation, etc. is not “race”.
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