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
There’s a whole lot of paragraphs in here when the answer is pretty simple. Race is genetic, it’s not “socially constructed”.
Although to help your confusion a bit, when a dna test says you’re %this and %that, what it’s really doing is looking at certain genetic markers that are associated with certain regions in certain time periods.
Here’s an article about it: [https://www.livescience.com/62690-how-dna-ancestry-23andme-tests-work.html](https://www.livescience.com/62690-how-dna-ancestry-23andme-tests-work.html)
And here’s a relevant quote: So, if your 23andMe test says you’re 29 percent British, it’s because 29 percent of the pieces of your DNA were most likely to have come from a group that 23andMe’s reference library has labeled “British.”
So the biggest stretch you can make is that how we identify someone’s genetics is usually an association with their cultural and regional ties, and that usage of language is “a social construct”. But race inherently is just genetics.
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