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 are real differences between people, but which ones are considered important and worth classifying, and how they are classified are up to humans entirely. One person may be considered different races depending on who’s judging, for example. Who counts as which race has varied quite a lot over time.
>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?
Italy and Korea, and any nation, is a construct of humanity. Nothing is fundamentally different in the planet itself on one side of a country’s border or the other. If the land were divided in a completely different way, you could still pick out alleles (gene variants) more common in one area than another and classify people that way. Also, some people have tried sending their DNA to multiple DNA testing companies and got results that were different! A lot is up to subjective, human interpretation.
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