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
The idea that a person is “White” or “Asian” or “Black” is a social construct, because those categories are made up by people, and what counts as “white” varies from culture to culture, and from person to person. The idea of dividing humanity into sub-groups based on ethnic origin is a social construct, something that humans invented. The idea that certain humans whose ancestors came from specific regions are going to have minor genetic differences is science, but how we divide people up into groups is based on social norms and ideas.
The way you know that race is a social construct is that (at least in America) it was…socially constructed. A White Protestant American in 1900 would have been horrified by the idea of an Irish-American or Italian-American or Jewish-American being considered white, and yet each of those groups is considered unquestionably white today.
What whiteness is instead is a club that everyone wants to be a part of – what James Baldwin called “a metaphor for power.” Nobody wants to be powerless, so joining the white club is about climbing the rungs so you aren’t the bottom group. If there’s someone with less power than you, you’ve made it. Any category whose membership changes that drastically must be socially constructed.
A lot of reasonable responses here, I just want throw in the apparent finding that people of Africa are the most genetically diverse set of populations on the planet (https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/30/AR2009043002485.html/). So, because they may share some set of phenotypic traits they are lumped together as a single race but this is an incredible oversimplification of the genetic diversity at play.
So if actual genetic variation is not considered (epigenetics can complicate this but that’s another story I’m totally unqualified to tell) for determining race that leaves cultural and societal factors to be responsible for racial distinctions.
Also, I’m glad people honestly inquire about sensitive topics. Many seem to choose political affiliation over seeking some approximation of truth.
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.
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
Follow up question. Is that notion mostly a US idea? It seems weird to me to think in terms of continents. African encompasses some 54 countries, 4 dependencies, has Arabs, White people, and many specific groups of Black people. Yet we seem to want to round it off. It leads to some serious confusion. I had a person insisting with great conviction that all Africans spoke “African.”
From a strictly scientific biological perspective:
>[The term *race* in biology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(biology)) is used with caution because it can be ambiguous. Generally, when it is used it is effectively a synonym of [*subspecies*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subspecies).[[73]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_%28human_categorization%29#cite_note-Keita;_Templeton;_Long-73) (For animals, the only taxonomic unit below the [species](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species) level is usually the subspecies;[[74]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_%28human_categorization%29#cite_note-conservation-74) there are narrower [infraspecific ranks in botany](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infraspecific_name), and *race* does not correspond directly with any of them.) Traditionally, [subspecies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subspecies) are seen as geographically isolated and genetically differentiated populations.[[75]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_%28human_categorization%29#cite_note-Templeton_1998-75) Studies of human genetic variation show that human populations are not geographically isolated,[[76]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_%28human_categorization%29#cite_note-76) and their genetic differences are far smaller than those among comparable subspecies
In other words: there are no different races of humans. At least not if you use the word like it is used for animals and from a biological perspective.
From the social perspective it is still commonly used (at least in the English speaking countries) and other redditors have already explained where that comes from wonderfully.
“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”.
I’ve read some of the answers and I’m not sure if someone else has brought this up, since everyone seems to be focusing on the cultural constructs surrounding the labels.
From an anthropological perspective, the relative difference in your DNA and everyone else in the room has no meaning as to what you are as a human. Mental ability, physical ability, or whatever metric you want to come up with do not deviate in such a way as for labeling you by race to be meaningful.
The only meaning of that label is cultural.
Yes. Their are a lot of differences we can track. Still no meaningful deviation based on genetics from perfectly normal boring human.
Source: I found Physical Anthropology super interesting in college and did a lot of reading on the subject of race and disease.
I read the comments, sounds like all the answers are confused. The take away is that race is a broad generalization based on geographic evolution. It’s not simply a construct. Skin colour, hair type, eye color, susceptibility to disease, these all form the generalization of race. But I think people are leaning on post modern interpretations when they say race doesn’t exist. It does exist, it exists in the same way breeds of dogs exist.
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