I’m currently educating myself about racism and anti-racism, and I keep reading that “race is a social construct”. I see how much subjective social views condition our ideas of different races. And yet, people from different places have certain traits that are quite obvious, and shared in common. If I’m not mistaken, that can apply to more than just visible things – things like susceptibility or resistance to certain diseases, if I’m not mistaken. Obviously no one deserves to be mistreated for any of these traits. But what I’m reading and what I seem to experience don’t add up. Anyone able to clarify things for me?
In: Biology
[deleted]
People have physical differences, like skin color or tolerance for different foods. But, first of all, most genetic diversity is found within a so-called racial group, not in the differences between races. And, second of all, the *importance* that we ascribe to these differences — the conclusions we draw from a mere difference in skin tone or hair or risk factors — is a social conceit and the product of the historical interest some groups had in dominating others. We don’t create whole categories of people based on eye color. We don’t discriminate on this basis. No law has ever prohibited people with a certain eye color from voting. The social structures and set of meanings surrounding race are what make it a social construct.
The fact that race is a social construct is best illustrated by an example. The apartheid regime in South Africa, which discriminated heavily based on race. When a lucrative trade deal with Japan was in jeopardy because Japanese would be considered non-white and therefore discriminated against, the South African government simply declared all Japanese persons to be “honorary whites”. Chinese persons, who are virtually indistinguishable from Japanese persons, were still considered non-white.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorary_whites
There’s no such thing as anti-racism. If you are anti racist then you’re just not racist. No sense in creating labels for the sake of labeling.
Basically race is only what the society makes it.
For example, in America’s past, Germans and Irish were seen as being different race than the Anglo-Saxons and thus suffered racism from the Anglo-Saxons.
Now a days they’re all labeled as white, and don’t experience the same kind of racism that they did back then.
Hardly anything changed about the people themselves, but the construct of race changed.
Anything that anyone thinks of as a race is inherently of pretty huge group. One of the common mistakes people make, in doing brain work like forming opinions and thinking about complex things, is seeing patterns where there are none.
Some people who study how other people think did an experiment where they gave people a special test. The experimenter would tell the person they were studying that the experimenter had in mind a rule that applied to a group of three numbers. The person would try to figure out what the rule was by asking the experimenter about as many groups of three numbers as they wanted, the experimenter would tell them whether or not each group of three numbers satisfied the rule. It was very rare for someone to succeed at this test despite getting to ask about as many sets of numbers as they want, because the rule was always any 3 numbers in ascending order. Most people would ask about a few sets of numbers getting idea ask about further sets of numbers until they were sure they were correct.
This is essentially the same process by which every person on the planet forms ideas about race. We encounter other people in our lives and we form ideas that there are different groups of people. But these subgroups don’t really exist in a real way, the groupings we form in our mind aren’t people with more similar DNA than everyone else. Sometimes these groups share a skin tone but often they don’t and one “white” person might have a skin tone closer to someone from Southeast Asia then an extremely fair-skinned “white” person.
We encounter the true reality that everyone we meet is human with individual origins and history not best described by membership in a group other than human and because of a tendency to over identify patterns reform the belief that there are subgroups within humanity that when you try to define objectively you discover do not exist
Humans are all the same species from a biological standpoint. There is some variation in features. There are a few factors that influence how common these features are in certain areas, but no one feature is defining of any particular group. All of the features we think of as defining race exist on a gradient – there are no clear lines or boundaries. Furthermore, the features are not limited to one group (eg: someone from a stereo-typically light skinned group can have darker skin, someone who is not of Asian ancestry can have epicanthial folds, etc).
All these sets of features really mean is what we, as a society, ascribe to them. We could have just as easily picked different features (attached or free-hanging earlobes, widow’s peak, etc) to focus on – or none in particular. In fact, people in different cultural groups often define ethnic background or “race” groups differently than you may be used to, and how these groups are defined in the US has changed over time.
The genetics differences between people are indeed real, but the categorization of humans into race is completely subjective, it’s a social construct.
Think of it like colours or species. Human like to put stuff into nice little category, but nature don’t care about that. Colours, species or races are all in a spectrum of differences. Where we as human draw the line in-between those differences is subjective.
In addition, when it come to races, there is a lot of genetics differences in between people, but we only focus on superficial indicator. This is even more problematic in the modern world when you see more and more interracial relationships. Someone could be black, but have more in common genetically with a swedish person, we would still categorized them as afro-american because of the single genetic indicator of skin color. We also can’t assume that the differences between someone in South Africa and Nigeria isn’t larger than betwen someone living in Russia and India for example. Race is suppose to be about genetic, but we don’t consider how much genetic differences there is between groups, we just use external visual characteristic and assume those are the most representative of the genetic markeup.
Race as a concept is nothing more than a generalization of genetic traits which were loosely dictated by geography. Genetics are of course real, and our understanding of genetics is scientific,but the fact of the matter is that if nobody came up with the concept of racial groupings then they would not exist/
Race isn’t a social construct, as you’ve pointed out. Attitudes about race are what’s socially constructed. The idea that race is a social construct is an logical tool for justifying a complicated set of ideas which tend to amount to “race is a real, important thing for people X to identify with, and make decisions around – but people y are simultaneously not allowed to do any such thing”. Essentially it’s a justification for selective racism.
Latest Answers