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
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.
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