What does it mean that race is “socially constructed”?
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[These women are twins](https://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/black-white-skin-twin-sisters-lucy-maria-aylmer-12.jpg).
Early modern and industrial science busied itself with attempting to group nature into distinct categories, such that the relationship between categories could be clearly understood. From that, there came a view that because human beings of different populations looked so different from one another, and had vastly different cultural norms from one another, that they too could be grouped into immutable categories on the basis of common qualities and behaviours – scientific racism, and contemporary race ideologies.
As it turns out, human beings and nature don’t work that way. We group things into categories for our own convenience, but nature is ultimately a series of gray areas that defy clear categorization. Pre-historic population bottlenecks and isolation have produced populations that have distinct physical features, but at the genetic level people of “different races” are no more different from one another than two people of the “same race” are – hence our twins there.
When we say that race is “socially constructed”, we mean that it is a description of social relations between people and not an accurate reflection of nature. “Race” is a description of a framework for viewing the world that governs how we interpret our relationship to one another – something that did not always exist, and need not always exist in the future.
All domestic dogs can breed with each other and produce viable, fertile offspring. Dog “breeds” are the description of their different physical characteristics. Likewise, all humans can breed with each other and produce viable, fertile offspring. Human “races” are the description of their different physical characteristics. Breeds and races are arbitrary distinctions artificially imposed by humans.
Also, there is no gene exclusive to any racial group. They may be more common, but not exclusive.
Others have said similar things, but I have an example to throw in that should help.
Essentially, there no set concept of race, no clear lines. Different culture have had different dividing lines and the categories are subject to change. Why is a biracial person who is half black and half white considered black, for example? There is no logical reason for this,but society has decided this.
The example I have is a new “race” only invented in the last few decades–Hispanic. The entire concept of Hispanic did not actually exist until recently. People from Spanish speaking countries just considered themselves members of whatever other race. So where did the concept of Hispanic as a group come from? The Republicans made it up so they could create a voting block that would hopefully always vote republican. Well the concept of a brand new race defined not by skin color or national origin but by language actually stuck. Didn’t really work out the way the Republicans at the time hoped, though.
Most racial/ethnic groups don’t have quite such an easily defined original, but all are similar. Someone drew an arbitrary line that fit their agendas and it has stuck. Mostly these days, it’s the Europeans making themselves feel superior, an idea that they got from the Romans, and the Romans got from the Greeks.
It’s a social construct in very much the same way that a country is a social construct. Take France, for example. You can describe where the country of France is, based on geographical coordinates and references to various geological features like coastlines, mountain ranges, and rivers. But “France” is not a geological feature even when its borders reference geological features. France is France because through the course of human history that particular patch of land was made into that country. The borders shift and change with the political situation. France isn’t geological, it’s a social construction. The same is true even of countries, such as island nations, where the borders match very clearly defined natural features. Why this island and not that? Why two nations on that island but not this one? It’s still a human construction.
In biology we often talk about the “phenotypic landscape” and as a way of thinking about the variation of form of a kind of living thing. And humans have such a landscape of variation….variation in eye color, skin color, blood type, height, and a truly immense number of other traits. And just like the surface of the earth isn’t perfectly smooth and uniform, the landscape of human variation is somewhat lumpy…people don’t have totally random collections of traits, you find some grouped together more than others, some are more common than others.
Just like nations are human inventions drawn on the underlying surface of the earth, races are human inventions drawn on the underlying boundaries of human variation. Sometimes the lines are drawn along relatively clear markers…the equivalent of mountain ranges or rivers. Sometimes they are just an arbitrary line. The races didn’t always exist, just like nations haven’t always existed, and the boundaries shift over time. And just like sometimes a patch of land is divided up by people living far away, races sometimes get defined around people who have no say in the matter. But regardless of who draws the lines or how well they align with this or that physical feature, or whether or not you can identify race with a genetic marker (which is like using geographical coordinates to detect a country), the races are still social groups invented and defined by people. They aren’t biological any more than nations are geological.
>ELI5: What does it mean that race is “socially constructed”?
I have a question based on observation.
The observation:
If there is a large pasture than enables livestock to spread out comfortably, and there are two different horse breeds like Arabians and Thoroughbred, those horses will form two loose groups based on their breed. (I’ve seen this in other animals as well…cattle, dogs,, and birds, for instance.)
This separation didn’t seem to be an aversion of one group toward the other but rather an attraction to their own breed–a preference for the familiar.
Would this behavior also be called or labeled “racism?”
A lot of people are talking in broad, general terms, so lets use an example:
Here’s a simple question: How many “races” are there?
If “race” was a measurable thing, this question should have a definable answer. But, what defines a “race”? How broad or narrow should the categories be? For example, who gets to be “white”?
It it anyone with a skin color lighter than a certain cutoff (and what’s the cutoff)? Is it only Europeans, excluding Asians and Inuit? Does it include Italians? What about Irish? What about Northern Europeans like Saami or Siberian Inuit? Are hispanics “white”? What about light-skinned Europeans born in Spain? Do South African people count? Do they also get to call themselves “African” or “African American”?
Ultimately, even though we call people “white”, the actual categories have very little to do with skin color. Its mostly a process of cultural exclusion against anyone who doesn’t get to be treated like a 1st class Citizen.
It means that people actually have a continuum of skin colors that change gradually as you move around the globe, but that society has set defined black/white/brown/yellow and classified everybody into one of a handful of broad buckets, then used those to discriminate.
Simple answer: Because all humans are humans, and the differences between them are both small and within the normal range of differences in a species.
“Race” was made up to divide people into “us vs them” groups. Tribes, basically. When the only difference is skin color. The ONLY difference.
Think about it this way. If people have different skin colors, they call that different “races” right?
Sooooo… Why are different hair colors called different “races”?
Why are blonde people and redhead people considered the “same race” when they have significant genetic differences (Google “redhead anesthetic” to see) while blonde Europeans and Africans don’t have that difference?
This is because race is made up by people in society. Only. Based on whatever rules they feel like. Skin is a rule, but not height, hair, eyes, or even genetics. And the rules have CHANGED over time.
The best example? In the year 1899, Irish people were not considered to be “the white race”
I’m serious about that.
https://history.howstuffworks.com/historical-events/when-irish-immigrants-werent-considered-white.htm
If the Irish weren’t considered white, and then later they were, that’s all the proof you need that race is quite literally made up
Nature rarely work in tight, distinct category, but human like to do just that. There is genetics differences between humans, but it’s more like a spectrum of differences. Human look only at the external physical differences and make arbitrary division between human that’s what we call races.
The genetics differences are there, but how to divided them into categories and why is purely arbitrary and give more information about the mindset of people, than physical reality.
Races become even more arbitrary when you think of inbreeding in a modern interconnected world. Someone can be more genertically related to european, but a darker skin because that’s a dominant trait. So we picked a genetic trait that is more visible, but doesn’t necessarily represent the gentic of that person.
We could decide to split races depending on the gene that allow us to drink milk as adult or not. This is as much of a valid genetic different between different human. But we didn’t do that, because 1) with limited tech we could take into account things we can see and 2) as a species we put a lot of importance into ingroup vs outgroup and so we put important into recognizing outsider.
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