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.
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