What does it mean that race is “socially constructed”?
In: Other
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.
Latest Answers