What does it mean that race is “socially constructed”?
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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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