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