What does it mean that race is “socially constructed”?
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Also, this famous experiment shows how easy it is to create “races” and to discriminate based on those arbitrary “races”. In a very real sense, race is just an arbitrary way to divide people up. If we wanted to, we could say Italians aren’t white, that Obama isn’t black, or that dark skinned Brazilians aren’t black. Think about it, why do we call Obama the first black president when he’s half white? Why do we never call someone who’s half white, white?
The standard answer (which /u/Xstitchpixels gave) is that the genetic/phenotypic differences between people are small. Therefore race is just a social construction, not a real natural category.
However, I don’t think that’s the correct answer. I think that *even if* there were huge genetic differences between people, race would still be socially constructed. Any category invented by humans is a social construction, even if it’s based on huge genetic differences.
The physical characteristics of “race” are just slight evolutionary differences our ancestors acquired based on their environment (dark skin near the equator, light toward the poles, smaller eye openings in the tropics etc etc).
These differences mean very little in terms of who we are as people. It is only society, collectively, that decided that each race is a separate entity, needing to be thought of separately.
It is an idea made up by society that the races are any more than trivial genetic differences.
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