What does it mean that race is “socially constructed”?
In: Culture
It mean that there is little scientific basis for defining the various “races.” It’s more something we invented for the purpose of grouping or separating people of different heritage.
It means that humans have decided to classify people as different races, but that there are really just variations along a continuum and not artificial break points with biological differences. While the difference between the average Swede and average Kenyan might be obvious, if you go from country to country, you’ll just see gradual changes over the distance.
Like, while people from different parts of the world look different, the idea of breaking people into categories and judging them differently based on their looks is totally arbitrary.
Are Irish people white? They weren’t considered such in turn of the century America.
The idea of race and how we interpret it is made up, just something society has created. A social construct. There’s nothing backing it up beyond just “people who live closer to the equator tend to have darker skin.”
White Man puts a baby into Black woman.
What race is the baby? White or Black?
When the child grows up, they marry someone that is 100% white, and they make 25% black children. What race is the grandchild?
What about the 1/8th black great-grandchild? Also, that assumes 3-4 generations of “racial purity” to “Fix” the bloodline, which isn’t going to happen out of 1700’s Alabama.
What if the 50% Black child mixes with a 25% Asian/White?
Wherever you draw the line, it’s going to be subjective and you’ll be proving the point that race is a social construct.
Our ideas on race are not based on anything quantifiable.
Yes, we can see how people have different skin tones based on genetics but our concepts of race go back way farther than genetic theory and so trying to map our contemporary understandings of race to genetics quickly falls apart.
You can also tell this just at looking how concepts of race vary from country to country. What counts as “black” in the USA is very different from what counts as “black” in a country like the Dominican Republic even though obviously no one’s skin is getting darker and lighter.
It means that how we view the concept of race is largely based on definitions based on societal views. Take the simple question “what is a white person” and you would probably get a pretty simple answer of “a fair skinned person of European descent”. Go back 200 years though and you get a much simpler answer of British people. French, german, irish, italian people have all been seen as not white at some point in the last 200 years. What about the first black president of the united states. Everyone identifies him as black including himself yet he is interracial. He is as black as he is white yet no one would even consider calling him white. Then you have situations like in Taiwan where china says that Taiwan is Chinas and the people there are Chinese. The problem arise where the people in Taiwan disagree. They are their own state and see themselves as Taiwanese. Except they have been under Chinese rule before. At some point someone who saw themselves as Chinese raised someone who has saw themselves as Taiwanese.
These contradictions occur because there is no objective basis for race. Race is defined by how the society you live in defines it.
There is greater genetic variance within one ‘race’ than there is between two such ‘races’. This tells us that race is likely not a meaningful genetic category.
It’s because so much ‘interracial’ breeding goes on that basically everyone has a little bit of everything in them.
If you are looking for genetic differences between different races you just won’t find them at the DNA level.
Nobody denies that humans have different phenotypes. But it’s essentially impossible to create a fail-proof system of racial classification. How would you build one? Someone who’s black in the United States may not be considered black in parts of sub-Saharan Africa. And even if you were to try pinpointing genetic similarities, you’d notice significant overlap between groups, often becoming lost between gradients or clines.
Do different groups of people in different places often look different from one another? Yes. But it’s practically impossible to draw a boundary between where one group ends and another begins. So race, in everyday discourse, tends to be defined or brokered as superficially physical or reductively physiological difference.
So, in a sense, our conceptions of “white,” “black,” “Asian” or “indigenous” have more to do with cultural takes on what constitutes group membership than any actual scientific criteria–thus race persists as a useful (and sometimes very harmful) mechanism for classification and identification within the context of society and culture but is otherwise tenuous and difficult to accurately define with any real precision.
I’d try to give some specific examples, but I’m already several beers down.
Its means our DNA is identical, you cant tell a black person from a native person by just looking at what they’re made from, all humans *are humans*. So racism or judging/determining anything based on race is fruitless
There are some cases where you can show it but it almost always comes down to social issues, like if asians are scoring low on tests in a white neighborhood, you could say “asians are dumb” or you can look for why they’re scoring low, possibly because they’re freshly immigrated and dont speak the native tongue, or are living in poorer neighborhoods because racists wont allow them to live near them, making it harder for the children to focus over the sirens blaring while the white family who lives in the nice neighborhood are buying books and additional study aids.
Tldr: Humans are Humans and racism usually creates it’s own problems that it points to as evidence to allow them to keep being racist, a snake eating it’s own tail
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