What does it mean that race is “socially constructed”?
In: Culture
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.
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