I don’t understand how so many people seem to understand the concept just fine. It sounds oddly complicated to me. The concept to me sounds like collectively concluded delusion or like if society collectively concludes something to be objectively real, that means it’s objectively real. Maybe I’m not understanding correctly?
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Typically people talk about social constructs when talking about categorization. When it is said that race is a social construct, it means that lines were drawn around people and determined to be significant to how they are treated. It’s not that differences in skin color or body types did not exist prior to the social construction of race, but that the categories were not well-developed and were not coherent enough to matter at any meaningful social/political/economic scale. The categories of race, however, were created and developed because they began to be politically useful during the time of colonization. Europeans had to justify the violence they brought to different people, and much of it became predicated on the idea that Europeans were the most intelligent/advanced/civilized race and other races – indigenous Americans, black Africans, East Asian groups, and Indian people – needed to have white European values thrust onto them without consent. That the Founding Fathers could say that Black people had no rights was grounded on the work done to draw lines, recategorize people, and justify violence based on these categories. This was a process that took hundreds of years to do, but it’s not like people go and vote on it people just begin discourse which helps solidify certain ideas. It’s like a technology which gives people a “common sense” justification for violence, abuse, and exclusion.
So when we say that race is a social construct, it’s specifically talking about the lines that had to be drawn around people as well as the maintenance of these lines (eg, “one drop” rules, shifting definitions, re-organization after abolition, etc). These categories are “real”, but because they are socially agreed upon ideas and oppression is justified by these categories. Those who seek liberation can do so through a renegotiation of these lines and/or changing how these categories “matter”. For instance, some feminists (especially in the past) view women’s liberation as needing the abolition of gender as a whole – get rid of that system of categorization (different body types would exist, but it would merely be like the difference between blond people and brown-haired people in that it exists but doesn’t really matter). However, many feminists see it important to keep gender as a system of categorization, but make the lines much more fluid and open as well as changing the political implications of these categorizations. This way, you can still be feminine and construct feminine spaces, but without the patriarchal oppression which uses gender as its excuse.
How far you want to take this idea depends on how much fun you want to have. Are electrons “objectively real” or are they just a consequences of a human categorization process within science. If it is the latter, then whatever interacted with the scientific instruments definitely exists (just as different bodies types exist independent of race) but grouping certain interactions together under the umbrella of “electrons” would be a human, social construct. This can make science more flexible, which is good, but makes it harder for scientists to access political authority over things since they can’t just say “it’s objectively real because experiments”.
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