What does it mean that race is “socially constructed”?
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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.
It means that people actually have a continuum of skin colors that change gradually as you move around the globe, but that society has set defined black/white/brown/yellow and classified everybody into one of a handful of broad buckets, then used those to discriminate.
Simple answer: Because all humans are humans, and the differences between them are both small and within the normal range of differences in a species.
“Race” was made up to divide people into “us vs them” groups. Tribes, basically. When the only difference is skin color. The ONLY difference.
Think about it this way. If people have different skin colors, they call that different “races” right?
Sooooo… Why are different hair colors called different “races”?
Why are blonde people and redhead people considered the “same race” when they have significant genetic differences (Google “redhead anesthetic” to see) while blonde Europeans and Africans don’t have that difference?
This is because race is made up by people in society. Only. Based on whatever rules they feel like. Skin is a rule, but not height, hair, eyes, or even genetics. And the rules have CHANGED over time.
The best example? In the year 1899, Irish people were not considered to be “the white race”
I’m serious about that.
https://history.howstuffworks.com/historical-events/when-irish-immigrants-werent-considered-white.htm
If the Irish weren’t considered white, and then later they were, that’s all the proof you need that race is quite literally made up
Nature rarely work in tight, distinct category, but human like to do just that. There is genetics differences between humans, but it’s more like a spectrum of differences. Human look only at the external physical differences and make arbitrary division between human that’s what we call races.
The genetics differences are there, but how to divided them into categories and why is purely arbitrary and give more information about the mindset of people, than physical reality.
Races become even more arbitrary when you think of inbreeding in a modern interconnected world. Someone can be more genertically related to european, but a darker skin because that’s a dominant trait. So we picked a genetic trait that is more visible, but doesn’t necessarily represent the gentic of that person.
We could decide to split races depending on the gene that allow us to drink milk as adult or not. This is as much of a valid genetic different between different human. But we didn’t do that, because 1) with limited tech we could take into account things we can see and 2) as a species we put a lot of importance into ingroup vs outgroup and so we put important into recognizing outsider.
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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.
A lot of people are talking in broad, general terms, so lets use an example:
Here’s a simple question: How many “races” are there?
If “race” was a measurable thing, this question should have a definable answer. But, what defines a “race”? How broad or narrow should the categories be? For example, who gets to be “white”?
It it anyone with a skin color lighter than a certain cutoff (and what’s the cutoff)? Is it only Europeans, excluding Asians and Inuit? Does it include Italians? What about Irish? What about Northern Europeans like Saami or Siberian Inuit? Are hispanics “white”? What about light-skinned Europeans born in Spain? Do South African people count? Do they also get to call themselves “African” or “African American”?
Ultimately, even though we call people “white”, the actual categories have very little to do with skin color. Its mostly a process of cultural exclusion against anyone who doesn’t get to be treated like a 1st class Citizen.
It’s a social construct in very much the same way that a country is a social construct. Take France, for example. You can describe where the country of France is, based on geographical coordinates and references to various geological features like coastlines, mountain ranges, and rivers. But “France” is not a geological feature even when its borders reference geological features. France is France because through the course of human history that particular patch of land was made into that country. The borders shift and change with the political situation. France isn’t geological, it’s a social construction. The same is true even of countries, such as island nations, where the borders match very clearly defined natural features. Why this island and not that? Why two nations on that island but not this one? It’s still a human construction.
In biology we often talk about the “phenotypic landscape” and as a way of thinking about the variation of form of a kind of living thing. And humans have such a landscape of variation….variation in eye color, skin color, blood type, height, and a truly immense number of other traits. And just like the surface of the earth isn’t perfectly smooth and uniform, the landscape of human variation is somewhat lumpy…people don’t have totally random collections of traits, you find some grouped together more than others, some are more common than others.
Just like nations are human inventions drawn on the underlying surface of the earth, races are human inventions drawn on the underlying boundaries of human variation. Sometimes the lines are drawn along relatively clear markers…the equivalent of mountain ranges or rivers. Sometimes they are just an arbitrary line. The races didn’t always exist, just like nations haven’t always existed, and the boundaries shift over time. And just like sometimes a patch of land is divided up by people living far away, races sometimes get defined around people who have no say in the matter. But regardless of who draws the lines or how well they align with this or that physical feature, or whether or not you can identify race with a genetic marker (which is like using geographical coordinates to detect a country), the races are still social groups invented and defined by people. They aren’t biological any more than nations are geological.
>ELI5: What does it mean that race is “socially constructed”?
I have a question based on observation.
The observation:
If there is a large pasture than enables livestock to spread out comfortably, and there are two different horse breeds like Arabians and Thoroughbred, those horses will form two loose groups based on their breed. (I’ve seen this in other animals as well…cattle, dogs,, and birds, for instance.)
This separation didn’t seem to be an aversion of one group toward the other but rather an attraction to their own breed–a preference for the familiar.
Would this behavior also be called or labeled “racism?”
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