Race As A Social Construct
We hear a lot about race these days and it's the fuel for a lot of hatred around the world today. But what is race? Well, race today is still defined in many ways and I think this only goes to show that there is still much widespread disagreement on the matter, there is an undetermined consensus as to whether it is in fact a social construct or a biological one.
It has been argued by many that race isn't defined by the way that people look because there is no objective criteria to go about choosing an adaptive trait (like skin color) over another in order for you to be able to define race; adaptive traits don't define races. Many scientists, psychologists, and other academic experts, have reaffirmed the notion that the human race does have a vast amount of genetic diversity but the diversity which exists isn't due to “race”, but rather it's a reflection of individual uniqueness.
Some people get readily confused hearing the premise that race may be a social construct because they take it to mean you are saying that there are no obvious visible differences to be seen (for the majority) from people who come from differing locations. But that isn't what is being said. Lumping people quickly into groups based on what their skin color or hair color is ignores the vast amount of human diversity that exists. There might be differing tribes and cultural differences but that doesn't support the notion of race as a biological construct.
Some talk about race in the way of certain groups being more susceptible to illness than others, or they will use identifying critique like intelligence tests, but that doesn't translate into a gene or cluster of genes that can be identified as being common to every single individual from every racial group. Not one gene can be used to distinguish and identify all members of one so-called race from all members of another so-called race.
A couple of years ago the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, put together a panel of experts who sought to shift away from racial concepts in genetic research because they believe that racial categories are weak proxies for genetic diversity. It appears that the majority-held view within the scientific community is still that race is a social construct.
At present, many scientists and others still argue that there is no biological validity to racial classification. Grouping together people based on their skin color, eye shape, hair texture or hair color etc, isn't a biological validation. If we want to go off just what people look like, in order to lump them into a category, then quite often we can be very easily misled as to what a person actually identifies with and what their heritage is. Therefore race cannot be determined in this way.
Science:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23684745
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-construct-scientists-argue/
Woah, Love the curveball, I came here to tell you that obviously there is race but soon as you said individual uniqueness that is exactly it. I figure that the reason race exists is because the majority of human beings have an almost compulsive need to categorize and label eveything. Upvoted.
I love your aricle. It is a subject that is very near to my heart, coming from South Africa. Truth be told, even if your skin is lily white, if your family has been in South Africa for many generations, you are "mixed". My best friend is "mixed" race, and has a husband whose racial classification is not the same as hers. My son's best friend is black, my daughter's friend is Indian. We are all people with different skin tones, but the same heart. All these amazing people are my family, and racial classification according to "society" is.....pathetic.
Ok, I will pay devil's advocate. Using the term "social construct" is a deliberate obfuscation. The term is vague and overly broad. It is usually meant to mean that it is something made up by society and therefore can be discarded.
I can also say that language is a social construct. Are you then going to tell me that there is no such thing as language? Would you still say that the English that I am writing is not English because it is a variant of what is spoken/written in Britain or Australia? Since there are loanwords in English that come from Chinese, like won ton, feng shui, ketchup, or yin yang, are you saying that English and Chinese are the same or that they both don't exist?
Just because there are variations in categories does not negate the categories. While I am tall for a Caucasian at 6'3", I tower head and shoulders over the Chinese when I am in China. Does me being tall for a Caucasian negate me being Caucasian? Does it make me Chinese? Does the fact that I don't exactly speak the English that my ancestors spoke negate my language as English?
Archaeologists and anthropologists can determine where someone originally lived by their bones. They know if they are sub-Saharan African, East Asian, Caucasian, Aboriginal, etc. just from their bones. They can also tell from genetic testing. There are genetic markers that are prevalent to different groups of humans, different cranial features, capacities, bone structures, muscular densities and even differing percentages of muscle types. These all evolved over tens of thousands of years of isolation. Either we accept evolution fully or we don't. We just don't accept evidence when it's convenient.
I find it fascinating the ways human beings have evolved to have such diverse races. I thought the progressives said that diversity is our strength, so why do they keep trying to homogenize us? Are we mixing and blending? Yes, and that does not negate our evolutionary past, it just makes variants in the different races.
Also, denying race does a great disservice to people. Health, in particular is at risk if doctors do not take race into account. If your race had a higher than average susceptibility to a certain disease, would you want your doctor to dismiss that information? It can mean life or death to the individual.
In closing, if race is a social construct, why am I constantly being berated for being a cisgendered white male by those who claim that they don't believe in race? How can they categorize me by the very social construct they abhor and claim is false?
P.S. putting up an obviously biased government granted abstract and another obviously biased magazine article is not science. Just because someone puts forth an argument, does not make it science. "Majority" held views also do not make science. Both article seem to say that if there is not 100% genetic isolation, there is no race. This is a reverse No True Scotsman argument. They are saying that if there is any genetic similarities between the races, there are no races. That is akin to saying if there are any similar words between languages, there are no languages.
They have an agenda and you are feeding into it.
i suspect that you were being sarcastic when you said you were advocating for the devil. i find nothing to disagree with you about and only 1 point of elucidation, which i would guess you actually know. when the progressives talk about diversity, they mean cultural not genetic. historically, genetic diversity has been shown to be a strength, as a resistance to some diseases and climactic changes. cultural diversity throughout history has more often than not, meant war. cultural diversity is unstable. thanks for calling it like it is. most of the rest of this post and replies, is tempting me to a fit of spitting ad homonyms.
"Race", as races are defined today, is absolutely a social construct. How can you point at someone like Beyonce and say "oh yeah, she's black". The racial characteristics that we look at are so vaguely defined. It's like dividing numbers into groups of ten. You have the single digits, the tens, the twenties, etc. But no one would argue that 11 is equal to 12, let alone 19. The lines are arbitrary.
Racial descent? Sure, some people have various features that originated in certain geographic areas. Nose and eye shape, skin, eye, and hair color, all these things have geographic origins. But who gives a fuck? I don't care where someone's great great great great great grandparents was born.
Hmmm interesting article! It's amazing how culture and social behaviors shape the constructs of what we as a society believe and hold to be standards or characteristics of a general mass of people.
This is What I know:
The Word Race anyway was to distinguish further who's who of which by then Social Darwinism run with it and later took it to the Extreme until Few Geneticist final concluded that WE are ALL Humans of the Human Race, But by then it was too late and is still being used today.