Question

Explain the assertion that race is socially constructed and that biological traits used in defining race cannot be used to explain the reality of race in the United states.

Answer 1

Speaking through biological terms, every single human walking on the face of this Earth is genetically the same, this is one reason we are referred to as "The Human RACE". Race is socially constructed to allow people to put together their identity, and add another label to their name. If you look at people you will see that we are genetically the same, we have a body, limbs, eyes, ears, tongue, nose, and many other genetically similar features.

Every human being walking the planet is the same race and the same species. We're all almost identical genetically. That being said, race is a social construct not invented, but assumed and believed both by people of the past and people of today. As a social construct, it has caused us nothing but trouble and bigotry.

The human genome lacks diversity with respect to other species of animal (assumedly due to some near-extinction event early in human history that limited breeding populations).

The variation of traits between individual human beings is large compared to the variation of traits between theoretical racial groups, meaning that statistically there is no evidence that ‘race’ is not a useful or verifiable biological concept.

Haplogroups exist in the human species, reflecting lineages that were geologically isolated and thus historically incapable of interbreeding, but these group differences account for a very small proportion of the human genome, and are only maintained in the modern world by social and cultural restrictions.

The concept of race itself is largely a function of the Colonial era, when technological innovations in arms and transportation allowed Europeans to expand rapidly outward and subjugate large regions of the world, encountering and exploiting a wide range of new peoples.

Race is a fascinating scientific subject. Unfortunately, for more than half of this century there has been a huge propaganda campaign to drive it completely out of the sciences. And even though most of the race-deniers’ claims are nonsense or wildly spun half-truths, the vast majority of serious scientists have been taught their lesson. For a youngster, to deal with race from a scientific perspective and risk the label “scientific racist” could be career suicide. Most of my scientific colleagues leave race alone, at least in public.

Many human societies classify people into racial categories. These categories often have very real effects politically, socially, and economically. Even if race is culturally real, that does not mean that these societal racial categories are biologically meaningful. For example, individuals who classify themselves as “white” in Brazil are often considered “black” in the U.S.A., and many other countries use similar or identical racial terms in highly inconsistent fashions. This inconsistency is only reinforced when examined genetically. For example, Lao et al. (2010) assessed the geographical ancestry of self-declared “whites” and “blacks” in the United States by the use of a panel of geographically informative genetic markers. It is well known that the frequencies of alleles vary over geographical space in humans. Although the differences in allele frequencies are generally very modest for any one gene, it is possible with modern DNA technology to infer the geographical ancestry of individuals by scoring large numbers of genes. Using such geographically informative markers, self-identified “whites” from the United States are primarily of European ancestry, whereas U.S. “blacks” are primarily of African ancestry, with little overlap in the amount of African ancestry between self-classified U.S. “whites” and “blacks”. In contrast a similar genetic assessment of Brazilians who self-identified themselves as “whites”, “browns”, and “blacks” and found extensive overlap in the amount of African ancestry among all these “races”. Indeed, many Brazilian “whites” have more African ancestry than some U.S. “blacks”. Obviously, the culturally defined racial categories of “white” and “black” do not have the same genetic meanings in the United States and Brazil. The inconsistencies in the meaning of “race” across cultures and with genetic ancestry provide a compelling reason for a biological-based, culture-free definition of race. Another reason is that humans are the product of the same evolutionary processes that have led to all the other species on this planet. The subdivision of a species into groups or categories is not unique to our species. Since evolutionary biology deals with all life on this planet, biologists need a definition of race that is applicable to all species. A definition of “race” that is specific to one human culture at one point of time in its cultural history is inadequate for this purpose. Therefore, a universal, culture-free definition of race is required before the issue of the existence of races in humans (or any other species) can be addressed in a biological context.
The word “race” is not commonly used in the non-human biological literature. Evolutionary biologists have many words for subdivisions within a species. At the lowest level are demes, local breeding populations. Demes have no connotation of being a major subdivision or type within a species. In human population genetics, even small ethnic groups or tribes are frequently subdivided into multiple demes, whereas “race” always refers to a much larger grouping.