Is Race a Social Construct?

The notion that race is a social construct is one of those deeply counter-intuitive notions that on closer examination appears to be undeniable. It's non-intuitive because we can each look at a random sample of other people and have a pretty good idea what continent the majority of their ancestors came here from.

In favor of the social construct idea are the following: mixing occurs wherever peoples from different populations interact, in spite of often stringent social prohibitions; there is good biological evidence to believe that gene flow is not a "new" (last few hundred years) phenomenon; and finally, our intuitive classifications are often wrong or incomplete.

In the United States, for example, most people classed as "Black" have at least some European ancestry, and, according to wikipedia:

the majority of the persons with African ancestry are classified as white.



The fact that race is "social construct" doesn't imply (to me, at any rate) that there isn't an underlying biological substrate. That substrate is the different histories of human populations. Geographic and other barriers significantly obstructed gene flow, especially in the distant past. Traits adaptive for a geographic or other millieu have a selective advantage and increase in frequency in it.

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