Race is a Social Construct!

Every once in a while, someone in or on the borders of academe manages to get themselves into a lot of trouble by allowing as how it might be possible that there could be intellectual differences between "races." The title sentence is usually part of the fevered response. I can't argue with it. Especially if by "social construct" you mean that borders drawn between races are ultimately arbitrary, in a way that the border between dogs and cats isn't. If you think that it means that the concept of race is meaningless, though, I have to call bullshit.

Social constructs are quite real, and they reflect underlying social and physical realities. After all, property, religion, and nation are all social constructs too. It's obvious even to young children that people can be grouped in lots of ways - tall or short, fat or skinny, and by characteristics like skin color, head and body shape, and the nature of their hair. These characteristics are all at least partially heritable, and systematic differences in gene frequency arose in different parts of the world during historical separation. Long periods of separation into essentially endogamous groups were usually enforced by geography, but social factors play a role as well.

The modern world has erased or at least blurred most geographic barriers, and modern nations like the US bring together peoples from all parts of the world with resultant genetic mixing - at which point the arbitrary element in the social construct starts to overwhelm the physical substrate.

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