Race Is Not Biologically Based but It Is a Social Construct, Essay Example

Please explain what do we mean when we say that ‘race is not biologically based but it is a social construct.’

The concept of social construct is a crucial sociological concept that enables one to think about various identities that may or may not exist in society, such as race. When considering the statement “race is not biologically based, but it is a social construct”, this suggests that the formulation of a racial identity is not the result of a scientific fact or some empirical data, but is rather the production of a particular society and how they view the world. In other words, to say that race is a social construct is to say that it is a particular, historical interpretation offered by a certain societal formulation. The social construct is thus the product of the consensus between the community that enables such identities (which in essence are pseudo-identities, insofar as they are relative to a given context) to be formulated.

To understand this notion, let us take a closer look at the notion of the social construct. For example, Degiuli defines a social construct as follows: “A social construction (or social construct) is any phenomenon ‘invented’ or ‘constructed’ by participants in a particular culture or society, existing because people agree to behave as if it exists or follow certain conventional rules.” (Degiuli, Race and Ethnicity) The social construct is thus denoted as a fabrication of a particular society, which is formulated through the consensus of a particular group. The cultural organization agrees on a series of norms, by which they regulate and distribute roles and identities within society. It is therefore the agreements that “invent” and “construct” identity that are crucial to the notion of race, as opposed to this identity being the result of an objective interpretation. Considering race in this context, this would therefore indicate that race is not a biological notion reducible to scientific fact, but rather that the notion of race is itself the product of the agreement and consensus engendered by the “conventional rules” of a given society.

To clarify this point, we may refer to the text from the American Anthropological Association “On Race”, which notes the inclination in anthropological academic discourse to move away from the thought of race as biological, and towards an understanding of race as purely a social construct. The AAA notes the following: “In the United States both scholars and the general public have been conditioned to viewing human races as natural and separate divisions within the human species based on visible physical differences.” (AAA “On Race”) In this dense statement, there are many crucial notions expressed. Firstly, the notion of “conditioning” suggests that the views experienced by the public vis-à-vis race are in fact learned from an outside source, or in other words, determined by some ideological function. Secondly, this conditioning has a very specific aim: it makes race thinkable in terms of “visible physical differences.” In other words, the apparently natural distinction between races that is perceived by the general public is not natural at all, according to the AAA; rather this apparently natural attitude has a non-natural origin: this is precisely the sense of the term conditioned employed by the AAA. However, if the classification of identity into terms such as “black”, “white”, are not natural – although believed to be – what is the source of these distinctions? With the term “condition”, the AAA certainly implies something that we may understand in terms of a social construct. For example, the AAA notes that, “with the vast expansion of scientific knowledge in this century, however, It has become clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups.” (AAA, “On Race”) Thus, there is no apparently “natural” view to a distinction between the races, according to science; it is rather the sociological discourse’s thinking about race as the product of a social construct that helps us clarify this phenomenon. While the view in the academic literature is varied in how to interpret this phenomenon, the AAA notes that one of the prevailing opinions in the academic community is as follows: “Today scholars in may fields argue that “race” as it is understood in the United States of America was a social mechanism invented during the 18^th century to refer to those populations brought together in Colonial America.” (AAA, “On Race”) Thus, the tenability of this interpretation of race corresponds to the role of various “social mechanisms” that construct racial forms of identity. If this thesis holds, it becomes clearer how a phenomenon such as race is not created naturally, but deliberately through what some ideological means. The social mechanism thus corresponds to the idea of a social construct that helps shape and form identities.

By employing the notion of a social construct to understand race, this helps the theoretician to suspend some of the prejudices within a given society, according to the realization that these identities are the products of a particular society. Thus, saying that race is a social construct means that claims about race are not universal and absolute; they cannot be justified through an appeal to any higher metaphysical discourse. Rather, the idea of understanding the phenomenon of race according to the concept of the social construct means that discourses on race are radically particular and derivative of the society that produces them: as such, they are subject to historical and linguistic interpretation according to this very particularly, as opposed to representing some infallible notion of absolute scientific certainty.

Works Cited

American Anthropology Association. “Statement on Race.” May 17, 1988.

Degiuli, Francesca. “The Role of Mass Media.” CUNY Staten Island,

Degiuli, Francesca. “Media and the Margins.” CUNY Staten Island.

Degiuli, Francesca. “Race and Ethnicity.” CUNY Staten Island.

Ellison, Ralph. “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks.” Accessed at: http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=574

Roediger, David R. “Popular Language, Social Practice, and The Messiness of Race.” In: Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White. New York, Basic Books, 2005. 35-54.