Introduction Although genetics certainly do define the physical features and characteristics of individuals, “race” itself is an arbitrary classification, much as geo-political boundaries are. Geopolitical boundaries are “real” in the sense that they can be delineated on a map and often are defined by geological features like mountain ranges or rivers. Yet the “reality” of geographic boundaries is tenuous, and they mainly have ramifications for political relationships and regional power struggles. Much in the same way, race can be based on distinct biological features like skin color or facial features but those physiological traits are only clustered for purposes of labeling and stereotyping, justifying social hierarchies, and political expediency. Race is a category of convenience, one that attempts to link specific biological markers like skin color or facial features with cultural components such as ethnicity. More importantly, the construction of race as a deterministic classification has direct implications for social, political, and economic hierarchies. Race is socially constructed and reinforced via processes like identity politics and stereotyping.

Context Matters

Race is socially constructed in context. For example, the Nazis and other anti-Semitic people view Jews as a “race,” whereas in other contexts Jews would be classified as an ethnic or cultural group but not a race given the tremendous diversity among Jewish people (Weber, 1998). Because context matters when it comes to determining what race a person belongs to, or even whether a race exists, race is not real but socially constructed. Moreover, race is socially constructed arbitrarily, based on the needs of the dominant culture. It is convenient to label Jews as a race in order to stigmatize, scapegoat, and promote genocidal pogroms, in order to establish the dominance of a self-designated “Aryan race.” The same types of contextual variables were at play in the way race was used to designate a category of slaves in the United States, distinct from subordinate classes of whites in the American South.

The concept of race is linked with false empiricism, which gave rise to problems like phrenology and eugenics in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and also the principles of social Darwinism (Dempsey-Jones, 2018). Diverting attention away from cultural variables and instead attributing behaviors, attitudes, and worldviews to race, the dominant culture creates the illusion that race is some biological, scientific reality when it really is not. Race can also be confounded with culture in other ways, such as the designation of people from all over Europe as being “Caucasian,” disregarding the people who are actually from the Caucasus region of the world. There is an almost infinite variation of physical and cultural features that can be considered “white” or “Caucasian,” and therefore none of these things are racial except when people are socialized to believe they are. At one time, “Irish Americans...

Thus, race is also relative; a Polish or Italian would be considered “more white” than a Native American or a person from China.
Likewise, a dominant culture or a misinformed outsider might create a racial category based on their superficial perceptions: blanketing Tamil people with Sikhs or Navajo with Sioux, for example (Weber, 1998). In fact, one of the ways to best prove that race is socially constructed is to examine the experiences of persons who do not fit neatly into pre-defined racial categories. For example, researchers found that Obama’s race was “systematically determined by racial biases of the perceiver, by the political partisanship of the perceiver, and by the temporal proximity of the testing session to an election,” (Hodson, 2016, p. 1). Specifically, Republicans viewed Obama as being “blacker,” which impacted their attitudes towards the candidate during his initial run for office (Hodson, 2016). The existence of liminal categories like mixed-race persons, subcultures, or small tribes that have lived in relative geographic isolation for centuries, also shows how race is more about anthropology, culture, and geography than about biological reality.

For much of American history, the social construction of race even became embedded in law. “You could be black in one state, but when you crossed the state line, you are no longer black,” (Johnson, 2017). Race was constructed and defined differently in each state, often depending on whether it was a slave state or a free state, but also on determining legal access to the privileges afforded only to whites. In some states, being a quarter black meant the person was designated as black but in other states the stipulations would be different (Johnson, 2017). There was no genetic test for determining race; it was just a matter of how the society wanted to manufacture social hierarchies based on visible characteristics. People who were half black but who had light skin could choose to “pass” as white in order to take advantage of power privilege, and opportunity, or choose to identify as black. Racial designations determined access to resources and how one was treated by others and in the law. Race is constructed through geographic, cultural, cognitive, and temporal contextual variables, all of which combine to determine perceptions and judgments.

The Science of Social Construction

Sociologists like W.E.B. DuBois first proposed that race is socially constructed, which in the early twentieth century marked a radical departure from prevailing views about race and biological determinism (Gannon, 2016). However, the social sciences could not offer hard evidence showing that race is socially constructed. Genetic research, however, could. Extending as far back as the 1970s, genetic science has bolstered DuBois’s view that race is socially constructed. Most notably, early genetic science demonstrated “there is far greater genetic…