In today’s society, given the heightened presence of racial tensions, it is important to understand the concept of race and its impact on our everyday life. The United States is going through a period of change and social divide between its people, stemming from the most recent presidential elections. It’s interesting to see how race is the primary underlying factor in these heightened tensions and how quickly some can be enabled to reveal their true thoughts, and that’s what inspired this paper. Although proven otherwise by the scientific community, today people still believe that race is a biological explanation for social and cultural differences between populations of people. These assumptions that race is biological has led to many social and historical repercussions in the past, but they still continue to impact minority communities around the country. The focus of this paper its research is to discuss how race is a social construct and to identify and explain how discrimination and racism, conscious or unconscious, impacts the lives of minorities.
First, it is important to understand and analyze how it is that race, for the most part, can be considered and classified as a social construct and how this idea came to be over time.
According to Robin O. Andreasen of the University of Delaware, the history of the race debate
can be summarized into three main ideas: races are biologically real, races are social constructs,
and biological realism and social constructivism are incompatible views about race (Andreasen S653). However, most of the debate is surrounded around the idea that races are biologically real and that races are social constructs. Andreasen states that, “In the 19th and 20th centuries, biological realism was the dominant view. Races were assumed to be biologically objective categories that exist independently of human classifying activities” (Andreasen S654). Scientists tried to reason this objectively by trying to prove that races were subspecies of homo sapiens. However, the idea that races were subspecies were constantly challenged, and one of the most popular arguments that was put forth is what Andreasen calls the “no human subspecies argument.” The argument is revolved around the fact that even if non-human subspecies exist, there is no human subspecies. This is proven by extensive genetic work that was done that revealed that there is as much genetic variation within racial groups as there is between them. Simply, humans are too genetically similar to each other to justify dividing them (Lewontin).
Despite the amount of evidence proving that biological races don’t exist and they are only
social constructs, there is still belief that there is an inherent superiority and inferiority of people
based on the color of one’s skin. According to Nina Jablonski, the roots of this problem, is based
on the mistaken belief that differing intellectual capacities and potential, moral resolve and
behavioral predilections are related to skin color and race, grading from white to black
(Joblonski). The existence of racism to this day can be attributed to this. Racism is rooted in an
unscientific acceptance that different groups of people are born with different capacities and they
determine a natural social order. The concept of race is learned. Humans do it unconsciously
and it starts slowly and from a young age. Humans learn to put people into groups based on
similarities in the way they look, act, and how others act towards them. This process isn’t done
to discriminate against others, rather done innately to survive. This is why humans tend to interact and make groups with those who are most similar to them. Our reactions towards people who are not similar to us aren’t automatically negative. Our reactions don’t automatically create stereotypes, but repeated reinforcement of positive or negative associations do, which is why it can be said that racism and discrimination can be taught (Joblonski).