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From what I understand, the definition of a social construct is a bit nuanced, and it's possible to both believe race is a social construct and that it correlat

From what I understand, the definition of a social construct is a bit nuanced, and it's possible to both believe race is a social construct and that it correlates with things. As a metaphor, let's say we create two categories in the world for all people - tallers (people above six feet in height) and shorters (people below six feet in height). Human height objectively exists, but these categories are social constructs. Likewise, human variations in genes based on ancestry clearly exists, but the discrete racial categories we define (black, white, asian, etc.) are social constructs since we could create other discrete categories (Irish, Slavic, etc.). So saying race is a social construct does not mean your genetic make up does not matter or correlate with anything, but that grouping people into the set of commonly agreed upon races is not the inherent way it has to be. At the same time, these groupings do represent distinct genetic make up and so correlate with physical attributes. It's just that different groupings with different correlations are also possible. This video explains it pretty well IMO: https://youtu.be/koud7hgGyQ8 https://youtu.be/koud7hgGyQ8

mig39 5y ago
Thanks for the great explanation. The height analogy made it click for me.
- tialaramex 5y ago
  Also, passing would work for height. Suppose you're 5'11 but your friends are around 6'1 and you were close friends in kindergarten (when you were all shorter of course). You begin wearing platforms that add about an inch to your height. You hang out with other tallers and so people just assume that's what you are, they likely don't insist on measuring you in bare feet at every opportunity. Laws affecting this social construction of "tallers" have much less impact on you than might seem to be the case looking at a medical chart. You would be said to "pass" for a taller. Passing was (and to a lesser extent remains) crucial in the US and many places where variations in appearance were crucial to racial assumptions. If you look white and you act white then, most of the time to a first approximation you are white. But of course this opportunity is much more open to a relatively pale-skinned person than to a dark-skinned poor person which is a further problem on top of the problem that now people are lying about who they are.
- KittenInABox 5y ago
  One of the other things to point out is that race doesn't correlate all that well with genetics in humans. People who would be described as black have so much genetic diversity that there can be no reasonable argument that there's a genetic basis for their racial label. Certain health conditions or biological differences often have to make far more specific categories than race.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
    Not sure why downvoted, this is correct. The rest of the world was populated by small (i.e. less genetically diverse) groups who came "out of Africa". So "Africans are more diverse genetically than the inhabitants of the rest of the world combined" https://www.geneticsandsociety.org/article/study-africans-more-genetically-diverse-rest-world https://www.geneticsandsociety.org/article/study-africans-mo... https://blogs.bcm.edu/2018/07/19/genetic-diversity-in-africa-is-greater-than-in-any-other-region-in-the-world/ https://blogs.bcm.edu/2018/07/19/genetic-diversity-in-africa... there are "Larger Genetic Differences Within Africans Than Between Africans and Eurasians" "and the genetic diversity in Eurasians is largely a subset of that in Africans, supporting the out of Africa model of human evolution" https://www.genetics.org/content/161/1/269 https://www.genetics.org/content/161/1/269 The highest genetic diversity is actually among people who are small subgroups of "Africans" - Khoisan not Bantu. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms6692 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms6692 https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24988-humanitys-forgotten-return-to-africa-revealed-in-dna/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24988-humanitys-forgo... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25471224/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25471224/ So, genetically, just as you can't draw a line around "bony fishes" without also including land animals who are also descendants of bony fishes. https://www.sciencealert.com/actually-there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-fish-say-cladists https://www.sciencealert.com/actually-there-is-no-such-thing... Also, you can't genetically call "Africans" a well-defined sub-group of humans, excluding others.
oh_sigh 5y ago
But with the taller/shorter, you would commonly have two tallers producing a shorter, or two shorters producing a taller. If we were talking about husbandry, we would say that tallers and shorters don't "breed true". But with race, you never have two white people produce a black person, or vice versa (and no, a black person with albinism is not a white person).
- arketyp 5y ago
  That's actually an interesting observation, though perhaps a bit besides the point for an analogy that wasn't meant to be perfect. Regression to the mean does not seem to apply the same way to skin color, even though presumably it is also a polygenetic trait to quite some extent.
- mcguire 5y ago
  The heritibility of human height is 79% (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01157-y https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01157-y). The heritibility of human skin color is 82% (https://www.nature.com/articles/emm201228 https://www.nature.com/articles/emm201228).
  - oh_sigh 5y ago
    That's relative lightness/darkness of skin pigmentation of the butt of Mongol people. Of course there is variation even among races, even among family members of the same race in skin tone. Which do you think is more common, based on your quoted stats? a) To see white parents who have a genetic child who has black skin, or black parents who have a genetic child who has white skin (disregarding albinism) or b) two tall parents have a genetic child who is short as an adult, or two short parents to have a genetic child who is tall as an adult
    - runnerup 5y ago
      Whats the point?
      - 5y ago
JamesBarney 5y ago
So if you were going to create a test for "Is this a social construct?" What would it be? It seems like the definition from your comment would be "Could we take this labeling system, and define different labels or the labels differently?" I watched some of the youtube, and in the thought experiment she proposes she take a continuous trait(height) and arbitrarily splits it into two buckets. And talks about how this is kinda silly. But this is something we do all the time, with hypertension, diabetes, disabled, Alzheimer's, the 1%, capitalism, Canadian, etc... And many of these categories are far more continuous than something like sex and gender which as far as categories go are pretty discrete. Maybe these things are social constructs, but if they are then we surely must come to the conclusion that almost everything we care about in the world is a social construct.
- awild 5y ago
  > Maybe these things are social constructs, but if they are then we surely must come to the conclusion that almost everything we care about in the world is a social construct. That's the point really. And it's not inherently a value judgement to say something is a social construct. Using it as a value judgment usually is meant to convey that some secondary attributes are not inherent, or even more so, just historical by-products and might need rethinking or recontextualisation. Being a woman and being of the female sex might seem to be identical, but womanhood is not the same as having a certain genomic makeup, and therefore womanhood is obviously a social construct. The video above even outlines how female-Ness might be considered a social construct but I'm not smart enough to explain that to you where abigail will do it much better.
  - JamesBarney 5y ago
    I guess another way to put this when someone says "race is a social construct". What are they trying to communicate about race?
    - Traster 5y ago
      Well, when you say something is a social construct it opens the door to find explanations for why that social construct has arisen. You open the door to questioning why those specific categories have been chosen. Why is it that in the early 20th century Italian was a race and now those people would be considered white (in America). It turns the conversation away from what is distinctive about a group and towards why we regard those distinctions as important.
bordercases 5y ago
This fails to capture why the term of "social construct" has to be brought in instead of just talking about physical differences across a threshold. In these discussions, one may want to use the term "social construct" instead of "physical classification" because it implies an arbitrary degree of freedom for discounting a term based on its social and pragmatic significance. This then lets you argue about the value of certain kinds of physical evidence over others when making social judgements, without having to consider the direct consequences of such evidence. In that sense calling the distinction between tallers and shorters a "social construct" does more than you let on when you are just subbing it for "shorthand definition for a rough threshold of height". It means you can give non-epistemological grounds for ignoring physical evidence.

mig39 5y ago

Thanks for the great explanation. The height analogy made it click for me.

tialaramex 5y ago
Also, passing would work for height. Suppose you're 5'11 but your friends are around 6'1 and you were close friends in kindergarten (when you were all shorter of course). You begin wearing platforms that add about an inch to your height. You hang out with other tallers and so people just assume that's what you are, they likely don't insist on measuring you in bare feet at every opportunity. Laws affecting this social construction of "tallers" have much less impact on you than might seem to be the case looking at a medical chart. You would be said to "pass" for a taller. Passing was (and to a lesser extent remains) crucial in the US and many places where variations in appearance were crucial to racial assumptions. If you look white and you act white then, most of the time to a first approximation you are white. But of course this opportunity is much more open to a relatively pale-skinned person than to a dark-skinned poor person which is a further problem on top of the problem that now people are lying about who they are.
KittenInABox 5y ago
One of the other things to point out is that race doesn't correlate all that well with genetics in humans. People who would be described as black have so much genetic diversity that there can be no reasonable argument that there's a genetic basis for their racial label. Certain health conditions or biological differences often have to make far more specific categories than race.
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
  Not sure why downvoted, this is correct. The rest of the world was populated by small (i.e. less genetically diverse) groups who came "out of Africa". So "Africans are more diverse genetically than the inhabitants of the rest of the world combined" https://www.geneticsandsociety.org/article/study-africans-more-genetically-diverse-rest-world https://www.geneticsandsociety.org/article/study-africans-mo... https://blogs.bcm.edu/2018/07/19/genetic-diversity-in-africa-is-greater-than-in-any-other-region-in-the-world/ https://blogs.bcm.edu/2018/07/19/genetic-diversity-in-africa... there are "Larger Genetic Differences Within Africans Than Between Africans and Eurasians" "and the genetic diversity in Eurasians is largely a subset of that in Africans, supporting the out of Africa model of human evolution" https://www.genetics.org/content/161/1/269 https://www.genetics.org/content/161/1/269 The highest genetic diversity is actually among people who are small subgroups of "Africans" - Khoisan not Bantu. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms6692 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms6692 https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24988-humanitys-forgotten-return-to-africa-revealed-in-dna/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24988-humanitys-forgo... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25471224/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25471224/ So, genetically, just as you can't draw a line around "bony fishes" without also including land animals who are also descendants of bony fishes. https://www.sciencealert.com/actually-there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-fish-say-cladists https://www.sciencealert.com/actually-there-is-no-such-thing... Also, you can't genetically call "Africans" a well-defined sub-group of humans, excluding others.

oh_sigh 5y ago

But with the taller/shorter, you would commonly have two tallers producing a shorter, or two shorters producing a taller. If we were talking about husbandry, we would say that tallers and shorters don't "breed true". But with race, you never have two white people produce a black person, or vice versa (and no, a black person with albinism is not a white person).

arketyp 5y ago
That's actually an interesting observation, though perhaps a bit besides the point for an analogy that wasn't meant to be perfect. Regression to the mean does not seem to apply the same way to skin color, even though presumably it is also a polygenetic trait to quite some extent.
mcguire 5y ago
The heritibility of human height is 79% (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01157-y https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01157-y). The heritibility of human skin color is 82% (https://www.nature.com/articles/emm201228 https://www.nature.com/articles/emm201228).
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  That's relative lightness/darkness of skin pigmentation of the butt of Mongol people. Of course there is variation even among races, even among family members of the same race in skin tone. Which do you think is more common, based on your quoted stats? a) To see white parents who have a genetic child who has black skin, or black parents who have a genetic child who has white skin (disregarding albinism) or b) two tall parents have a genetic child who is short as an adult, or two short parents to have a genetic child who is tall as an adult
  - runnerup 5y ago
    Whats the point?
    - 5y ago

JamesBarney 5y ago

So if you were going to create a test for "Is this a social construct?" What would it be? It seems like the definition from your comment would be "Could we take this labeling system, and define different labels or the labels differently?" I watched some of the youtube, and in the thought experiment she proposes she take a continuous trait(height) and arbitrarily splits it into two buckets. And talks about how this is kinda silly. But this is something we do all the time, with hypertension, diabetes, disabled, Alzheimer's, the 1%, capitalism, Canadian, etc... And many of these categories are far more continuous than something like sex and gender which as far as categories go are pretty discrete. Maybe these things are social constructs, but if they are then we surely must come to the conclusion that almost everything we care about in the world is a social construct.

awild 5y ago
> Maybe these things are social constructs, but if they are then we surely must come to the conclusion that almost everything we care about in the world is a social construct. That's the point really. And it's not inherently a value judgement to say something is a social construct. Using it as a value judgment usually is meant to convey that some secondary attributes are not inherent, or even more so, just historical by-products and might need rethinking or recontextualisation. Being a woman and being of the female sex might seem to be identical, but womanhood is not the same as having a certain genomic makeup, and therefore womanhood is obviously a social construct. The video above even outlines how female-Ness might be considered a social construct but I'm not smart enough to explain that to you where abigail will do it much better.
- JamesBarney 5y ago
  I guess another way to put this when someone says "race is a social construct". What are they trying to communicate about race?
  - Traster 5y ago
    Well, when you say something is a social construct it opens the door to find explanations for why that social construct has arisen. You open the door to questioning why those specific categories have been chosen. Why is it that in the early 20th century Italian was a race and now those people would be considered white (in America). It turns the conversation away from what is distinctive about a group and towards why we regard those distinctions as important.

bordercases 5y ago

This fails to capture why the term of "social construct" has to be brought in instead of just talking about physical differences across a threshold. In these discussions, one may want to use the term "social construct" instead of "physical classification" because it implies an arbitrary degree of freedom for discounting a term based on its social and pragmatic significance. This then lets you argue about the value of certain kinds of physical evidence over others when making social judgements, without having to consider the direct consequences of such evidence. In that sense calling the distinction between tallers and shorters a "social construct" does more than you let on when you are just subbing it for "shorthand definition for a rough threshold of height". It means you can give non-epistemological grounds for ignoring physical evidence.