Race – Social Construct or Biological Reality?
While debating with racists on YouTube – a practice that I recognize as utterly futile, but still engage in as a guilty pleasure – I came across an article, which attempts to argue against the anthropological consensus (and my personal opinion) that race is merely a social construct and does not reflect any physical reality. The argument the author presents is convincing – in particular that race does exist but that the lines are drawn incorrectly – but also that it is how we use race as a system of social stratification that is the actual construct. That is to say, just because we misunderstand and abuse the differences between people doesn’t mean that differences don’t exist.
The article is primarily an indictment of the views of Dr. Joseph L. Graves, author of The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millenium, and others like Stephen Jay Gould who have attempted to deconstruct and discredit scientific support for the institution of race and racism. This naturally makes me skeptical of the author’s intentions, but I am trying to separate whatever those may be from the content of his article. Alas, I do not know enough about genetics or even anthropology to say whether he is right or wrong, but what I will say is that ifhe turns out to be correct, then I would have to concede that race could BE a valid concept as a criteria for classifying people, but then ONLY if it were done correctly and responsibly, which clearly it is not.
At the same time, since race seems to primarily serve the purposes of social stratification, I find it unlikely that any new definition or understanding of race wouldn’t also still come packaged with the social construction of qualitative differences between these races – i.e. racism. Humans hardly need a reason to hate one another, it seems a fundamental error in our programming as sentient beings to sustain the self vs. other dynamic that inhibits us from achieving equality and solidarity as a species.
And while I’m on the topic of a lack of solidarity and a lack of equality, I’ve written the following new article discussing what I perceive as a crippling ideological and cultural/class divide between African-Americans that is of more immediate concern than my longer term battle for the abolition of race.