The Social Meaning of Race
In a previous agtheory, I mentioned our country’s inability to “face race.” As a nation, we have found it extremely difficult to confront our racial cleavages; ironically, however, we have found it exceedingly easy to insert race – both consciously and sub-consciously – into nearly every facet of American life. Essentially, we utilize racial characteristics as often as possible in defining a group’s behavior, traits, abilities, etc., while simultaneously masking our nation as united, egalitarian, and “colorblind.”
One of my most basic and fundamental agtheories is that race is a social construct. The underlying notion of this theory is that race is nothing more than a man-made distinction for dividing people based on arbitrary factors. For me, this idea can go much further. Personally, I have always found interdisciplinary arguments against race-based distinctions to be particularly compelling. In conjunction to the sociological idea that race is a social construct, biology and anthropology serve to amplify this view free from personal biased or impassioned opinions. Jared Diamond, for example, has maintained the capriciousness of “race” by drawing parallels to other species. [Read this short piece for more information.] When reduced to mere differences in natural selection traits, race becomes even more meaningless.
In his article, Diamond warns of the detrimental effects race-based distinctions have on human societies:
Such snap judgments didn’t threaten our existence back when people were armed only with spears and surrounded by others who looked mostly like themselves. In the modern world, though, we are armed with guns and plutonium, and we live our lives surrounded by people who are much more varied in appearance. The last thing we need now is to continue codifying all those different appearances into an arbitrary system of racial classification.
Because, despite the superficial and insignificant nature of race, racial divides are omnipresent throughout human history. From justifications for slavery and genocide to race-based segregation to the modern-day practice of categorization via “check a box below,” race has always been a socially salient issue. The obsession with race has manifested itself in the form of racial hierarchies, ethnic divisions, stereotypes, prejudices, and so forth. In theory, our physical differences are more or less inconsequential; we are merely variations on a theme by natural selection. If only we could be more like animals in practice…
