Race Is Socially Constructed Essay

Race is something people thought was biologically based. However, scientists are starting to agree that race is something socially constructed, meaning that race is based on the different physical qualities that different societies view and use to group people into different groups which has many unfortunate consequences. Fields, Bernand and Mullainathan, and the video seen in lecture all further elaborate on how race is a social construction, how it segregates us, as well as what consequences this social construction has on society.
Race is something that is socially constructed, but what exactly is race and what does that mean? According to Professor Smith in lecture, race is a “grouping of people believed to share common descent, based

on perceived innate physical similarities” (Lecture). This means that race is something only based on physical characteristics and nothing more, and there is no true biology that explains the distinctions between different races; these characteristics can vary in different societies and time periods, which makes races socially constructed.

The video we watched in lecture, “The Difference Between Us,” discusses why race is a social construction and why ultimately it is not possible for people to be defined as a single race based on genes or a certain trait. It discusses differences in races, how the idea even came up in the first place, and talks about some of the possible consequences of race. In this video, Evelynn Hammonds explains what it means for race to be a social construction by saying, “Race is a human invention. We created it, we have used it in ways that have been in many, many respects quite negative and quite harmful” (“The Difference Between Us”). Goodman then talks about specifically why people should think race is socially constructed by stating various examples and explaining, “Think about race in its universality. Where is your measurement device? There is no way to measure race. We sometimes do it by skin color, other people may do

it by hair texture- other people may have the dividing lines different in terms of skin color. What is black in the United States is not what’s black in Brazil or what’s black in South Africa” (“The Difference Between Us”). All of these leading experts show that race is nothing but a social construction; something fabricated by different societies in an attempt to categorize people without any true biological merit or consistency. So, if race is something that people created, there must have been reasons behind the establishment of race.
Race was invented because people desire to place things or people into different categories to better understand and to explain differences between them. Barbara Fields attempts to explain how the ideology of race developed in America by discussing the history of America since its inception and by explaining the background behind slavery in “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States.” She specifically talks about how racial ideology arose to explain why certain people were being treated differently and why it is still being perpetuated and handed down in our society today. She says that initially, African slaves were not racially discriminated against, but when more and more started becoming permanent slaves by law, a racial ideology started to develop because they were seen as weird and because they were already being oppressed. She ultimately states, “Race explained why some people could rightly be denied what others took for granted: namely, liberty, supposedly a self-evident gift of nature’s God” (Fields 114). So, the concept of race was something that did not initially sprout because of Africans becoming enslaved. However, because they were oppressed, people used race as a means to explain why Africans specifically, and not white people, were enslaved and denied certain liberties. Although the original purpose of race was to keep Africans enslaved, today it continues to exist for different reasons and because people still attempt to place others into categories and because people wish to distinguish themselves from others. Fields explains an example one of this by writing that race is perpetuated by, “academic writers whose invocation of self propelling ‘attitudes’ and tragic flaws assigns Africans and their descendants to a special category, placing them in a world exclusively theirs and outside history” (118). So, people today are still passing on the ideology of race to explain things and to group people because that is what humans have been doing for so long. Today, race structures our lives in different ways and has many unintended consequences.
Race structures our lives in many ways which Professor Smith discussed in lecture. Race affects how we make sense of the world around us by placing things into groups or hierarchies; some races are “higher” than others, and this also affects how we inhabit the world and interact with people around us in our lives. Through racialization, imagined biological characteristics used to define race explain why certain groups of people are excluded in society, why other groups receive preferential treatment, and why some groups receive more benefits than other groups of people (Lecture). Race is very tightly integrated into our society; college admissions, job offers, and available resources are all contingent on a person’s race: all of these in turn affect the structure of our lives. In the video from lecture, the narrator explains that the race structures our society to make the “playing field” for everybody not even by saying, “if the playing field were level, the array of opportunities open… would not be limited by assumptions society makes about the nature of the genes they inherited” (“The Difference Between Us”). Unfortunately, race has many negative implications for society and its inhabitants.
Race has many unintended consequences for society, and one of the biggest consequences that it has on our lives is on job offers.

In, “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiement on Labor Market Discrimination,” authors Bertrand and Mullainathan discuss job and callback discrimination based on race. They employ the use of audit studies to examine discrimination which are different because they place comparable minority and White into actual social and economic settings to measure how each group fares. In their studies, they examined different factors such as social status, jobs being applied for, and neighborhoods which people live in and ultimately conclude that racial discrimination is something that is very real in the job market. For instance, they found that a 50% gap in callback rate between Whites and Blacks and say, “This 50 percent gap in callback rates is statistically very significant... Since applicants’ names are randomly assigned, this gap can only be attributed to the name manipulation” (Bertrand and Mullainathan 12). They also find that, “In every industry except for transportation and communication…African Americans fare worse than Whites” (18). So, discrimination based on this social construction is something that is unfortunately very real; employers are more likely to hire somebody else just based on some physical characteristics that they possess. In addition to discrimination, there are many other consequences due to

race such as affirmative action which all affect how people’s futures.
Race, although previously thought to be biologically based, is something that depends on a time period and society. It has many unintended consequences and is tightly involved in the structure of society and peoples’ lives. Why people continue to pass on this ideology is unknown; race is something that we have to consciously make an effort to eradicate because of the many negative consequences it has. We continue to recreate race in our present and future societies, and until we choose to stop, the concept of race will live on for generations to come.