Social Construction

Knowledge is a product of learning through human interaction. Social constructions are the way in which we create a context for our reality using our shared knowledge. Our environment and those in power within our society often dictate the way in which we define the world. By using our feelings and personal ideologies as lenses, we often take a subjective approach to explain the objective. For this reason, social constructions can take on multiple definitions but it is the majority group, or group in power, that defines our collectively-held beliefs. Conversely, although the task may be difficult, this also means that social constructions can be challenged as a result of their contingency.
Our lives are influenced by our genotypic script and how it appears phenotypically. Social constructions ascribe labels to people as a result of their apparent phenotypes. For example, socially constructed differences between race and gender and the true scientific nature of these differences are not synonymous. Race and gender groups are differentiated by more than physical differences as labels carry into the way in which we organize our social institutions, our ability co-exist within shared communities, and the availability of opportunities.
Our way of life is shaped by the social constructions that have been embedded within our

al., 1992) Blackness is an essentialism, meaning that we treat it as though it is fixed, when in reality it encompasses a melting pot of dynamic cultures and a people with an agency to re-signify what it means to be black in our modern-day society. As a result, it will take creative forms of activism to dissolve the relationship between inequality and