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Race Social Construction

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Throughout history social scientists have been trying to examine the different parameters of race in terms of phenotypic characteristics, and cultural behaviors regarding the different groups that society construct’s. legally judges have had different rulings regarding the categorization of different ethnicities and groups within the United States. Many philosophers such as Kwame Appiah, and Scientists such as Dr. James Watson have had opposing arguments on the topic of race and whether it exists or not. In order to do so we need to examine the different definitions of race, and analyze them in order to see how race is a social construct, where people’s notions of race and their interactions with different races determine the way they perceive …show more content…

Social construction, folk and scientific definitions of race provide very good ideas as to why societies view race in the manner that they do. Despite, all of them being good ways of looking at race, social construction is the best method to describe race. The reason is that if you examine the scientific and folk notions of race they don’t describe race as accurately as social construction. The scientific notions of race describe the biological differences between different races which are valid points, however they don’t demonstrate the fact that all humans are at most times biologically equivalent to one another no matter what your race is. Scientific definitions at times can be useful but with the topic of race it seems really redundant if everyone has lungs, eyes, hands, etc that function in the same way as every human. The folk definition of race is also redundant because folk definitions always change with every generation, even though it’s the closest definition to social construction.
Race has always been a social construction because race did not exist before societies did. The idea of race was completely non-existent if you look at the behaviors of our ancestor species through observing the ways chimpanzees behave we can see that it wasn’t about race it was about “social status; physical fitness, aggressiveness, skill at fighting, ability to form coalitions, intelligence, and other personality traits. Status is either maintained or changed through communication and social interactions, such as physical competition and

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