Race (social)

“Race” as a distinction between different types of humans entered the European vocabulary as early as the end of the 15th century, particularly in Iberia. It quickly came to mark Europe over the next few centuries, especially in the drive to state sovereignty; by the late 19th century, the race concept had assumed throughout Europe a sense of naturalness and a taken-for-granted ordering of social arrangements. “Science and literature, scripture and law, culture and political rhetoric all worked in subtle and blunt ways to establish the presumption of white supremacy… and black disenfranchisement”. Nor was this confined to the West: Yan-Fu (1853-1902), the Chinese scholar who promoted Darwinian theory, considered that there were “four main races on the earth: the yellow, the white, the brown and the black… The black race is the lowest…”

By the end of the 20th century, a rather different consensus had emerged amongst academics from all disciplines – the humanities, the social sciences and the biological sciences – that biological races do not exist in humans. Nevertheless, for a lay person the idea of race seems to have retained its value as a useful concept in managing and interpreting the world at the individual level. This “commonsense approach” thus marks out popular discourse from that of the scientific community; nor do advocates of “racialism” feel the need to justify what is, to them, obvious. The task of social science is to explain the persistence of racial beliefs, the patterns of behaviour and their consequences: it is not sufficient to deny that race exists, although social science is far from unanimous in how to deal with issues of studying racism and racial phenomena.

Different or confused concepts?

Race in its popular usage appears to be a categorization of people according to specific physical attributes: most commonly, these are skin colour, facial characteristics and sometimes hair type. As these are supposed to be genetic differences, culture and environment should have no role to play.

Ethnicity, or membership of a particular ethnic group, on the other hand, is linked specifically with historical and cultural commonalities shared by all members of that ethnic group. Although genetic differences may occur between groups, and be visible in the same way as claimed for racial differences, these are not a necessary feature. Nor are visible similarities within a group a necessary condition. Thus, ethnicity is historically and socially constructed.

Identity is a complex concept, which defies easy definition. It constitutes the connection between individuals and society, although the precise nature of this connection is the focus of a multitude of competing social theories. It is associated with time, place and membership of social groups, and is thus relevant to both ethnicity and race.

What can be observed over the last few centuries, is that race, ethnicity and even social class have co-existed and merged in complex ways. Few people distinguish between ethnicity and race, and to a great extent these are determinative of social class. Given the inability of biologists, and most recently geneticists, to provide any support for the biological concept of race, the almost unanimous view of social science is that Race is a social construction. This is applied to both the historical and contemporary world.

What do social scientists mean when they say that “race is socially constructed”?

A socially constructed phenomenon is one which has been created by society, but has little or no substance outside of that social context. Such social constructions are frequently presented as “common sense” and obvious truths in everyday narratives: it is left to social science to challenge the veracity of these, along with deconstructing them.

Social science’s earliest significant contribution to the study of race began with the work of Robert Park, with the premise that “we interact with others not directly but on the basis of our ideas about them. The ‘proper’ facts of society are therefore the imaginings we have of each other.” In Park’s view, race relations became “relations which are fixed in and enforced by custom, convention and the routine of an expected social order of which there may be at the moment no very lively consciousness”. He notes that social actors use ‘marks of racial descent’ as the basis for distinguishing groups and individuals: of course, the primary issue at that time in the USA was skin colour. In more recent times, the work of John Rex has extended the analysis, with a sociological definition of race and arguments for viewing certain social relations as race relations. Other social science analytical traditions – e.g. postmodernism, realism – approach race differently, but we will not deal with them here.

Thus, we can note a reification of notions of different races: in the absence of solid support from the biological sciences, these notions can be identified as wholly socially-constructed. The social relations which are implicit in notions of race have major ramifications for individuals’ participation in society. The extreme cases involving skin colour can be found with the history of forced slavery of Africans imported into America, the apartheid systems which existed in the USA, South Africa and Rhodesia, and comparable (but little-known) situations across the globe. Yet, there are also more subtle forms of racial behaviour, concerning access to jobs, education, housing, etc.: these are all socially constructed, and historically were justified as being attributable to the alleged inferior character of people with black skin.

See also

• See race (biology) for the biological concept of human races.
• See subspecies for the broader concept of race (of any species).
• See race (sports) for sports racing.