Social Construction of Race
The assigned readings for today, excerpts of professional work from Ore, Bonilla-Silva and Winant, concern the social construction of race. Although they shared similar topics, there analysis of the social construction of race is noticeably different. Ore emphasized the concept that nearly everyone, regardless of race, class, or gender, learns some type of racial classification, with the overarching issue being one of political nature. He focuses on the issue of hypo-descent, which was briefly covered in last Thursday's lecture. Winant believes that the economy and the government have negatively perpetuated the social construction of race, by creating a cycle of racial oppression. Bonilla-Silva, on the other hand, theorizes that the system of rewards, associated with multiple social structures, has formed the social implications of race.
Each author provides a somewhat different approach when attempting to decompose the social construction of race in society. My opinions on the topic aligned with the ideas that served as commonalities between the researchers. For example, I agree with ideas from Bonilla-Silva and Winant, which argue that social change is not occurring because the oppressed groups are continuing to resist the system that can spark a shift. Finally, the social scientists show that there is immense intricacy involved with the topic of racial inequality, by describing several factors from various social structures, and that there are many ideas of how to correct disparity in the social construction of race.
Discussion Questions:
1. With such emphasis on the social classification of race, do we ever consider that we are overanalyzing, or acting excessively sensitive about racial classification in our society?
2. How do these three analyses of the social construction of race affect your thoughts regarding affirmative action?
Posted by Jillian
Comments
It's more than a social construction though, see Steve Hsu's discussion of the Risch paper:
"there are readily identifiable clusters of points, corresponding to traditional continental ethnic groups: Europeans, Africans, Asians, Native Americans, etc. (See, for example, Risch et al., Am. J. Hum. Genet. 76:268–275, 2005.) Of course, we can get into endless arguments about how we define European or Asian, and of course there is substructure within the clusters, but it is rather obvious that there are identifiable groupings, and as the Risch study shows, they correspond very well to self-identified notions of race.
Consistent with prior studies, the major genetic clusters consisted of Europeans/West Asians (whites), sub-Saharan Africans, East Asians, Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans. ethnic groups living in the United States, with a discrepancy rate of only 0.14%.
This clustering is a natural consequence of geographical isolation, inheritance and natural selection operating over the last 50k years since humans left Africa.
We see that there can be dramatic group differences in phenotypes even if there is complete allele overlap between two groups - as long as the frequency or probability distributions are distinct. But it is these distributions that are measured by the metric we defined earlier. Two groups that form distinct clusters are likely to exhibit different frequency distributions over various genes, leading to group differences.
This leads us to two very distinct possibilities in human genetic variation:
Hypothesis 1: (the PC mantra) The only group differences that exist between the clusters (races) are innocuous and superficial, for example related to skin color, hair color, body type, etc.
Hypothesis 2: (the dangerous one) Group differences exist which might affect important (let us say, deep rather than superficial) and measurable characteristics, such as cognitive abilities, personality, athletic prowess, etc.
Note H1 is under constant revision, as new genetically driven group differences (e.g., particularly in disease resistance) are being discovered. According to the mantra of H1 these must all (by definition) be superficial differences.
A standard argument against H2 is that the 50k years during which groups have been separated is not long enough for differential natural selection to cause any group differences in deep characteristics. I find this argument quite naive, given what we know about animal breeding and how evolution has affected the (ever expanding list of) "superficial" characteristics. Many genes are now suspected of having been subject to strong selection over timescales of order 5k years or less. For further discussion of H2 by Steve Pinker, see here.
The predominant view among social scientists is that H1 is obviously correct and H2 obviously false. However, this is mainly wishful thinking. Official statements by the American Sociological Association and the American Anthropological Association even endorse the view that race is not a valid biological concept, which is clearly incorrect."
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2007/01/metric-on-space-of-genomes-and.html
Posted by: Ben | December 5, 2008 12:49 AM