The Social Construction of Race

Akshaya Mulakala

SW207-02

September 22, 2022

 What is race? Is it the categorization of people based off their natural born

athletic abilities, hair type, intellect, body type? Is it based off someone’s eye shape?

head shape? Is it all of them? Or maybe, just maybe, it is none of them at all. Race is a

term people have made up over time in order to unnaturally divide people based off

something so fundamentally insignificant: skin color. It is a damaging ideology – one that

makes people believe that the amount of pigment in someone’s skin determines their

physical, personality, and intellectual traits. Race is a social construct – a concept that

objectively does not exist but was made to prevail because humans agreed with one

another that it does. However, in a scientific context, there are no distinctive genetics or

DNA that differentiate people based on race. Therefore, if someone were to look at

different DNA samples anonymously, there would be no way for scientists to analyze the

samples and distinguish someone’s race from it.

Since race was created by people to uphold their own power and standard in

society, privilege was bound to skew as well. Whether we like it or not, the amount of

privilege someone gets has a lot to do with their race. The most notorious example of

this: white privilege. Whiteness comes with benefits and advantages that most other

non-white people unfortunately don’t have. However, this does not only apply to

people who are ethnically white. People who are White passing, regardless of

nationality or ethnicity, profit from these societal advantages solely because of their

white skin and their ability to “pass” as a White person. This, in turn, takes away
privileges from the people who are not White passing. This can be seen in cases with

shop stalking, medical help, job acceptance, etc. A more well-known example is police

brutality. The contrast in beliefs is far too great when talking about the police to Black

people compared to White people. Usually, if you ask a White person what the first

thing they should do when they are in danger is something along the lines of finding a

police officer and asking for help. However, if that same question is asked to a Black

person, their response would usually say something different: hide from the police and

wait for someone else to help. In general, the Black community fear the police because

of historical and current examples of unnecessary force, brutality, and racial targeting –

all because they have darker skin. This is just one of the many examples that show the

disparity of privilege between races.

Race was created from those in high positions of social authority or economic

class in order to create and reinterpret differences found in people and allocate value

based on those differences in order to maintain their own dominance over others.

Basically, this means that the hierarchical structure of race only exists because people

want it and enforce it. Their belief is that if there is a race, or two, that belongs in the

bottom of the social structure, then they will, by default, be at the top. Examples of this

can easily be proven when looking at the average American workforce. When looking at

white collar employees and CEOs of large companies, who make up the majority? White

people. When looking at blue collar employees and manual labor workers, who make up
the majority? Hispanics, Latinos, and Black people. In general, people tend to look at

white-collar jobs as jobs for intelligent, refined, and put-together people while manual

labor jobs are seen as “gross” and looked down upon. This just comes to show that

racial disparity is easily seen in our society as our social structure divides people based

off of perceived traits based on their skin color.

In conclusion, race is not only a biological myth, but also a human-made concept

that enables prejudice within privilege, social structure, and many more. Modern

American society makes race more complicated, even though the variations humans

contain have no connection to race. It is important to understand that humans are

humans. There is no “Black”, “White”, “Red”, “Yellow”, etc., there is only humankind.