Race As A Social Construct

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I am sick of racism. Creating divisions among people using a false differentiations among groups of humans is a tool for controlling people (divide and conquer), and in fact the division into races is false. Race is a synonym with “subspecies,” the differences among subspecies is a matter of location and genetic difference. A good example of races or subspecies among other animals can be found in the Northern brown bears.

The brown bears of Eurasia and North America are a single species; that is, they can produce fertile offspring, but they are called by different names because of the different areas where they live and different appearances; they are called Eurasian Brown Bears, North American Brown Bears, Alaskan Brown Bears, Kodiak Bears, Grizzly bears, and Polar Bears. In the wild there is little interaction among the various subspecies, and they probably are on the way to becoming different species, but in zoos they interact readily and mate whenever convenient, and they have fertile offspring. While humans are like brown bears in having groups that have minor differences in appearance, like the North American and the Eurasian subspecies of brown bears, humans travel around quite a bit.

It has been rare for significant groups of humans to remain isolated for a significant amount of time. Although there have been small groups on islands that may have been isolated from other humans for a very long time; it appears that migrating humans have interacted with other groups on a regular basis throughout the development of the human species. As a result there is no sign that any group of humans has been moving toward becoming a separate species, at least not for the last several thousand years.

There are some differenc...

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...f humans, the human race.

If you are a racist, a believer that there is more than one race of humans, then please do a little research into the matter before you tell me that that I’m a complete idiot for not believing that there are several races of humans, and please define the races for me. I have been trying to find out for years what the proper defining characteristics are, and no one has managed to create a consistent set of defining characteristics.

Works Cited

“85% of variation is within races, and only 15% between.”

https://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2009/05/genetic-distance-between-populations/#.UssT26yznvM

http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/003951.html

Non-existence of races

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2739576

Human Races: A Genetic and Evolutionary Perspective

http://www.realfuture.org/GIST/Readings/Templeton%281998%29.pdf

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