Race Social Construct

Scanning around the classroom, you will see a sample of diversity: skin tones ranging from milk-white to dark brown and different hair textures from thick- fine hair to thick coarse wavy hair that your classmates have, and you will notice that all you guys possess different facial features, height and body type. Because of these different externally visible traits, we often classify ourselves and others into “races”. But what is race and does race exist? Can we distinguish one another heritage and ethnicity based on our physical characteristics?
What is race? According to Steve Barkan, race is referred to a category of people who share certain inherited physical characteristics, such as skin color, facial features, and stature (Barkan 152). Most people think that race is a biological term, however, race is a social concept that has been around several hundred years. People use race to classify people into groups by physical traits. While many think race is based in biology but many scientists argue that race is a social construct, in other words, “race has no real existence other than what and how people think of it” (Barkan 153). Race is a social construct because there is still no clear definition of what makes a person a member of

However, despite how much different we look from the surface compare to others, many studies have shown that “roughly 90 percent of human genetic variation occurs within a population living in a give continent where about 10 percent of the variations distinguishes continental populations” (Scientific American 80). In other words, individuals from different populations are just slightly different than individuals from the same population. Svante Pääbo, a biologist and the director of Max Planck Institute