Identifying Race as a Social Construct

RACE AS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT
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Question 1
One of the most compelling evidence that race is a social construct rather than natural and existent since the beginning of time is DNA analysis. Geneticists and microbiologists have sequenced DNA of humans from different regions and of different ‘races’ and concluded that there are no meaningful differences between the human species. Some few genes that may have mutated because of environmental factors and led to different hair texture and skin tone but the rest of the thousands of human genomes are identical. In the documentary, Mr. Scott Bronson leads a DNA workshop and takes DNA samples of several students of different backgrounds: black, Caucasian, Korean, Chinese. After sequencing their mitochondrial DNA, they found that each one of them are like each other despite their striking outward appearance. Analysis of mitochondrial DNA proves beyond reasonable doubt that humans do not have different genetic differences.
Secondly, according to Smedley, the English through the monarchy passed laws that forbade intermarriage and learning Irish culture. This brought animosity with the Irish and it was an early racial thinking that shaped the English’ worldview of other cultures that they encountered during exploration.
Question 2
One of the people who championed the categorization of humans on basis of their skin color and hair texture was Mr Frederick L. Hoffman. He published a race traits and tendencies of the American negro. He championed the ‘extinction thesis’ by comparing the rates of deaths and disease among American blacks and whites. He found enormous disparities, but his dat...