What do anthropologist mean by saying “race” is a social construct?
Contemporarily, we’ve come to define race in biological terms. This, in fact, is unfounded. As someone here already said, there is more biological variation within one “race” than between two “races.” In addition to the lack of biological foundation for our everyday concepts of race, it’s important to realize that conceptions of race have changed over time and they are indeed historically and socially construct (meaning that in each historical era, there were different understandings of what constituted a race and what that meant). Some common examples include Jews in both Europe and the US and the case of the Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda. With the Jewish example, there have been historical periods in which Jews were thought to comprise a different race. Nowadays, that understanding of Jewishness is largely obsolete. In Israel, for example, there are thought to be many different “races” of Jews (Ashkenazi and Sephardic, for example). In the Rwanda example, the Hutu and the Tutsi are though
