What do social scientists mean when they say that “race is socially constructed”?
A socially constructed phenomenon is one which has been created by society, but has little or no substance outside of that social context. Such social constructions are frequently presented as “common sense” and obvious truths in everyday narratives: it is left to social science to challenge the veracity of these, along with deconstructing them. Social science’s earliest significant contribution to the study of race began with the work of Robert Park, with the premise that “we interact with others not directly but on the basis of our ideas about them. The ‘proper’ facts of society are therefore the imaginings we have of each other.” [17] In Park’s view, race relations became “relations which are fixed in and enforced by custom, convention and the routine of an expected social order of which there may be at the moment no very lively consciousness”.[18] He notes that social actors use ‘marks of racial descent’ as the basis for distinguishing groups and individuals: of course, the primary
