Race Is A Social Construct Quotes

I have been to many religious services over the years. Each one I go to only reinforces my general impression that religions have much, much more in common than they like to admit. The beliefs are almost always the same; it's just that the histories are different. Everybody wants to believe in a higher power. Everybody wants to belong to something bigger than themselves, and everybody wants company in doing that. They want there to be a force of good on earth, and they want an incentive to be a part of that force. They want to be able to prove their belief and their belonging, through rituals and devotion. They want to touch the enormity. It's only in the finer points that it gets complicated and contentious, the inability to realize that no matter what our religion or gender or race or geographic background, we all have about 98 percent in common with each other. yes, the differences between male and female are biological, but if you look at the biology as a matter of percentage, there aren't a whole lot of things that are different. Race is different purely as a social construction, not as an inherent difference. And religion--whether you believe in God or Yahweh or Allah or something else, odds are that at heart you want the same things. For whatever reason, we like to focus on the 2 percent that's different, and most of the conflict in the world comes from that.

Have you ever thought about why GOD did it? Why tempt such fragile beings in the first place? Did GOD give the race of man free will, knowing that they would use that will to defy him, or to take it a step further since GOD knows all, did he know that Adam and Eve would eat the forbidden fruit, allowing him to cast them out of paradise to toil and suffer for a living.

On one hand, the RGI [Race Grievance Industry] will declare that race is a social construct, but then use race to socially construct a paycheck.

Race is a social construct. This does not mean that it is invalid or unimportant.

There is no such things as race,” said Morrison. "Racism is a construct; a social construct. And it has benefits. Money can be made off of it. People who don’t like themselves can feel better because of it. It can describe certain kinds of behavior that are wrong or misleading. So [racism] has a social function. But race can only be defined as a human being

The Hell of Regret He who wins the race cannot run with the pack. And once you get out you can’t come back, because caged lions don’t mate with free ones! If ever you are going to win, you must forsake the social construct of the cage and all the cage dwellers.

Race might be a social construct, but racism’s as real as the clouds,” he said, pointing at the sky. “You can see it, and you can feel it when it pours.

There is a great new work before us, which is to replace with true knowledge the ignorance that has destroyed human minds. We will construct unity in a world [which] has been brutally torn apart by false divisions of race, religion, gender, nationality, and age. We will heal with unconditional love those souls whose hearts have been disfigured by hatred and loneliness.

If we fail to provide boys with pro-social models of the transition to adulthood, they may construct their own. In some cases, gang initiation rituals, street racing, and random violence may be the result.

Hardly any aspect of my life, from where I had lived to my education to my employment history to my friendships, had been free from the taint of racial inequity, from racism, from whiteness. My racial identity had shaped me from the womb forward. I had not been in control of my own narrative. It wasn’t just race that was a social construct. So was I.

Color is a fact. Race is a social construct.

Race is different purely as a social construction, not as inherent difference. And religion - whether you believe in God or Yahweh or Allah or something else, odds are that at heart you want the same things. For whatever reason, we like to focus on the 2 percent that's different, most of the conflict in the world comes from that.

To be sure, like the rest of race, whiteness is a fiction, what in the jargon of the academy is termed a social construct, an agreed-on myth that has empirical grit because of its effect, not its essence. But whiteness goes even one better: it is a category of identity that is most useful when its very existence is denied. That’s its twisted genius.

I refuse to denounce social media as a terrible evil that is plaguing young people today. Maybe because I sort of grew up on it and I think the Internet has enriched my life--I've made friends on social media, I've laughed until I've cried at a perfectly constructed tweet and I've learned more about gender, race, sexuality, class, and politics online than I have anywhere else.

Blackness is indeed a social construct. Within the context of American racial politics, there can be no Black without white. No racism without race. But the prevalence of culture is undeniable.

What is the difference between racism and casteism? Because caste and race are interwoven in America, it can be hard to separate the two. Any action or institution that mocks, harms, assumes, or attaches inferiority or stereotype on the basis of the social construct of race can be considered racism. Any action or structure that seeks to limit, hold back, or put someone in a defined ranking, seeks to keep someone in their place by elevating or denigrating that person on the basis of their perceived category, can be seen as casteism.

Color is a fact. Race is a social construct. “We think we ‘see’ race when we encounter certain physical differences among people such as skin color, eye shape, and hair texture,” the Smedleys wrote. “What we actually ‘see’…are the learned social meanings, the stereotypes, that have been linked to those physical features by the ideology of race and the historical legacy it has left us.” And yet, observed the historian Nell Irvin Painter, “Americans cling to race as the unschooled cling to superstition.

The more I learned about race in college—that it has no genetic underpinnings, but is a social construct—the less obligated I felt to check WHITE

The anthropologist Ashley Montagu was among the first to argue that race is a human invention, a social construct, not a biological one, and that in seeking to understand the divisions and disparities in the United States, we have typically fallen into the quicksand and mythology of race. “When we speak of the race problem in America,” he wrote in 1942, “what we really mean is the caste system and the problems which that caste system creates in America.

It’s a social construct. There has never been any scientific or genetic evidence to back up the concept of race. Despite it being false, it has woven its way into the fabric of all of our societies.

Race is a by-product of racism. In fact, race doesn’t exist.” Damaras said this in the way a person might say water is wet. “Some of you look surprised.” She adjusted her feet and straightened her back. “It’s a social construct. There has never been any scientific or genetic evidence to back up the concept of race. Despite it being false, it has woven its way into the fabric of all of our societies.

The promise of the Church of Color Blindness is that if we stop seeing race, then racism goes away. That racism will go away not through awakening consciousness of privilege and racial harm, not through systemic and institutional change, not through addressing imbalances in power, not through making amends for historical and current-day harm, but instead by simply acting as if the social construct of race has no actual consequences—both for those with white privilege and those without it. The belief is that if you act as if you do not see color, you will not do anything racist or benefit from racism. And if you teach your children to not see race too, you can create a new generation of people who will not do anything racist or benefit from racism.

Q: But isn’t race “just skin deep”? Don’t most scientists now agree that race is a social construct, not a biological reality? A: Biological evidence shows that race is not a social construct. Coroners in crime labs can identify race from a skeleton or even just the skull. They can identify race from blood, hair, or semen as well. To deny the existence of race is unscientific and unrealistic. Race is much more than “just skin deep.

It’s tempting to hope that abandoning race as a descriptive category will lead to a post-racial utopia. But the belief that dropping racial categories will lead to transcending racial inequality relies on a basic misunderstanding of what social construction means.

Without question, the balance of power on the planet today lies in the hands of business. Corporations rival governments in wealth, influence, and power. Indeed, business all too often pulls the strings of government. Competing institutions-religion, the press, even the military-play subordinate roles in much of the world today. If a values-driven approach to business can begin to redirect this vast power toward more constructive ends than the simple accumulation of wealth, the human race and Planet Earth will have a fighting chance.

Race, as we know it, is a political and social construct created by man for the purpose of asserting power and maintaining a hierarchy.

It's only in the finer points that it gets complicated and contentious, the inability to realize that no matter what our religion or gender or race or geographic background, we all have about 98 percent in common with each other. Yes, the difference between male and female are biological, but if you look at the biology as a matter of percentage, there aren't a whole lot of things that are different. Race is different purely as a social construction, not as an inherent difference. And religion-whether you believe in God or Yahweh or Allah or something else, odds are that at heart you want the same things. For whatever reason, we like to focus on the 2 percent that's different, and most if the conflict in the world comes from that.

It’s only in the finer points that it gets complicated and contentious, the inability to realize that no matter what our religion or gender or race or geographic background, we all have about 98 percent in common with each other. Yes, the differences between male and female are biological, but if you look at the biology as a matter of percentage, there aren’t a whole lot of things that are different. Race is different purely as a social construction, not as an inherent difference. And religion—whether you believe in God or Yahweh or Allah or something else, odds are that at heart you want the same things. For whatever reason, we like to focus on the 2 percent that’s different, and most of the conflict in the world comes from that.

Young children understand that the idea of “we don’t see color” does not make sense. They will not necessarily use the socially constructed terms of race that we as adults use, such as Black or white, but when asked to describe what color they are and what color their friends are, they use words such as brown and peach that match up with the colors in their Crayola crayon boxes. When

We repeat, these hybrid constructions are not the least interesting for the artist, the antiquary and the historian. They make us aware to what extent architecture is a primitive thing, demonstrating as they do, like the cyclopean remains, the pyramids of Egypt, or the gigantic Hindu pagodas, that architecture's greatest products are less individual than social creations; the offspring of nations in labour rather than the outpouring of men of genius; the deposit let behind by a nation; the accumulation of the centuries; the residue from the successive evaporations of human society; in short, a kind of formation. Each wave of time lays down its alluvium, each race deposits its own stratum on the monument, each individual contributes his stone. Thus do the beavers, and the bees; and thus does man.

Many intellectuals argue that race is a social construct, meaning that we, as a society, give it meaning. Race doesn’t tell us about society—society tells us about race. Society has already made it clear that Latinos are seen as a race—we experience discrimination because we are seen as racially different. If the definitions of race and ethnicity are constructed and deconstructed by those in power, why can’t we reframe Latino as a race to better understand where we fit in America’s racial framework? Isn’t Latino a mixed race, even by the way we currently define race? Race is not biological. It is political and personal. To have a Latino race is not to say we are all the same but that we are organizing ourselves politically, to be counted accurately, to garner political power for the benefit of our entire community. To not be erased.

What I was pointing to was that, yeah, blackness is a fiction; whiteness is a fiction. When we live according to these categories, we’re living within a fiction. Of course, it’s a fiction with very real consequences.

Incorrect conceptions of race as a social construct (as opposed to a power construct) of racial history as a single march of racial progress (as opposed to a duel of antiracist and racist progress), of the race problem as rooted in ignorance and hate (as opposed to powerful self-interest) -- all come together to produce solutions bound to fail. Terms and sayings like 'I'm not racist' and 'race-neutral' and 'post-racial' and 'color-blind' and 'only one race, the human race' and 'only racists speak about race' and 'Black people can't be racist' and 'White people are evil' are bound to fail in identifying and eliminating racist power and policy.

No one tribe or group of people can adequately display the fullness of God. The truth is that it takes every tribe, tongue, and nation to reflect the image of God in his fullness. The truth is that race is a social construct, one that has divided and set one group over the other from the earliest days of humanity. The Christian construct, though, dismantles this way of thinking and seeks to reunite us under a common banner of love and fellowship.

It's only in the finer points that it gets complicated and contentious, the inability to realize that no matter what our religion or gender or race or geographic background, we all have about 98 percent in common with each other. Yes, the differences between male and female are biological, but if you look at biology as a matter of percentage, there aren't a whole lot of things that are different. Race is different purely as a social construct, not as an inherent difference. And religion - whether you believe in God or Yahweh or Allah or something else, odds are that at heart you want the same things. For whatever reason, we like to focus on the 2 percent that's different, and most of the conflict in the world comes from that.

Racism has been among the most complex social dilemmas since the founding of this country. While there is no biological race as we understand it (see chapter 2), race as a social construct has profound significance and shapes every aspect of our lives.1 Race will influence whether we will survive our birth, where we are most likely to live, which schools we will attend, who our friends and partners will be, what careers we will have, how much money we will earn, how healthy we will be, and even how long we can expect to live.2 This book does not attempt to provide the solution to racism. Nor does it attempt to prove that racism exists; I start from that premise. My goal is to make visible how one aspect of white sensibility continues to hold racism in place: white fragility.

The more dutifully scholars acknowledge that the concept of race belongs in the same category as geocentrism or witchcraft, the more blithely they invoke it as though it were both a coherent analytical category and a valid empirical datum. In place of Jefferson’s moment of impassioned truth-telling, his successors fall back on italics or quotation marks, typographical abbreviations for the trite formula, ‘race is a social construction.’ The formula is meant to spare those who invoke race in historical explanation the raised eyebrows that would greet someone who, studying a crop failure, proposed witchcraft as an independent variable. But identifying race as a social construction does nothing to solidify the intellectual ground on which it totters. The London Underground and the United States of America are social constructions; so are the evil eye and the calling of spirits from the vasty deep; and so are murder and genocide. All derive from the thoughts, plans, and actions of human beings living in human societies. Scholars who intone ‘social construction’ as a spell for the purification of race do not make clear—perhaps because they do not themselves realize—that race and racism belong to different families of social construction, and that neither belongs to the same family as the United States of America or the London Underground. Race belongs to the same family as the evil eye. Racism belongs to the same family as murder and genocide. Which is to say that racism, unlike race, is not a fiction, an illusion, a superstition, or a hoax. It is a crime against humanity.

The assumption that femininity is always structured by and performed for a male gaze fails to take seriously queer feminine desire. The radical feminist critiques of femininity also disregarded the fact that not all who are (seen as) feminine are women. Crucially, what is viewed as appropriately feminine is not only defined in relation to maleness or masculinity, but through numerous intersections of power including race, sexuality, ability, and social class. In other words, white, heterosexual, binary gender-conforming, able-bodied, and upper- or middle-class femininity is privileged in relation to other varieties. Any social system may contain multiple femininities that differ in status, and which relate to each other as well as to masculinity. As highlighted by “effeminate” gay men, trans women, femmes, drag queens, and “bad girls,” it is possible to be perceived as excessively, insufficiently, or wrongly feminine without for that sake being seen as masculine. Finally, the view of femininity as a restrictive yet disposable mask presupposes that emancipation entails departure into neutral (or masculine) modes of being. This is a tenuous assumption, as the construction of selfhood is entangled with gender, and conceptions of androgyny and gender neutrality similarly hinge on culturally specific ideas of masculinity and femininity.

What is a family? Is it just a genetic chain, parents and offspring, people like me? Or is it a social construct, an economic unit, optimal for child rearing and divisions of labor? Or is it something else entirely: a store of shared memories, say? An ambit of love? A reach across the void?

Struggle was life, not a means to some other end. It was not justified by the prosperity (capitalism) or justice (socialism) that it supposedly brought. Hitler’s point was not at all that the desirable end justified the bloody means. There was no end, only meanness. Race was real, whereas individuals and classes were fleeting and erroneous constructions. Struggle was not a metaphor or an analogy, but a tangible and total truth. The weak were to be dominated by the strong, since “the world is not there for the cowardly peoples.” And that was all that there was to be known and believed. — Hitler’s worldview dismissed religious and secular traditions, and yet relied upon both. Though he was no original thinker, he supplied a certain resolution to a crisis of both thought and faith. Like many before him he sought to bring the two together.

Ashley Montagu was among the first to argue that race is a human invention, a social construct, not a biological one, and that in seeking to understand the divisions and disparities in the United States, we have typically fallen into the quicksand and mythology of race. “When we speak of the race problem in America,” he wrote in 1942, “what we really mean is the caste system and the problems which that caste system creates in America.

Seeming biological realities are socially constructed: gender is only genre, race is a race to the bottom, species as arbitrary as specie. Seeming social realities are machinations of power hiding their inverse: slavery is called freedom to disguise its exploitation; ignorance is called strength, to champion political illiteracy; and most of all, most of all, war is called peace, the peace bought by murder, the peace of the unmarked mass grave.

Contrary to a notion that has become fashionable among American historians, the concept of race was not invented in the late eighteenth or nineteenth century. Indeed, systems of categorical generalization that separated groups of people according to social constructions of race (sometimes based on skin color, sometimes with reference to other attributes) and ranked them as to disposition and intelligence, were in use in Europe at least a thousand years before Columbus set off across the Atlantic.

We don't like to admit that the ideology of white supremacy, constructed and reified for centuries, is still with us in the expectations that many whites have. Ina social world in which whiteness is central, where white people have the luxury of thinking of themselves as individuals and never in racial terms, seeing or talking about race is unnecessary and often forbidden, except for intra-tribal talk about the problems of others. In this sense, people who profess themselves to be color-blind are disingenuous or deluding themselves

The history of the movement reveals that Negro-white alliances have played a powerfully constructive role, especially in recent years. While Negro initiative, courage and imagination precipitated the Birmingham and Selma confrontations and revealed the harrowing injustice of segregated life, the organized strength of Negroes alone would have been insufficient to move Congress and the administration without the weight of the aroused conscience of white America. In the period ahead Negroes will continue to need this support. Ten percent of the population cannot by tensions alone induce 90 percent to change a way of life.

It is one of the ironies of antiracism that we must identify racially in order to identify the racial privileges and dangers of being in our bodies. Latinx and Asian and African and European and Indigenous and Middle Eastern: These six races—at least in the American context—are fundamentally power identities, because race is fundamentally a power construct of blended difference that lives socially. Race creates new forms of power: the power to categorize and judge, elevate and downgrade, include and exclude. Race makers use that power to process distinct individuals, ethnicities, and nationalities into monolithic races.

As a culture, we don’t claim that gender roles and gender conditioning disappear the moment we love someone of the “opposite” gender. I identify as a woman and am married to someone who identifies as a man, yet I would never say, “Because I am married to a man, I have a gender-free life.” We understand that gender is a very deep social construct, that we have different experiences depending on our gender roles, assignments, and expressions, and that we will wrestle with these differences throughout the life of our relationship. Yet when the topic is race, we claim that it is completely inoperative if there is any level of fond regard.

Indigenous cultures around the world have long accepted the concept of “two-spirit” people: those who embody both feminine and masculine identities or whose gender is more complicated than one of two options.12 There were periods of time in history when the constructs of race looked considerably different. Irish folks were not enfolded into Whiteness when they arrived in America; neither were the Polish or Italians.13 These elements of our identities are socially constructed and transmitted through a multitude of vehicles, including family, community, and culture. But no vehicle has been as potent in shaping our perceptions of bodies on a global scale as the vehicle of media.

To be sure, like the rest of race, whiteness is a fiction, what in the jargon of the academy is termed a social construct, an agreed-on myth that has empirical grit because of its effect, not its essence. But whiteness goes even one better: it is a category of identity that is most useful when its very existence is denied. That’s its twisted genius. Whiteness embodies Charles Baudelaire’s admonition that “the loveliest trick of the Devil is to persuade you that he does not exist.” Or, as an alter ego of the character Keyser Söze says in the film The Usual Suspects, “The greatest trick the devil ever played was to convince the world that he didn’t exist.” The Devil. Racism. Another metaphor. Same difference.

The odds are ever in Katniss's favor: she is the primary character with whom audiences identify. This is not inherently problematic, as part of the work of literature is to provide mirrors, windows, and doors into other people's experiences. The problem occurs when contemporary literature and media for young people include characters of color who are supposed to provide someone for every reader or viewer to identify with--and yet at the same time construct protagonists who are the only characters worth rooting for. Although the initial authorial intent may have been noble, stories constructed in such a fashion have the pernicious effect of normalizing our existing social hierarchies--including hierarchies of race.

According to Vedder and Galloway, prior to the enactment of the Davis-Bacon Act, black and white construction unemployment registered similar levels. After the enactment of the Davis-Bacon Act, however, black unemployment rose relative to that of whites.[31] Vedder and Galloway also argue that 1930 to 1950 was a period of unprecedented and rapidly increasing government intervention in the economy. This period saw enactment of the bulk of legislation restraining the setting of private wage, such as the Fair Labor Standards Act, Davis-Bacon Act, Walsh-Healey Act, and National Labor Relations Act. The Social Security Act also played a role, forcing employers to pay for a newly imposed fringe benefit.[32] Vedder and Galloway also note that this period saw a rapid increase in the black/white unemployment ratio.

Man is comprised of an organism, which is to say an organised form, and of vital forces, as well as a soul. The same may be said of a people. The national construction of a state, while taking account of all three elements, for various reasons of qualification and heredity can nevertheless be chiefly based upon a single one of these elements. In my opinion, in the Fascist movement it is the state element that prevails, coinciding with organised force. What finds expression here is the shaping power of ancient Rome, that master of law and political organisation, the purest heirs to which are the Italians. National Socialism emphasises what is connected to vital forces: race, racial instinct, and the ethical and national element. The Romanian Legionary movement instead chiefly stresses what in a living organism corresponds to the soul: the spiritual and religious aspect. This is the reason for the distinctive character of each national movement, although ultimately all three elements are taken into account, and none is overlooked. The specific character of our movement derives from our distant heritage. Already Herodotus called our forefathers “the immortal Dacians”. Our Geto-Thracian ancestors, even before Christianity, already had faith in the immortality and indestructibility of the soul – something which proves their spiritual drive. Roman colonisation introduced the Roman sense of organisation and form. Later centuries made our people miserable and divided; yet, just as a sick and beaten horse will still show traces of its nobility of stock, so too the Romanian people of yesterday and today reveals the latent features of its two-fold heritage. It is this heritage that the Legionary movement seeks to awaken. It begins with the spirit: for the movement wishes to create a spiritually new man. Once we have met this goal as a “movement”, we must then awaken our second heritage – the politically shaping Roman power. The spirit and religion are thus our starting point; “constructive nationalism” is our point of arrival – almost a consequence. Joining these two points is the ascetic and at the same time heroic ethic of the Iron Guard.

It is possible that the next economic downturn--or stock market crash--will bring on further developments. During the recession at the end of the 1980s, ex-Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke gathered strong support from disgruntled citizens in Louisiana for his gubernatorial and US Senate races. Voters did not seem to be bothered by his record, which included plenty of statements like: "The Jews have been working against our national interest. . . . I think they should be punished." Bertram Gross and Kevin Phillips had each foreseen part of a process that engendered remarkable tolerance for authoritarian political solutions. Gross correctly identified the kind of authority that the corporate world wanted to exercise over working- and middle-class Americans. Phillips was perceptive about the way ordinary Americans would participate in actually constructing a more harsh and restrictive social milieu. By the 1990s the two strands were coalescing into something we could call "Authoritarian Democracy." Today it is clear that the goals of the corporate rich can be furthered by the enthusiasms of the popular classes, especially in the realms of religion.

This excerpt from When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories, edited by Bernestine Singley, appeared in 2002 as part of Harvard Magazine’s coverage of recent books by Harvard affiliates. The excerpt concerns author Noel Ignatiev’s role in launching a journal “to chronicle and analyze the making, remaking, and unmaking of whiteness.” … The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists. Of course, we expected bewilderment from people who still think of race as biology. We frequently get letters accusing us of being "racists," just like the KKK, and have even been called a "hate group." ... Our standard response is to draw an analogy with anti-royalism: to oppose monarchy does not mean killing the king; it means getting rid of crowns, thrones, royal titles, etc.... Every group within white America has at one time or another advanced its particular and narrowly defined interests at the expense of black people as a race. That applies to labor unionists, ethnic groups, college students, schoolteachers, taxpayers, and white women. Race Traitor will not abandon its focus on whiteness, no matter how vehement the pleas and how virtuously oppressed those doing the pleading. The editors meant it when they replied to a reader, "Make no mistake about it: we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as 'the white race' is destroyed—not 'deconstructed' but destroyed.

As part of his long-winded bullshit, Baby fell into a genre trope that he had avoided in his first two novels. He started inventing new words. This was a common habit amongst Science Fiction writers. They couldn’t help themselves. They were always inventing new words. Perhaps the most famous example of a Science Fiction writer inventing a new word occurs in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. Part of Heinlein’s vision of horny decentralized alien sex involves the Martian word grok. To grok something is to comprehend that something with effortless and infinite intuition. When you grok something, that something becomes a part of you and you become a part of that something without any troublesome Earthling attempts at knowing. A good example of groking something is the way that members of the social construct of the White race had groked their own piglet pink. They’d groked their skin color so much that it became invisible. It had become part of them and they had become part of it. That was groking. People in the San Francisco Bay Area, especially those who worked in technology like Erik Willems, loved to talk about groking. With time, their overusage stripped away the original meaning and grok became synonymous with simple knowledge of a thing. In a weird way, people in the Bay Area who used the word grok did not grok the word grok. Baby had always been popular with people on the Internet, which was a wonderful place to deny climate change, willfully misinterpret the Bible, and denounce Darwin’s theory of evolution. Now that Baby had coined nonsense neologisms, he had become more than popular. He had become quotable.

Tracing the career of the Teuton through mediaeval and modern history, we can find no possible excuse for denying his actual biological supremacy. In widely separated localities and under widely diverse conditions, his innate racial qualities have raised him to preeminence. There is no branch of modern civilization that is not of his making. As the power of the Roman empire declined, the Teuton sent down into Italy, Gaul, and Spain the re-vivifying elements which saved those countries from complete destruction. Though now largely lost in the mixed population, the Teutons are the true founders of all the so-called Latin states. Political and social vitality had fled from the old inhabitants; the Teuton only was creative and constructive. After the native elements absorbed the Teutonic invaders, the Latin civilizations declined tremendously, so that the France, Italy, and Spain of today bear every mark of national degeneracy. In the lands whose population is mainly Teutonic, we behold a striking proof of the qualities of the race. England and Germany are the supreme empires of the world, whilst the virile virtues of the Belgians have lately been demonstrated in a manner which will live forever in song and story. Switzerland and Holland are veritable synonyms for Liberty. The Scandinavians are immortalized by the exploits of the Vikings and Normans, whose conquests over man and Nature extended from the sun-baked shores of Sicily to the glacial wastes of Greenland, even attaining our own distant Vinland across the sea. United States history is one long panegyric of the Teuton, and will continue to be such if degenerate immigration can be checked in time to preserve the primitive character of the population.

THE IRIS OF THE EYE WAS TOO BIG TO HAVE BEEN FABRICATED AS A single rigid object. It had been built, beginning about nine hundred years ago, out of links that had been joined together into a chain; the two ends of the chain then connected to form a loop. The method would have seemed familiar to Rhys Aitken, who had used something like it to construct Izzy’s T3 torus. For him, or anyone else versed in the technological history of Old Earth, an equally useful metaphor would have been that it was a train, 157 kilometers long, made of 720 giant cars, with the nose of the locomotive joined to the tail of the caboose so that it formed a circular construct 50 kilometers in diameter. An even better analogy would have been to a roller coaster, since its purpose was to run loop-the-loops forever. The “track” on which the “train” ran was a circular groove in the iron frame of the Eye, lined with the sensors and magnets needed to supply electrodynamic suspension, so that the whole thing could spin without actually touching the Eye’s stationary frame. This was an essential design requirement given that the Great Chain had to move with a velocity of about five hundred meters per second in order to supply Earth-normal gravity to its inhabitants. Each of the links had approximately the footprint of a Manhattan city block on Old Earth. And their total number of 720 was loosely comparable to the number of such blocks that had once existed in the gridded part of Manhattan, depending on where you drew the boundaries—it was bigger than Midtown but smaller than Manhattan as a whole. Residents of the Great Chain were acutely aware of the comparison, to the point where they were mocked for having a “Manhattan complex” by residents of other habitats. They were forever freeze-framing Old Earth movies or zooming around in virtual-reality simulations of pre-Zero New York for clues as to how street and apartment living had worked in those days. They had taken as their patron saint Luisa, the eighth survivor on Cleft, a Manhattanite who had been too old to found her own race. Implicit in that was that the Great Chain—the GC, Chaintown, Chainhattan—was a place that people might move to when they wanted to separate themselves from the social environments of their home habitats, or indeed of their own races. Mixed-race people were more common there than anywhere else.

For abolitionists, who advocated the immediate emancipation of all slaves, and free-soilers, who simply opposed the spread of slavery into the western territories, the existence of such a group proved the destructive effect of slavery on social morals and human industry and the inordinate economic power of the planter elite. It also served as an implicit warning of the disastrous consequences of the spread of slavery into nonslaveholding regions and its debilitating effect on the work ethic of otherwise stalwart white farmers. For slave-holders, particularly those at the apex of southern society, the idleness of rural working-class whites justified the “peculiar institution” and made clear the need for a planter-led economic and social hierarchy. Planter D. R. Hundley wrote, for example, that “poor whites” were “the laziest two-legged animals that walk erect on the face of the earth . . . [and exhibited] a natural stupidity or dullness of intellect that almost surpasses belief.” To abolitionists and proslavery ideologues alike, therefore, southern poor whites utterly lacked industry, intelligence, social propriety, and honor, the essential ingredients for political and social equality and thus should not be trusted with political decision-making.7 Northern and southern middle- to upper-class commentators perceived this class of people as so utterly degraded that they challenged their assertion of “whiteness,” the one claim southern working-class whites had to political equality, “normative” status, and social superiority to free and enslaved blacks. Like Byrd and the author of “The Carolina Sand-Hillers,” journalists and travel writers repeatedly compared “poor whites” unfavorably to other supposedly inferior people of color, be they enslaved blacks, Indians, or even Mexican peasants. Through a variety of arguments, including genetic inferiority, excessive interbreeding with “nonwhites,” and environmental factors, such as the destructive influences of the southern climate, rampant disease, and a woefully inadequate diet, these writers asserted that “poor whites” were neither truly “white” nor clearly “nonwhite” but instead, a separate “‘Cracker’ race” in all ways so debased that they had no capacity for social advancement. This attitude is clear in an 1866 article from the Boston Daily Advertiser that proclaimed that this social class had reached depths of “[s]uch filthy poverty, such foul ignorance, such idiotic imbecility” that they could never be truly civilized. “[T]ime and effort will lead the negro up to intelligent manhood,” the author concluded, “but I almost doubt if it will be possible to ever lift this ‘white trash’ into respectability.”8 Contempt for working-class whites was almost as strong among African Americans as among middle-class and elite whites. Enslaved African Americans invented derogatory terms containing explicit versions of “whiteness” such as “(poor) white trash” and “poor buckra” (a derivative form of the West African word for “white man”). Although relations between slaves and non-elite southern whites were complex, many slaves deeply resented the role of poor whites as overseers and patrol riders and adopted their owners’ view that elite southern planters were socially and morally superior. Many also believed that blacks, enslaved and free, formed a middle layer of social respectability between the planter aristocracy at the top of the social system and the “poor whites” at the bottom. The construction of a “poor white” and “white trash” social and cultural category thus allowed black slaves to carve out a space of social superiority, as well as permitted the white planter elite to justify enormous economic and social inequality among whites in a supposedly democratic society.9

Learning about the history of race in America is so worthwhile because you’re going to hear it said over and over again—“Race is just a social construct.” But you’ll also soon learn that some of the people who say this aren’t interested in learning how it became a social construct, or why it’s a social construct, or who invented the construct.

race is fundamentally a power construct of blended difference that lives socially.

The idea of race as a biological construct makes it easy to believe that many of the divisions we see in society are natural. But race, like gender, is socially constructed. The differences we see with our eyes—differences such as hair texture and eye color—are superficial and emerged as adaptations to geography.1 Under the skin, there is no true biological race. The external characteristics that we use to define race are unreliable indicators of genetic variation between any two people.

No individual belongs to “just” one socially constructed category: each has his or her multiple racial, gender, class-based, national identities, and that’s just a start of the list. Nor are these categories uniform or stable; we are Whitmanesque, we contain multitudes.

To recognize our many selves is to understand the vast social construction that is not only the individual, but history itself, the present as history. A radical democratic politics must invite us to comprehend this.

For postmodernism, by contrast, reality is ultimately the product of our socialization and lived experiences, as constructed by systems of language.

Racism has been among the most complex social dilemmas since the founding of this country. While there is no biological race as we understand it (see chapter 2), race as a social construct has profound significance and shapes every aspect of our lives.1 Race will influence whether we will survive our birth, where we are most likely to live, which schools we will attend, who our friends and partners will be, what careers we will have, how much money we will earn, how healthy we will be, and even how long we can expect to live.2

Race is a social construction for which there is no scientific basis; racism is the foundation of that construction...but when I am out in the world with my daughters, it is not a construction or it’s consequences that I fear will hurt them. What I fear are human beings, white human beings, who are not made of theory, but of flesh and blood.

But most social scientists today do not believe that racial differences have a deep biological or genetic origin; rather, most differences (such as skin pigmentation) are superficial and can’t come close to explaining broad social inequalities. Instead, most accept the notion that race is in large part socially constructed. As the historian Matthew Jacobson asks, “Why is it that in the United States a white woman can have black children but a black woman cannot have white children? Doesn’t this bespeak a degree of arbitrariness in this business of affixing racial labels?”11

Seeing how every country has a different way of classifying people shows us that RACE AND ETHNICITY REALLY ARE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONS.

In other words, race is a social construction, and how groups are defined varies over time and place.

Race is a social construct but it is often embedded in computational systems as if it were scientific fact.

Society may tolerate you. It may wish you well. But your desire to dress in lady’s knickers is no reason to force everyone to use entirely new pronouns. Or to alter every public bathroom. Or to bring up children with the belief that there is no difference between the sexes and that gender is a social construct. If

Men still build walls of partition and division like the terrible Berlin wall, or erect invisible curtains of iron or bamboo, or construct barriers of race, colour, caste, tribe or class. Divisiveness is a constant characteristic of every community without Christ.

critical race Theory as a model to insist that disabilities are ultimately social constructions is particularly unhelpful, given that—unlike social categories of race—physical and mental impairments are objectively real and people often dislike having them because of the way they materially affect their lives (and not because they have been socialized to believe they should dislike them).

race is fundamentally a power construct of blended difference that lives socially. Race creates new forms of power: the power to categorize and judge, elevate and downgrade, include and exclude. Race makers use that power to process distinct individuals, ethnicities, and nationalities into monolithic races.

race as a social construct.

The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct’. This was an academic paper published in 2017 which proposed that: The penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a gender-performative, highly fluid social construct.14

The theory’s basic teaching is that racism is systemically embedded within the fabric of society and can only be addressed by first interpreting the world through the lens of minority experience. While critical race theory accomplishes deconstruction, the sub-theory “intersectionality” accomplishes construction. It is this element which has become, perhaps, the most important concept for understanding the modern social justice movement.

The idea that homosexuality is a social construct neglects the plentiful evidence that it is also a biological reality. Despite any liberation this may achieve, it threatens to undo the considerable progress made by lesbian and gay activists encountering the belief that their romantic and sexual attractions are a mere lifestyle choice that could, in two manifestations of the same principle, be theorized into existence or prayed away.

Epigenetics is a discipline that relies more on speculation than genuine scientific understanding. Nevertheless, scholars of race and racism would do well to keep a wary eye on epigenetic research, as this is an avenue whereby many researchers will attempt to resurrect the biological concept of race. Defining ‘race’: is there a consensus that race is a social construct?

Most sociologists in the UK and many in the USA are now convinced by scientific research that ‘race’ is a social construct rather than a biological fact.

S’il est une leçon que doit retenir la jeunesse, c’est que la survivance d’un peuple se conquiert beaucoup moins par les beaux coups d’éclat, par les victoires d’éloquence, que par les œuvres constructives. Être fort pour un peuple, c’est l’être d’abord par la vigueur intérieure de son âme, par sa constitution sociale, économique, intellectuelle, morale. Cela même est la première condition de défense contre l’ennemi extérieur; pour être un bon soldat il faut être physiquement et moralement bien constitué. La fierté fut bien, dans le passé tout proche, l’une des vertus qui nous ont le plus manqué, quand fort peu pourtant nous étaient aussi nécessaires. Un peuple faible par le nombre, peut se passer, à la rigueur, de richesse et même d’art; il ne saurait se passer d’être fier. Pour vivre il faut d’abord se convaincre que la vie en vaut la peine; et notre peuple n’aura plus de raisons de perpétuer sa race quand il y aura vu la cause d’une infériorité. Pour être fiers, les jeunes n’ont besoin que de savoir qui ils sont. Il n’appartient pas aux fils des grands Français qui ont bâti ce chef-d’œuvre d’histoire que fut la Nouvelle-France, de chercher ailleurs que chez eux, les raisons de leur dignité. Si cette gloire fut entachée d’une défaite, nos pères ont empêché que cette défaite fût irréparable; il y a même beau temps qu’ils l’ont rachetée. Aujourd’hui, dans notre pays, où notre ordre social fait l’envie des autres, nous n’avons que le déshonneur de nous mal juger nous-mêmes. Nous sommes pourtant la race qui n’a jamais violé le droit d’autrui. Persécutés souvent, nous n’avons jamais été persécuteurs. Le service de la civilisation par la propagande de la foi du Christ, plus que personne en Amérique, nous l’avons pratiqué. Tous ces motifs de fierté suffiraient à de moins inattentifs.

While there is no biological race as we understand it (see chapter 2), race as a social construct

But race, like gender, is socially constructed.

We have constructed the category of race based on perceptions of different skin color. We have created an inequitable social and economic relationship that is structured by skin color, class, gender and nation. Race was created by and for white people and in service of white supremacists. As a social construct, it has huge ramifications on American society, economics, politics, and religion. Race is not a benign category; it is an oppressive structure and understanding.

White is a created category of race that has no biological/scientific foundation. Whiteness, on the other hand, is a compelling and convincing powerful social construct with tangible, destructive, and violent effects. Whiteness is a cultural space with political power and privilege with a goal and an agenda to keep people of color marginalized, oppressed, and subordinated. Whiteness is a learned behavior that is multidimensional, complex, extensive, and systemic, which becomes a powerful tool for white people.

Under Hudgins, Virginia law presumed blacks were slaves, denoting their status as objects even when, in fact, they were free.84 Judge Tucker undercut even the provisions in the statute that contemplated some mixed-race individuals as free, because they descended from either a white woman or a free black or mulatto female. Judges throughout the 19th century followed Judge Tucker’s lead, creating presumptions of enslavement and other devices for limiting black freedom. These cases reinforced a subordinate role for blacks in American society, and in so doing, created a superior role for whites. This social construct of white privilege is unmistakably seen in the words of one South Carolina judge in 1836: “A

Le langage quotidien (tout comme le langage des images) est de part en part traversé par des rapports de force, par des rapports sociaux (de classe, de sexe, d'âge, de race, etc.), et c'est dans et par le langage (et l'image) que se joue la domination symbolique, c'est-à-dire la définition - et l'imposition - des perceptions du monde et des représentations socialement légitimes. Le dominant, comme le dit Pierre Bourdieu, est celui qui réussit à imposer la manière dont il veut être perçu, et le dominé, celui qui est défini, pensé et parlé par le langage de l'autre et/ou celui qui ne parvient pas à imposer la perception qu'il à de lui-même. Seules les périodes de crise sociale, culturelle, ou au moins l'irruption de mobilisations politiques ou culturelles, peuvent permettre une mise en question de cet ordre symbolique des représentations et du langage dont al force principale est de se présenter comme ressortissant aux évidences d'un ordre naturel, immuable, et sur lequel on ne s'interroge pas ou sur lequel on s'interroge faussement pour mieux le réaffirmer dans son arbitraire en le présentant comme ayant toujours existé. La mobilisation politique, l'action politique, sont toujours des batailles pour la représentation, pour le langage et les mots. Ce sont des luttes autour de la perception du monde. La question qui s'y joue est de savoir qui définit la perception et la définition d'un groupe et la perception et la définition du monde en général. La mobilisation, l'action politique, consistent souvent, pour un groupe, à essayer de faire valoir, d'imposer la manière dont il se perçoit lui-même, et d'échapper ainsi à la violence symbolique exercée par la représentation dominante. Mais il convient de préciser qu'il n'y a pas, pour les gays, encore moins pour les « gays et lesbiennes », une manière d'être et de se penser soi-même qui préexisterait et qu'il conviendrait de découvrir et de manifester au grand jour, et encore moins une seule et unique manière d'être et de « se percevoir », ce qui constitue toute la complexité du mouvement gay et lesbien et explique le fait, si souvent souligné, que les définitions qu'il peut donner de lui-même ne sont que des constructions provisoires, fragiles et nécessairement contradictoires entre elles. (p. 117-118)

Some really brilliant men (I am thinking mainly of McTaggart) made great efforts in constructive idealistic thought, well above the level of Hegel; but they did not get very far beyond providing targets for equally brilliant critics. And one can say that outside the continent of Europe, especially in the last twenty years, the interest of philosophers in Hegel has slowly been vanishing. But if that is so, why worry any more about Hegel? The answer is that Hegel’s influence has remained a most powerful force, in spite of the fact that scientists never took him seriously, and that (apart from the ‘evolutionists’6. many philosophers are beginning to lose interest in him. Hegel’s influence, and especially that of his cant, is still very powerful in moral and social philosophy and in the social and political sciences (with the sole exception of economics). Especially the philosophers of history, of politics, and of education are still to a very large extent under its sway. In politics, this is shown most drastically by the fact that the Marxist extreme left wing, as well as the conservative centre, and the fascist extreme right, all base their political philosophies on Hegel; the left wing replaces the war of nations which appears in Hegel’s historicist scheme by the war of classes, the extreme right replaces it by the war of races; but both follow him more or less consciously. (The conservative centre is as a rule less conscious of its indebtedness to Hegel.)

The issue of homosexuality in the church is complex, highly charged, and defined by misrecognized fears related to rapid social change and the perceived threat to familiar social institutions and the sense of security they represent. Underlying this conflict are the church’s historic discomfort with issues of sexuality, and dualistic constructions that codify that unease into categories of sexual insiders (monogamous heterosexuals and celibates) and outsiders (everybody else). These have been magnified in recent years by cultural differences between different generations and African countries where the church has grown.

Winant, a leading proponent of the social constructionist theory of race, offers an extreme evaluation of the implications of a totally raceless future: The five-hundred year domination of the globe by Europe and its inheritors is the historical context in which racial concepts of difference have attained their present status as fundamental concepts of human identity and inequality. To imagine the end of race is thus to contemplate the liquidation of Western civilization.83

Race is real. Race is powerful. But race is also a social construct. This understanding of race begins to shed light on the conundrums of whiteness. In the United States constructions of race have never been morally neutral. Racial construction processes have always meant and continue to mean today that persons with phenotypes marking them as “white” receive better treatment, greater social access, and more institutional benefits than those with phenotypes that mark them “of color.

Queer Theory is about liberation from the normal, especially where it comes to norms of gender and sexuality. This is because it regards the very existence of categories of sex, gender and sexuality to be oppressive. Because queer Theory derives directly from postmodernism, it is radically skeptical that these categories are based in any biological reality. It thus ignores biology nearly completely (or places it downstream of socialization) and focuses upon them as social constructions perpetuated in language.

Liberalism does not require one to believe that gender and sexuality are socially constructed in order to argue that there is no justification for discriminating against anyone.

or stereotype on the basis of the social construct of race can be considered racism. Any action or structure that seeks to limit, hold back, or put someone in a defined ranking, seeks to keep someone in their place by elevating or denigrating that person on the basis of their perceived category, can be seen as casteism.

The result is that the belief that society is structured of specific but largely invisible identity-based systems of power and privilege that construct knowledge via ways of talking about things is now considered by social justice scholars and activists to be an objectively true statement about the organizing principle of society. Does this sound like a metanarrative? That’s because it is. Social Justice scholarship and its educators and activists see these principles and conclusions as The Truth According to Social Justice—and they treat it as though they have discovered the analogue of the germ theory of disease, but for bigotry and oppression.

By the late 1980s, this distinction had begun to drive a wedge between various types of feminists, who disagreed as to how far to take deconstructive methods,15 a disagreement which persists today. Mary Poovey, a materialist feminist—a feminist who focuses primarily on how patriarchal and capitalist assumptions force women into socially constructed gender roles—described this clearly. Poovey was attracted to deconstructive techniques for their ability to undermine what she saw as socially constructed gender stereotypes (the belief that such stereotypes reflect intrinsic human nature is often referred to as “essentialism”), but as a materialist she was concerned that deconstruction in its purest form did not allow the category “woman” to exist at all.16 This was new.

Judith Butler, a feminist and LGBT scholar and activist who was foundational to the development of queer Theory, epitomizes the opposite approach to this dilemma. In her most influential work, Gender Trouble,17 published in 1990, Butler focuses on the socially constructed nature of both gender and sex. For Butler, “woman” is not a class of people but a performance that constructs “gendered” reality. Butler’s concept of gender performativity—behaviors and speech that make gender real—allowed her to be thoroughly postmodern, deconstruct everything, and reject the notion of stable essences and objective truths about sex, gender, and sexuality, all while remaining politically active. This worked on two levels. Firstly, by referring to “reality-effects” and social or cultural “fictions,” Butler is able to address what she sees as the reality of social constructions of gender, sex, and sexuality. For Butler, the specific constructions themselves are not real, but it is true that constructions exist. Secondly, because the “queer” is understood to be that which falls outside of categories, especially those used to define male and female, masculine and feminine, heterosexual and homosexual, disrupting and dismantling those categories is essential to activism. “To queer” can therefore be used as a verb in the Butlerian sense, and the “queering” of something refers to the destabilization of categories and the disruption of norms or accepted truths associated with it. The purpose of this is to liberate the “queer” from the oppression of being categorized.

Postmodern Theory offered an opportunity to retain the same beliefs and predictions—male domination exists and serves itself at the expense of women—while redefining them in terms diffuse enough to be a matter of faith, requiring no evidence: social constructions, discourses, and socialization. The Foucauldian idea of a diffuse grid of power dynamics that constantly operates through everyone through their unwitting uses of language fit the bill perfectly.

Small children who have yet to learn the rules will describe people as they see them, not by the political designations of black, white, Asian, or Latino, until adults “correct” them to use the proper caste designations to make the irrational sound reasoned. Color is a fact. Race is a social construct.

Color blindness constitutes an entire microaggression “Theme” in the “Tool,” pace Martin Luther King Jr. Beware of saying, “When I look at you, I don’t see color” or “There is only one race, the human race.” Doing so, according to the “Tool,” denies “the individual as a racial/cultural being.” Never mind that diversity ideologues reject the genetic basis of racial categories and proclaim that race is merely a “social construct.” The nondiverse world is under orders both to deny that race exists and to “acknowledge race,” in Tool-parlance, regarding Persons of Color.