Is race a social construct?

Overview

Whether “race” is best understood as a social construct or a biological reality depends on which aspect of the term one is examining. Most population geneticists agree that (a) human genetic variation is structured and (b) the racial labels used in everyday life only coarsely map onto that structure. Social scientists emphasize the second point, biologists often emphasize the first, and the public debate usually conflates the two.

Historical origin of the social-construct view

• After World War II UNESCO promoted the idea that races are political inventions that should be replaced by the language of “populations” and “ethnic groups.” This campaign deliberately de-emphasised biology in order to delegitimise scientific racism [3].
• Philosophers of biology later formalised this stance, arguing that because within-group genetic diversity is high and the boundaries between continental groups are fuzzy, race is “biologically meaningless” even if it is socially powerful [5].

Genetic structure that motivates “race realism”

• Large-scale genotyping projects consistently find that a modest number of genetic markers can classify individuals into clusters that mirror continental ancestry with high accuracy. A. W. F. Edwards showed that considering many loci at once overturns Lewontin’s classic 1972 statistic and makes such classification feasible [6].
• David Reich notes that these ancestry clusters are reproducible, predict some disease risks, and therefore cannot be dismissed out of hand [4].
• Even AI systems trained on X-ray and MRI data, where race is not visually obvious, can infer a patient’s self-identified race far above chance, implying that there are correlated biological signals beyond skin colour alone [2].

Points of agreement among many scholars

• Human variation is clinal: genetic differences change gradually across geography rather than jumping at national or folk-racial borders.
• Social racial categories (e.g., “Black,” “White,” “Asian”) capture only a subset of this variation and vary across countries and historical periods.
• Genetic ancestry can be medically and forensically informative, so blanket rejection of biological differences is not warranted.

Where authors in the source set disagree

• Race realists (e.g., Aporia essay, Edwards, Reich) stress that if clusters can be identified objectively and have predictive value, race is at least partly biological [1 6 4].
• Social-constructionists (e.g., Kaplan & Winther, UNESCO historians, Ars Technica) counter that the clusters do not map cleanly onto folk terms and that emphasising them risks reifying arbitrary categories [5 3 11].
• Razib Khan and other “it’s complicated” writers argue that both positions, when stated as absolutes, over-simplify: ancestry clusters are real, yet the choice to call them “races” is a cultural decision [7].

Public-discourse dynamics

• Commentators complain that US debate rewards moral signaling over empirical nuance, leading to professional costs for biologists who discuss population differences candidly [10].
• Activists and some journalists describe any acknowledgement of genetic structure as a backdoor to racism, while bloggers on the opposite side accuse mainstream outlets of censorship [8 1].
• The result is a conformity/fragmentation cycle: discussion retreats to specialist journals, pay-walled newsletters, or polemical blogs, widening the gap between expert knowledge and public perception [10 7].

Conclusion

Race is simultaneously (1) a set of socially defined labels that shift across time and place and (2) an imperfect proxy for patterns of human genetic variation. Saying “race is only a social construct” ignores measurable biological structure; saying “race is purely biological” ignores the contingent, historically specific way societies draw their racial lines. Most contemporary scholars therefore treat race as a socio-biological hybrid: useful for some practical purposes, misleading for others, and always requiring clear definition in context.

Sources

1. “The Case for Race Realism,” Aporia Magazine.
2. Banerjee et al. “AI Recognition of Patient Race in Medical Imaging” (2022 pre-print).
3. “Changing the Concept of Race: On UNESCO and Cultural Internationalism” (2020).
4. David Reich, “How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’,” The New York Times (2018).
5. Kaplan & Winther, “Race: A Social Destruction of a Biological Concept,” Biology & Philosophy (2009).
6. A. W. F. Edwards, “Lewontin’s Fallacy” (2003).
7. Razib Khan, “Current Status: It’s Complicated” (Unsupervised Learning newsletter).
8. UCSC Science & Justice, “Developing: Debate on ‘Race’ and Genomics” (2019).
9. Armand M. Leroi, “A Family Tree in Every Gene,” The New York Times (2005).
10. Yascha Mounk, “Discourse on Race Has a Conformity Problem,” Persuasion (2020).
11. Ars Technica, “Trump ‘Annoyed’ the Smithsonian Isn’t Promoting Discredited Racial Ideas” (2025).

Suggested Sources

1. The Case for Race Realism – Aporia Magazine (Opinion / Essay)
2. “AI Recognition of Patient Race in Medical Imaging” (2022 pre-print PDF; Empirical research)
3. Discourse on Race Has a Conformity Problem – Persuasion (Opinion / Essay)
4. Changing the Concept of Race: On UNESCO and Cultural Internationalism (Historical scholarship)
5. David Reich: How to Talk About “Race” and Genetics – iSteve (Blog commentary)
6. Developing: Debate on “Race” and Genomics – UCSC Science & Justice (Research commentary / Blog post)
7. How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of “Race” – The New York Times (Opinion / Op-Ed)
8. No Voice at Vox: Sense and Nonsense About Discussing IQ and Race – Quillette (Opinion / Essay)
9. Race: A Social Destruction of a Biological Concept – Biology & Philosophy (Peer-reviewed journal article)
10. Lewontin’s Fallacy – A. W. F. Edwards (2003) (Peer-reviewed article)
11. Current Status: It’s Complicated – Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning (Newsletter essay / Blog post)
12. Why Can’t We Talk About IQ? – Politico (Opinion / Op-Ed)
13. Latest Rationalization: Race Doesn’t Exist, But Subraces Do – Steve Sailer Blog (Blog commentary)
14. Trump “Annoyed” the Smithsonian Isn’t Promoting Discredited Racial Ideas – Ars Technica (News article)
15. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/14/opinion/a-family-tree-in-every-gene.html
16. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-59351-8