What is Race?

Race has been attempted to be defined by many scholars, both from a biological and a social lens. For example, some may look at race from a biological definition, used in the past to define populations. More recently, geneticists have noticed clusters of variants among people of different biological “races” but noted that these differences were minimal. As of today, there is no gene that one can attribute to race, or consider a certain amount of genes to be identifiable consistently with race (National Research Council, 2004).

Recognizing these problems, other scholars have looked at race in the context of its social definition. Berger and Luckman have defined race as a “concept that has no objective reality but rather is what people decide it is” (Berger and Luckman, 1967). Here, there is no objective way of looking at race, but subjective based on what society deems important at the time. In this definition, race is a social construct derived from observable characteristics. Within this social category, a distinction should be made between race vs. ethnicity. Cultural factors have been historically attributed to ethnicity, while phenotype has been correlated with race (National Research Council, 2004). Although this analysis shows that race is not a real category, it is important to recognize that it is real in its effects. For the purposes of this project, we will be looking at race as the socially constructed way of categorizing people based on what society deems as relevant.