On Identities and Social Construction

All the people in my neighborhood who were called "shorty" were short. And all the people with dark skin were called "moolies," for mouliyan (eggplant in Italian--get it?). We may not have been school-smart but we knew that there were things called "facts"---not having a job was a fact; the police were a fact; my absent father was a fact. There was no social construction in this stuff, and no matter what you may wish for, it didn't change the facts. No matter how hard me and my buddies tried to get Junior Emerson into the neighborhood park swimming pool by claiming that he was Puerto Rican, it never worked. Junior was a light-skinned "moolie" but not light enough.

The social science mantra that race is a social construct is an idea that I learned as a graduate student and which I still believe. This means that people can "pass" if they are smart enough, thereby making race a product of social processes, hence a social construction. But there are limits to social construction. Kareem can't pass for short, except in a home for the blind.

But the idea of pure social construction was presented in social science before the research on DNA and the human genome. We can now trace our biological descent to any population in the world, which makes the idea of distinct races very questionable, but it doesn't mean that race is only a social construct. There can still be found distinctive "gene pools" that are "closed" with few links outside the pool, and there are gene pools with dominant and distinctive genetic material. So until we have further research it would probably be accurate to say that race is a "bio-social construct," which means that the defining power of one side of the construct will limit the power of the other side.

I don't think I would give a public talk today arguing that race is a bio-social construct; the public or the main street media are not ready for that level of complexity.