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I cringe any time I see the words "social construct."
Race exists. It is beyond ignorant to deny this. Take some human children from any country or culture in the world. It doesn't matter what society they are from, or whether they've even had any exposure to people of a different race. Show them, individually, a few slides of black people and tell them that these people are "black." Show them some slides of chinese people and tell them that these people are "asian." Show them some American wasps and tell them that these people are "white." Now show them various images of people and ask them to identify whether they are black, white or asian. Common sense should tell you that, even in the absence of an explanation of what race is, each answer will have an extremely significant percentage (I'd guess 90% or more) indicating what race the person is. Nesrly all the children will identify Jerry Seinfeld as white, Chris Rock as black, and Jet Li as asian, regardless of the context of the picture.
I know this test has been done before, and I'm not even going to bother looking for it because it is so painfully obvious. If children of different societies repeatedly show the ability to identify something with great agreement, then
there must be something there.
Just because race isn't identified by a scientifically functional, discontinuous property (like species) does not mean that it
does not exist. It's a readily identifiable phenotype that any five year old can understand. If civilization hadn't exploded when it did, the races would have speciated too. Are we to believe that inter-group phenotype differences
do not exist until the arbitrary point when they can no longer produce fertile offspring?
Mainstream academia does a great disservice to society by making such idiotic claims like "race does not exist." Yes, racism is a problem. It has existed in every multi-cultural society in the history of the world. Is trying to pretend that race doesn't exist really the solution? I don't think so.
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If that is all race is, skin color (plus a very limited number of superficial features (and it is a limited number,for instance, those children might have a hard time picking out 'Japanese' or 'Korean (don't you just love these nested parentheticals?))) then your point is obvious to the point of not needing to be stated. But if thats the case, why call it race? Its just color. Ask those kids to identify
this guy, and they will almost certainly all say white, but he isn't. His father would clearly be labeled black. Doesn't this demonstrate that these children are NOT adept at determining race, but are just adept at differentiating colors? We know they can do that already. And I would bet that almost none of those kids would even say he was a mix, or half-black, or anything. They'd just immediately say white, because all they are grouping is colors, NOT race.