{"id":21070,"date":"2012-03-04T03:33:26","date_gmt":"2012-03-04T03:33:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=21070"},"modified":"2012-03-04T03:33:26","modified_gmt":"2012-03-04T03:33:26","slug":"race-is-a-social-construction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=21070","title":{"rendered":"Race is a Social Construction"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.livinganthropologically.com\/2012\/02\/18\/race-is-a-social-construction\/\" target=\"_blank\">Race is a Social Construction<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.livinganthropologically.com\" target=\"_blank\">Living Anthropologically<\/a><br \/>\n2012-02-18<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.hartwick.edu\/academics\/majors-and-minors\/social-sciences\/anthropology-home\/anthropology-faculty\/jason-antrosio\" target=\"_blank\">Jason Antrosio<\/a><\/strong>, Associate Professor of Anthropology<br \/>\n<em>Hartwick College, Oneonta, New York<\/em><\/p>\n<p>I usually avoid the phrase \u201crace is a social construction.\u201d It\u2019s become too much of a mantra, it\u2019s too much of a shortcut, and it is wildly misunderstood and misinterpreted. A perhaps better phrase\u2013still concise but more accurate, and hopefully less susceptible to misinterpretation, is from John H. Relethford: Race is a \u201cculturally constructed label that crudely and imprecisely describes real variation\u201d (<a href=\"http:\/\/onlinelibrary.wiley.com\/doi\/10.1002\/ajpa.20900\/abstract\" target=\"_blank\">Race and global patterns of phenotypic variation<\/a> 2009:20).<\/p>\n<p>It is important to spell out what that means, and what people were after with the \u201crace is a social construction\u201d phrase. I am going to go out on an optimistic limb here and say that some recent posts on popular genetic-sorting blogs\u2013<a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/\" target=\"_blank\">Gene Expression<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/dienekes.blogspot.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Dienekes<\/a>\u2013demonstrate these bloggers 1) acknowledge the genetic clustering data exhibits much more complexity and tells a much more complex story of human movement and mixing than is popularly understood; and 2) therefore acknowledge that the lived experience of racial classification can be much more real than the kinds of genetic clustering they are outlining; so that 3) correctly understood they are at least tacitly acknowledging that indeed \u201crace is a social construction.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Now before any of these bloggers or the people who inhabit their comment streams jump in and crush me, I want to make clear that this is an optimistic reading of some recent posts; that these comments apply to the main bloggers and not necessarily the commenters; and that since I am not a regular reader of these blogs, this may not be a new development even as I am reading a difference in tone&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire article <a href=\"http:\/\/www.livinganthropologically.com\/2012\/02\/18\/race-is-a-social-construction\/\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Race is a Social Construction Living Anthropologically 2012-02-18 Jason Antrosio, Associate Professor of Anthropology Hartwick College, Oneonta, New York I usually avoid the phrase \u201crace is a social construction.\u201d It\u2019s become too much of a mantra, it\u2019s too much of a shortcut, and it is wildly misunderstood and misinterpreted. A perhaps better phrase\u2013still concise but [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,12,8],"tags":[6148,6147],"class_list":["post-21070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-articles","category-media-archive","tag-jason-antrosio","tag-living-anthropologically"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21070\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}