1.3: A Sociological Overview of Race, Ethnicity, and Social Constructions

The world of sociology is largely a world of social constructions, or the process of crafting the different operational parts that make-up our social realities. Social constructions are those experiences and subjective perceptions that may appear natural, as they’ve seemingly been around forever and have given off the impression that they are indispensable to our lives. However, in reality these constructions have been created for some purpose or function in the service of our lived experience. For example, think about events such as holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, funerals, quinceañeras, wedding ceremonies, honeymoons, baptisms, etc. Each of these events generally provide us with a date, time, and venue to honor someone or something. Social constructions such as these form, once again, operational parts for our lived experience. In other words, social constructions like these holidays and events aren’t natural, but instead they are constructed in such a way that they create our lived realities.

Of course, social constructions are not just limited to holidays and events but can be much more instrumental in our everyday interactions. Think, for example about language: it is an outgrowth of our need to communicate, and we do so symbolically by stringing together different letters or characters, including, excluding, and combining them differentially in order to make purposeful statements that, in turn, affect our lives. Not only is language diverse, as in French, Chinese, English, Nahuatl, and the like, but there are also various dialects, corruptions, adaptations, and even non-verbal systems like sign language and Braile that are all indicative of how language is socially constructed and reconstructed out of human necessity.

Now, an important note should be made about social constructions: just because something is a social construction, does not mean it’s any less significant to our existences. One rather telling example of this would be money; though a social construction, few would be so naïve as to characterize money as insignificant. Indeed, the example of money and its relevance to our lives suggests that some social constructions can go beyond mere importance and can actually become definitive channels through which we organize our lives and maintain our livelihoods.

Race and ethnicity are also two phenomena that are subject to the processes of social construction. In terms of race, it is squarely a social phenomenon that has both emerged and developed over the course of roughly the past 500 years. Although there have been attempts at substantiating the biological foundations of race, they have fallen flat without merit. As is introduced in later chapters, the formation of race is really a series of socially constructing it into reality—a reality bound to the assumptions people append to appearance of different races.

Similarly, ethnicity and its unique feature of cultural expression is not only a social construction but is one in which that is constantly being constructed and reconstructed through social interaction. Ethnicities adapt through the behaviors of the people within their communities, and this means that behaviors become the expressive material that establishes the unique qualities of a given ethnicity.

In addition to the definitions and characteristics presented by race and ethnicity, and the overlap that they share, it’s also important to understand that individuals may have multiple races and/or multiple ethnicities. For example, former President Barrack Obama was born to an American mother of European descent and a Kenyan father of African descent. Obama’s physical features—foremost his skin color and hair texture—situated him within a Black racial category; however, his upbringing fostered a much more Euro-American ethnic category. Yet these categories were not fixed, and as Obama matured, he was able to navigate between and among a variety of racial and ethnic spaces. Nonetheless, what perhaps made President Obama such an effective politician was his ability to relate to so many diverse communities, due in large part to his multi-racial and multi-ethnic background—a not so subtle indication of how the diversity of both race and ethnicity can be celebrated.