Like others of my sort, I have been going around for decades telling people that race is a social construct. Recently Jack told me that what I claimed was true but trivial.
Jack went on to remind me that all words are social constructs (see the private language argument). So when you say that race is a social construct, you can't be wrong. "Walnut" is also a social construct, originally meaning "foreign nut."
"Race" is a term from biology, where it was used in my youth as a taxonomic category related to "subspecies." But biologists no longer divide people into races. The human species doesn't have enough genetic variation to merit that kind of division. And that settles the matter. We are all one thing, so to speak. There are no clear-cut, genetic boundaries in a species with a thousand shades of skin color.
I would guess that DNA studies played a role in all this. Penguins have more genetic variation than we do.
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