Thread by @AlsoACarpenter

I believe the social construction of race thesis is central to Critical Race Theory analysis and has wide ranging, radical, and inescapable implications.

A thread:

2/ The social construction thesis is, in short, that race is not a natural, biological, “out there” entity such that it exists independently of law and society. Rather, it is a product of human social interaction, a construction of social reality.

3/ Further, race and racial categories were historically created to justify and maintain social hierarchy, slavery, and other forms of group-based exploitation, as well as to distribute rights, citizenship, privileges, access, and disparate advantages/disadvantages.

4/ Alternative conceptions of race, on the other hand, include (1) that race is biological, an “essence” carried around in the bodies of individuals, or (2) that race is unreal and should be collapsed into alternative categories like ethnicity or culture.

5/ Now—and here’s the logical center claim—if race is either reducible to biology or collapsible into ethnicity, then race can be treated as historically neutral, apolitical, and easily domesticated as either just a physical trait that should mean nothing (like eye color) or as

6/ simply no different than being English-, Welsh-, Irish-, Slavic-, Italian-, Spanish-, or German-American, all of which were accorded the citizenship benefits of Whiteness, by law.

7/ But, if race is in fact very real, though not biological, essential, nor collapsible into something else, but rather an historical social construction, then it is inseparable from the historical context in which it was constructed, the purpose for which it was constructed,

8/ the hierarchies for which it was structured, the stereotypes, ideas, and inner-logics embedded within the construction of individual races, nor is it separable from the legal system from which it was in part born and continues to be shaped.

9/ In short, if race is socially constructed, then it is inescapably non-neutral and inescapably political. If races were socially constructed—and of course continue to be constructed—there is a when, a how, and a why associated with their current existence, social function, and

10/ meaning. And to be frank, race was created for hierarchy, for exploitation, and for the justification of dominant/subordinate group hierarchy.  

I think it should be easy to recognize that many of the commonplaces of CRT flow logically from this understanding of race,

11/11 socially and historically understood. Differential racialization, intersectionality, that racism is endemic to American life, skepticism of claims to objectivity and color-blindness, etc.

I think it's pretty much a package linked to the social construction thesis.

@LittletonTodd and I are exploring this on his podcast.