The Social Construction of Race

Excerpts from the Paper

The Social Construction of Race
The belief that race is a biological concept is an outdated and inaccurate perception which is based largely on socially derived perceptions. Frederick Douglass regarded race as being a critical issue in the U.S. between African Americans and European Americans in which Eurocentric culture dictated the social construction of race. He intimated his feelings about race: “I taught them, because it was the delight of my soul to be doing something that looked like bettering the condition of my race” (Douglass 1852, 75).
The classical definition of race is formulated on one major aspect of people: appearance or phenotype. “Human races, if defined by antimalarial genes, would be very different from human races as...

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