Race is a social construction:
It is society that creates and defines the make up of race. Race is not an exact classification such as gender or blood type. From a scientific standpoint, it is a construction only slightly more important then hair color or eye color. The emphasis placed on the color of our skin is an emphasis arbitrarily created but the world we live in, rather then scientific standards. It is a creation meant to serve certain purposes for certain people. For instance, Asian Indians are considered generally to be of the Asian race, however from a genealogical standpoint, natives of the Asian sub-continent have ancestries more closely related to Europeans then to East Asians. So why have our south Asian friends been effortlessly labeled as ‘Asian’ rather then European/Caucasian or a separate classification of there own? In this case, besides the obvious aesthetic reasons, European hegemony and colonialism play major roles in the racial identification of South Asians. A case where European “Hispanics” (i.e. Spain, Portugal) are more often then not considered Caucasian while Hispanics brought up in south and central America are not, while both have clear Latin roots, clearly exemplifies how subjective the idea of race truly is. Race identity and its creation holds no ill in itself; it is when race is used to subjugate entire groups of people at the benefit of another that we must investigate how and why racial identities are created and assigned.
