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Comment by awild | Hacker News Reader

> Maybe these things are social constructs, but if they are then we surely must come to the conclusion that almost everything we care about in the world is a social construct.

That's the point really. And it's not inherently a value judgement to say something is a social construct. Using it as a value judgment usually is meant to convey that some secondary attributes are not inherent, or even more so, just historical by-products and might need rethinking or recontextualisation. Being a woman and being of the female sex might seem to be identical, but womanhood is not the same as having a certain genomic makeup, and therefore womanhood is obviously a social construct. The video above even outlines how female-Ness might be considered a social construct but I'm not smart enough to explain that to you where abigail will do it much better.

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I guess another way to put this when someone says "race is a social construct". What are they trying to communicate about race?

Well, when you say something is a social construct it opens the door to find explanations for why that social construct has arisen. You open the door to questioning why those specific categories have been chosen. Why is it that in the early 20th century Italian was a race and now those people would be considered white (in America). It turns the conversation away from what is distinctive about a group and towards why we regard those distinctions as important.

> What are they trying to communicate about race?

That the hard racial boundaries are unscientific (despite attempts to make it so), and that it's artificial and depends on consensus, and therefore is subject to change, and is typically subjective to the involved social group: the "one drop rule" is an example of how arbitrary this can get.

As sibling pointed out, in the United States, Italians and Jewish folk used to be not white, but are now widely considered to be white, despite not having any genetic or cultural changes in the interval between the shift in categorization.

That racial categories and the criteria for deciding which category an individual belongs to depends on history, traditions and politics. There is no objective criteria to decide what constitutes a "race".

In my experience, the implication is that things which are social constructs have no basis in reality and are thus not useful (and their use is harmful). I'm often inclined to respond, "money is also a social construct", but I'm afraid they would agree and proceed into some anti-capitalist, utopian diatribe.

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