How the Brain Invents Race
Race is a social construct. But it’s a perceptual construct first.
Race has long been described as a social construct: a framework used in dominance hierarchies to maintain power by those at the top.
We also hear people claim to “not see race,” presumably in an attempt to deflate the power from those frameworks.
Both stories are wrong.
Well, they’re incomplete. Race is certainly a social construct, but it’s virtually impossible to “not see” race. So what’s the real story? If race is entirely social and not based in biological differences, how do we “see” it? How do we use it to construct those hierarchies? If no real differences exist, then how do we agree on these categories of white, Black, and so on?
The answer lies in how the brain perceives and processes information.
“The brain has two jobs: To categorize and differentiate.”
No lesson from my graduate education in neuroscience has stuck with me longer or carried greater weight. It was uttered in my first-year seminar by a brilliant social and cultural psychologist who, turns out, also knew how to sum up the entire field of perception in nine words.
