P S

Would you judge a person by the size of his/her pancreas?  Silly question?  Then why do so many of us judge others by the color of their skin – just as silly.  If you were to determine what the size of each person’s pancreas was and then categorize them according to size, say three sized categories – small, medium, and large – and then correlate the sizes to other factors such as crime figures, attendance in college, Nobel prizes, etc., for each correlation one of the sized categories would correlate the highest and one would be the lowest.

Is there a cause and effect relationship among those correlations or are they just happenstance occurrences?  Most of us would say they are happenstance.  But suppose for some weird reason(s), people began believing that there was a cause and effect relationship and began treating the negatively or positively affected group in some unusual way. Would that treatment enhance the belief or assuage it?  It would probably enhance it.

So the belief is not one based on biological factors – the genetic factor(s) that cause people to have the size pancreas they have – but the social construct (the shared, made up belief) that says pancreas size (PS) leads to the behaviors one sees and with which one must deal.

          Yes, all of this is silly.  But it reflects a serious problem.  For example, the most glaring example is the historical treatment of African-Americans.  That treatment has led to the conditions that exist today, not the biological factors that cause the different shades of skin color we see.  Here, there is a people who were taken against their will from their homes and enslaved.  Then there were generations upon generations of people enslaved and deemed to be inferior in every way possible.

Upon liberation from slavery, they were subjected to horrendous social conditions and messages that continued the negative stereotypes.  And yet those people today can claim, beyond all the negative treatment, advancement.  Most African-Americans live middle class lives, just like the rest of us.  This is due to their diligence, hard work, and continued hope that things would/will get better.

          One such person made it to the highest office in the land.  But this negative social construct persists and among some, the effects can still be seen in promoting the counterproductive behaviors – on both sides of the racial divide – that further the negativity.  In a shorthand way, this brief piece is an attempt to describe what is meant by saying that race is a social construct, a social construct educators have the responsibility to set straight.