After watching the videos and thinking about it, I realized that race has always been a social construct. Race is not biological. There is no gene or cluster of genes common to all blacks or all whites. If race were “real” in the genetic sense, racial classifications for individuals would remain constant across all boundaries and borders. I was recently watching a movie called 42, which portrayed the story of Jackie Robinson, the first black player in Major League Baseball history. In one of the games, a kid sees all of his family and the people around him verbally abusing Jackie and throwing out racial slurs, and joins them in abusing Jackie, but then another player from Jackie’s team, who happened to that kid’s brother, goes to Jackie to have a chat and then hugs him, which immediately makes the kid stop because he had a new example to follow, made by his brothers. Nobody is born a racist, but the environment they grow up in and the things they are taught along the way make people that way.
For example- the saying that pink is for girls and blue is for boys is a social construct. All colors are colors, put people put the labels “girlie” and “boyish” on them.
The same way all people are people, and trying to make someone feels more inferior than someone else is a social construct, starting in Europe and taking over the world in a very unneeded manner.