Humans, seemingly by nature, create a model of the world that we can understand. We place our experiences in a framework that makes sense. We have constructed these frameworks over time. The models have been imposed on us, or they have made our lives more comfortable. But either way, their repercussions, the repercussions of ideas of race, gender, childhood, god, justice, and nationhood, have been felt down through history. A young woman working in a factory in Bangladesh and a woman working in an office in New York are confronted with the same ideas of their worth and abilities. Extensive social constructs affect many, and varied, aspects of our lives. The problems caused by these constructs have created our era, and are bound to define our future.
Social constructionism is the idea of a group model of the social world. Something that is socially constructed is not biologically a certain way, but a given society has agreed to see it, or treat it, in that certain way. When I say
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Scientists generally agree that there is no such thing as biological race, and yet race certainly exists; it had caused riots and revolutions. The way people see race is what creates race. In the south, during the Jim Crow laws and institutionalized segregation, Italians were often segregated with colored peoples. Now, few, if any, southerners would categorize them as anything other than white. If race can change with cultural attitudes, then it must be a construct. A modern example of different cultures’ views of race is the way immigrants from Mexico and Central America are treated in the United States: as a single race. When I lived in Chiapas no local I knew would have doubted the differences among and between people classified as Indito, Mestizo, or European Mexican. But in the United States, for the most part, anyone from Chiapas is classified as Mexican, and left at