Looking Through the Lens of Biological Anthropologists: Race is Not Biology, It is a Social Construct

Pioquinto, Patricia Mae M.

According to the National Human Genome Research Institute, humans are 99.9 percent identical to one another based on the DNA analyzed in the Human Genome Project completed in 2013. That leaves only 0.1 percent that constitutes our uniqueness. Unfortunately, that negligible amount of difference between humans leads to the loss of lives. With people coming from various parts of the world, having different individualities, one of kind culture, skin color remains the strongest factor separating Whites from the Blacks, representing supremacy and slavery. We often derive the word ‘race’ when referring to this topic. This topic has long been persisting throughout history, and all along we have the wrong notion. In the lens of biological anthropologists, race is not biological, it is a social construct. Early scientists and anthropologists already debunked the idea of race according to typological classification because it is only through the biological processes where we learn much about ourselves as human beings. Racism still remains as one of the pressing issues in society, and it is so because the way we treat others greatly depends on the way we see things. Now more than ever, we are not silenced and through this project, a little glimpse of hope is to be achieved. Through the medium I chose, no color is distinguishable. Only silhouette telling us that we are humans regardless of color.