Lopez "The Social Construction of race"

Lopez and "The Social Construction of Race" Since the concept of race dates several hundred years ago, there have been numerous attempts in defining it. Lopez, himself a social constructed person regarding race, argues that race should be considered a social phenomenon where physical features and other personal characteristics are mixed in order to give the race a new meaning. For Lopez race is "a vast group of people loosely bound together by historically contingent, socially significant elements of their morphology and/or ancestry. I argue that race must be understood as a … social phenomenon in which contested systems of meaning serve as the connections between physical features, races, and personal characteristics. In other words, social meanings connect our faces to our souls." In other words, for him race is not genetically determined, but rather socially. In order to convince, Lopez takes his own case and says that basically he was given his race by the name he received and that name infuenced his entire racial affiliation. He says that race is practically a formation, a process. He uses a meaningful expression : "racial fabrication" and offers four steps involved in this concept. First, he says race should be related closely to its human nature. Before perceiving the race in a person we should rather consider the human side with all affiliated implications. Second, race is just a part of our human profil. Another important factor is the pace at which people change or evoluate. The last important thing is that races are determined by relations established among people. Consequently race seems to be a process defined by inconstancy. The interactions between people influence the concept of race or these relations offer a subjective trait that is harder to monitor. In other words race is rather defined by perception, how one perceives oneself and how one is perceived by others.