"Race" is not a black or white issue in the social sciences, and for the last sixty years it has been increasingly called into question. This paper will answer three specific questions dealing with the social scientific criticisms of "race." The three questions will deal with the social construction of reality, the justification of basic concepts supporting the idea of separate races, and explaining the cause of high rates of hypertension among African-Americans.
             Our first question: When the author says that the classification of races is arbitrary, how is this similar to our discussion of the social construction of reality?
             Social construction of reality is a process by which a definition of reality is: 1) Socially created 2) Are internalized, and 3) Taken for granted. Classification of races is arbitrary because it is not based on fact and is not consistently applied. An example of this classification was during the racism of the late nineteenth century, mulattos had to either "pass" as whites or join with the Negroes. Many states then adopted the South's one-drop rule, meaning that a person with any African ancestry was defined as black, although most "blacks" by then were brown. The one-drop rule only applies to African Americans and has never made a Native American out of someone with a Cherokee great-grandmother (even a princess). Racial categories are socially and culturally defined. All this is peculiar to America. As one can gather from this example, racial classifications are basically relative to the culture in which they are applied and relative to the time period.
             Our second question: To explain point #3 on the problems that have recently been identified in this "science of race". A study by Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin in 1972 examined the distribution of seventeen traits, like those for blood group types, among the equivalent of seven geog...