Is Race Biological or Conceptual?

As Ms.Valentino assigned us the prompt "Is race a socially constructed concept?", little did she know that it would spark out class debates about the topic. *cough cough Elise* The main argument was over whether race was social or biological.
It is globally recognized that race itself, as a strictly scientific and anatomical concept, is irrefutably biological. "Most anthropologists recognize that there are four major classifications in the world, which include caucasian, mongoloid or asian, negroid or black and australoid. The race classification was created by Carleston S. Coon in 1962. The four major races can then be further subdivided into 30 subgroups." Like gender, race is not something that you can just change or simply not identify to. For the example of gender, no matter what gender you "feel" you identify with, you cannot argue that you were born a certain way and can never change that fact. Race is something that you are categorized into no matter what nationality or country you live in. You fall under one of the main race groups or a mix of several.  Another example is how we differentiate animals that come from a common ancestor as separate species after evolution has taken them to different paths. Although humans aren't as extreme, it's comparable. There was a rebuttal for the fact that there is no gene or physical characteristics such as skin pigmentation that can determine what you are. That is false. In an article published by TIME , "A longstanding orthodoxy among social scientists holds that human races are a social construct and have no biological basis" is simply wrong due to the "decoding of the human genome." Because of this, "a growing wealth of data has made clear that" this conception is "simply incorrect" and that there is "indeed a biological basis for race." Due to the fact that you can look into the genome and find particular proteins that correlate to different races, one cannot argue that race is subjective.
And this makes sense right?  Tens of Thousands of years ago after the great migrations from Africa such as the Indo-European migrations, the Bantu migrations, the Polynesian migrations, and even the ones that brought people to the Americas from Alaska, you'd expect evolution over thousands of years from their surroundings that would result in physical diversification such as skin pigmentation and average height. You cannot tell me that these two people are the same physically and genetically and that they cannot be distinguished from these characteristics let alone if a genome test was done on them.



I am not denying, however, that the racism and discrimination that happens in society is socially constructed. As you'd expect if you were separated for tens of thousands of years, the people that you were with would likely create its own culture and customs. These, I believe, are the roots of the reason that racial groups are viewed as different than others. The social stigmas and stereotypes that come with each race are a direct result of their culture and behavior are the reasons why different ethnic and racial groups distance themselves from others. The rapid globalization of our planet and intermixing of cultures would have the expected effects of fear, racism, and discrimination. This aspect of the argument, I believe, is indeed socially constructed. There is a choice, whether or not we oppress or segregate people based off of their race, but it is not a choice whether or not we are a certain race.
In conclusion, race is not socially constructed, but racism is. I think the main problem with this debate is over the meaning of the term socially constructed. Whether it means that it was first identified by humans (which would actually make everything socially constructed) such as the difference between a tree and a potato or that the concept itself was manufactured by humans such as the difference between normal people and gangsters shapes our opinions. Is color socially constructed if we categorized them? Is math socially constructed because we labeled the different kinds and its laws?  There was nothing to predate human language to be able to classify these things. If you say that something is socially conceptual, such as how race is since we had to give names to these races, because humans had to give a name to them, then everything is socially conceptual. There was nothing before these terms and language such that humans could telepathically send chemical messages to one another. I've concluded that the root of these debates is either the difference in the interpretation of the term socially constructed, or the inaccuracy of the question itself. If your opinion still falls opposite to mine, I'll leave you with a question. What's not socially constructed?