The Tutsis and Hutus Are Genetically Different. Does That Matter?

Today it is fashionable to contend that ethnic identity is a social construction. That fashion obviously has some genuine basis in reality. Univision host Jorge Ramos, a blue-eyed Mexican American, is considered a “person of color.” If his name was “George Romans” he would be coded as a white American simply on account of his physical appearance. This is due to the social construction of a Hispanic American identity, which has roots in decisions made by the United States government in ethnic classification in the 1960s. But this model of social construction allowing for plasticity is not universal. As outlined in The Cleanest Racist the North Korean national identity is strongly essentialist, to the point where even genetically close populations such as Japanese could never be part of the nation. Similarly, in Japan itself the native-born ethnic Koreans are still viewed as fundamentally guests in the Japanese nation. Both cases illustrate how social construction can impede rather than enable fluidity. Yet social construction as a total explanatory model has limits. Canada has the term “visible minority” to denote those populations which are distinct in origin from Anglophone and Francophone whites by virtue of their appearance. This is in contrast to groups like Ukrainian Canadians, which are minorities due to their chosen cultural distinctiveness.