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As anthropologists and other evolutionary scientists have shifted away from the language of race to the term population to talk about genetic differences, historians, cultural anthropologists and other social scientists re-conceptualized the term "race" as a cultural category or social construct, i.e., a way among many possible ways in which a society chooses to divide its members into categories.

Many social scientists have replaced the word race with the word "ethnicity" to refer to self-identifying groups based on beliefs concerning shared culture, ancestry and history. Alongside empirical and conceptual problems with "race", following the Second World War, evolutionary and social scientists were acutely aware of how beliefs about race had been used to justify discrimination, apartheid, slavery, and genocide. This questioning gained momentum in the 1960s during the civil rights movement in the United States and the emergence of numerous anti-colonial movements worldwide. They thus came to believe that race itself is a social construct, a concept that was believed to correspond to an objective reality but which was believed in because of its social functions.[123]

Craig Venter and Francis Collins of the National Institute of Health jointly made the announcement of the mapping of the human genome in 2000. Upon examining the data from the genome mapping, Venter realized that although the genetic variation within the human species is on the order of 1–3% (instead of the previously assumed 1%), the types of variations do not support notion of genetically defined races. Venter said, "Race is a social concept. It's not a scientific one. There are no bright lines (that would stand out), if we could compare all the sequenced genomes of everyone on the planet." "When we try to apply science to try to sort out these social differences, it all falls apart."[124]

Anthropologist Stephan Palmié has argued that race "is not a thing but a social relation";[125] or, in the words of Katya Gibel Mevorach, "a metonym", "a human invention whose criteria for differentiation are neither universal nor fixed but have always been used to manage difference."[126] As such, the use of the term "race" itself must be analyzed. Moreover, they argue that biology will not explain why or how people use the idea of race; only history and social relationships will.

Imani Perry has argued that race "is produced by social arrangements and political decision making",[127] and that "race is something that happens, rather than something that is. It is dynamic, but it holds no objective truth."[128] Similarly, Racial Culture: A Critique (2005), Richard T. Ford argued that while "there is no necessary correspondence between the ascribed identity of race and one's culture or personal sense of self" and "group difference is not intrinsic to members of social groups but rather contingent o[n] the social practices of group identification", the social practices of identity politics may coerce individuals into the "compulsory" enactment of "prewritten racial scripts".[129]