Social Concept - Race Race is a social concept that a lot of people misuse as a scientific concept when explaining how people act and why they do what they do. Given two separate humans and compare both of their DNA, it is found that they are 99.9% identical. In Robert Sussman’s The Myth of Race, he traces the origin of the word race to the Spanish Inquisition using race to justify Western imperialism and slavery (Racial divide: It’s a social concept, not a scientific one 2014). Companies use race when they want to market to a certain target customer as well as when it comes to the hiring process. A majority of companies contradict themselves by concentrating on an employee’s race for hiring in order to provide an “equal opportunity” employment.
As societies break down the interracial border it will be harder to classify a person to a singular race of people. In a study of over 160,000 it was found that on average the African-American genome was 73.2% African, 24% European and 0.8% Native American (Suresh 2015). For someone to claim to be African American, a person only needs “one drop” of African blood in the person’s family history to claim African-American. States in the United States have already identified this flaw in which people are claiming a separate ethnicity to gain an unfair advantage in the job field or college environment. As the race concept gets more complex, several people become increasing uncertain of their own ethnicity and race. When comparing the 2000 to 2010 census, it was found that over 10 million people had changed their race which was approximately 6% of the United States population (Cohn 2014). Some analysts believe it was due to the increase in competition for jobs during the economic crisis.

References
Cohn, D'Vera. 2014. "Millions of Americans changed their racial or ethnic identity from one census to the next." PEW