That there title is a bit of a mouthful, but i couldn't find a way to fully ask the question in all its nuances in the title alone. Recently there was a very interesting discussion about the nature of race in ancient societies. But the information there really only raised more questions than it answered. I know that the nation and race as a social construct was created rather recently, but whenever i hear that i wonder about how the ancients may have classified "other peoples."
Let's say i'm a a black African slave in the holy land when the first crusade comes around. i'm a part of a household that a french noble takes/steals/however you want to phrase it. I was a Muslim but convert to Christianity and learn french. The noble frees me but i still serve him and i come with him to France, let's say somewhere near nice a few years later. He's a nice guy so he gives me land a few years later where i can settle down with a socially appropriate wife.
When my neighbors meet me, do they see a Frenchman? Do they see an African? does it matter more that i used to be Muslim or that i am black? Will my children be considered as french as their playmates? Will the fact that i am Christian be more important than the color of my skin? What if i never truly learn french and mostly communicate through grunts or pointing? What if i relapse into Islam in my old age?
I know this is an insanely specific example but whenever i hear that race is a modern construct i think of someone like this. Someone must have lived a life similar to this or faced the same questions. I have a hard time believing that medieval peasants would see a black man and just see another Frenchman with a bit of tan but not a member of another "race." wouldn't they think: "I mean yeah, after all he's been through he's as french as me(whatever that meant or didn't mean at the time) , but clearly we are different."
Huh. I happen to be writing an article on this very subject.
You have two different questions in your post. The first is in your title: is race a social construct? The second is in your final paragraph: is race a modern construct? Although you treat them as identical, these are not the same. I'll see what I can do to answer both.
To the first: race is substantially more than skin color. If it were just skin color, how could you have a black albino? Race is actually quite a difficult term to define because it is so complex and multifaceted, but I like the construction used by Geraldine Heng, who defines race as the selective essentialization of characteristics in order to distribute power between human groups. Thus, "race is a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences, rather than a substantive content." (1) I find Heng's definition incredibly useful when discussing race because it allows us to define our modern idea of it, based on the biological essentialization of physiological and psycho-social features, as one iteration of the concept that can be examined comparatively. It allows us to apply the same analytical tools we currently use on black/white to other dichotomies that "manage human differences", e.g. Christian/pagan or Greek/barbarian.
And this definition is one which insists on race as a social construct, a "structural relationship," but it does not preclude it from using biological features. This is the key: when we say that modern race is a social construct, what we mean is that the biological reality we associate with modern race is selected socially, and that associations are made between that socially selected biology and other concepts. When you control for social and economic factors, people who define themselves or are defined as "black" can't jump better, aren't better athletes, aren't more susceptible to heart disease, and don't have less lung capacity than people who define themselves or are defined as "white", to give only a few examples. (2) But, as I'm sure the replies to this very post will show, we believe they are very, very deeply.
To the second: I've already given a definition that states that race is an ahistorical concept, so to reword slightly - is our current construction a race a modern construct. Here, I think, the jury is still out, not the least because scholars of premodernity really haven't troubled themselves to find out until the last ten years, and even now discussions are isolated to literary criticism and (more or less) entirely untouched by historians. Well, until I publish!
Heng's definition allows us to approach your question in this way: is blackness race in a premodern context? That is, was a person possessing the biological features we now think of as "race" also raced in the same or similar way in the premodern period? This is difficult to suss out, because our texts very rarely mention skin color, and, as moderns, we assume this means that a person not defined as black is white. As Toni Morrison bluntly states in Playing in the Dark regarding one of Hemmingway's characters, "Eddy is white, and we all know that he is because nobody says so." Europe in the middle ages and antiquity is thus a white space in our imagination; as Cord Whitaker has pointed out, no one needs to be told that a black knight has white skin. But we don't actually have any evidence to say that this is true or false, that the medieval or antique imaginary also defaulted to "white". I'm hoping to give this issue some clarity in the future.
In lieu of a solid answer, then, I'm going to leave you with some reading.
A monograph on the construction of identities of self and other in the middle ages. The final chapter, "On Saracen Enjoyment", is particularly relevant.
A compiled volume seeking to bring aspects of postcolonial theory into medieval studies.
This is the introductory article of an entire journal issue devoted to race, the first real attempt by premodernists to grapple with the subject since Snowden (see below). Almost all the contributors are literary theorists.
Basically a list of examples in contradiction to Snowden's work (see below).
A mere 100 pages, this volume was fairly earth-shattering when it was published. Morrison examines why white authors include black characters, and how they use them, with many insights into the conscious and unconscious ways we use race.
For a long time, the only study on premodern race. Snowden argues that, though the Romans and Greeks had an understanding of skin color, it did not enter their apparatuses of prejudice. But see Mayerson, above.
An attempt to untangle the complicated metaphors surrounding skin color in the King of Tars.
The introductory article for a second full journal issue devoted to the question of race (see Hahn, above). This issue has incorporated modern racial theory in a much more useful way. Almost all of the contributors remain literary theorists.
(1) G. Heng, "The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages II: Locations of Medieval Race," Literature Compass no. 5 (2011): 332.
(2) See, for example, Braun, Lundy. Breathing Race into the Machine the Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics.