This paper challenges the conventional view that race itself is the cause of discrimination. It points out that race is closely intertwined with other social factors, making it difficult to identify its independent causal role. It questions how causal relationships can be explained if race is a socially constructed concept. This paper proposes a new framework that views race as an abstraction of lower-level characteristics. This framework allows race to be modeled as a direct cause of discrimination, ensuring modularity by explicitly stating assumptions about social construction through alignment between race and its constituent elements. These assumptions face normative and empirical challenges, leading to diverse perspectives on the timing of discrimination. By distinguishing between constitutive and causal relationships, this paper clarifies inconsistencies in existing research on discrimination modeling and provides a precise causal explanation.
