Idea of Race

Alot of people in class have been having difficulty understanding that race is a social mentality and has no basis in scientific fact.  As I interpret the concept, a person's racial identity is not reliant on physical characteristics, although these can and usually are how race is defined on an individual level.  Instead, race comes from how a person perceives his or her self and how he or she is perceived by others. If a boy born to "Latino" parents in Brazil is adopted by upper class "White" Americans living in Wyoming as baby, will he be defined Latino or White when he is adult?  The point is Race is not an inborn characteristic of someone, but an idea of what they are, true or not.