Social interpretations of race
Encyclopedia
Social interpretations of race regard the common categorizations of people into different races, often with biologist
tagging of particular "racial" attributes beyond mere anatomy, as more socially and culturally determined than based upon biology. Such interpretations are often deconstruction
ist and poststructuralist
in that they critically analyze the historical construction and development of racial categories.
among themselves and with the indigenous
inhabitants of the continent. In the United States, for example, most people who self-identify as African American have some European ancestors—in one analysis of genetic markers that have differing frequencies between continents, European ancestry ranged from an estimated 7% for a sample of Jamaicans to ∼23% for a sample of African Americans from New Orleans. In a survey of college students who self-identified as white
in a northeastern U.S. university, the west African and native American genetic contribution were 0.7% and 3.2%.
In the United States, social and legal conventions developed over time that forced individuals of mixed ancestry into simplified racial categories. An example is the "one-drop rule
" implemented in some state laws that treated anyone with a single known African American ancestor as black. The decennial censuses conducted since 1790 in the United States also created an incentive to establish racial categories and fit people into those categories. In other countries in the Americas where mixing among groups was more extensive, social categories have tended to be more numerous and fluid, with people moving into or out of categories on the basis of a combination of socioeconomic status, social class, ancestry, and appearance.
Efforts to sort the increasingly mixed population of the United States into discrete categories generated many difficulties. By the standards used in past censuses, many millions of children born in the United States have belonged to a different race than have one of their biological parents. Efforts to track mixing between groups led to a proliferation of categories (such as mulatto
and octoroon) and "blood quantum" distinctions that became increasingly untethered from self-reported ancestry. A person's racial identity can change over time. One study found differences between self-ascribed race and Veterans Affairs
administrative data. Until the 2000 census, Latinos were required to identify with a single race despite the long history of mixing in Latin America.
Historians
, anthropologists
and social scientists
often describe human races as a social construct, preferring instead the term population, which can be given a clear operational definition
. Even those who reject the formal concept of race, however, still use the word race in day-to-day speech. This may either be a matter of semantics
, or an effect of an underlying cultural significance of race in racist societies. Regardless of the name, a working concept of sub-species grouping can be useful, because in the absence of cheap and widespread genetic tests, various race-linked gene mutations (see Cystic fibrosis
, Lactose intolerance
, Tay-Sachs Disease
and Sickle cell anemia) are difficult to address without recourse to a category between "individual" and "species". As genetic tests for such conditions become cheaper, and as detailed haplotype
maps and SNP
databases become available, identifiers of race should diminish. Also, increasing interracial marriage is reducing the predictive power of race. For example, most babies born with Tay-Sachs Disease
in North America at present are not from Jewish families, despite stereotypes to contrary.
In everyday speech, race often describes populations better defined as ethnic group
s, often leading to discrepancies between scientific views on race and popular usage of the term. For instance in many parts of the United States, categories such as Hispanic or Latino
are viewed to constitute a race, though others see Hispanic as a linguistic and cultural grouping with European, African, and Amerindian ancestries. Historically in the United States, when the one-drop rule
was in existence, the term Black subsumed people with a broad range of ancestries under one label.
Some argue it is preferable when considering biological relations to think in terms of populations, and when considering cultural relations to think in terms of ethnicity, rather than of race.
These developments had important consequences. For example, some scientists developed the notion of "population" to take the place of race. It is argued that this substitution is not simply a matter of exchanging one word for another.
This view does not deny that there are physical differences among peoples; it simply claims that the historical conceptions of "race" are not particularly useful in accounting for these differences scientifically. In particular, it is claimed that:
Neven Sesardic
has argued that such arguments are unsupported by empirical evidence and politically motivated. Arguing that races are not completely discrete biologically is a straw man
argument. He argues "racial recognition is not actually based on a single trait (like skin color) but rather on a number of characteristics that are to a certain extent concordant and that jointly make the classification not only possible but fairly reliable as well". Forensic anthropologists can classify a person's biological ancestry with an accuracy close to 100% using only skeletal remains if they take into consideration several characteristics at the same time. A.W.F. Edwards has argued similarly regarding genetic differences in "Human genetic diversity: Lewontin's fallacy".
, lack of effort optimism
due to low social status and many other proposed explanations. For example psychologist Jefferson Fish
argues that race is a social construction and argues that for this reason the question of racial differences in intelligence is not scientific. For example, one might want to compare black-white IQ differences in Brazil with those in the United States. Since many people who are considered black in the U. S. would not be considered black in Brazil, and since many people who are considered white in Brazil would not be considered white in the U. S., such a comparison is not possible. However, Richard Lynn
in his book Race differences in intelligence
does not define races based on current social classification but on ancestral populations. Many current ethnic groups would be mixtures of several races in this classification. Arthur Jensen
and J. Philippe Rushton
have also defined race based on ancestral home, although somewhat differently from Lynn, when speaking of Black - White - East Asian IQ differences in the US. "Blacks (Africans, Negroids) are those who have most of their ancestors from sub-Saharan Africa; Whites (Europeans, Caucasoids) have most of their ancestors from Europe; and East Asians (Orientals, Mongoloids) have most of their ancestors from Pacific Rim countries"
s by predicting hard-to-ascertain factors on the basis of more easily ascertained characteristics. The most well-known examples of genetically-determined disorders that vary in incidence between ethnic groups would be sickle cell disease and thalassemia
among black and Mediterranean populations and Tay-Sachs disease
among people of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. Some fear that the use of racial labels in biomedical research runs the risk of unintentionally exacerbating health disparities, so they suggest alternatives to the use of racial taxonomies.
) due in large part to American slavery ethics.
was characterized by a relative absence of sharply defined racial groups. This pattern reflects a different history and different social relations. Basically, race in Brazil
was recognized as the difference between ancestry (which determines genotype) and phenotypic differences. Racial identity was not governed by a rigid descent rule. A Brazilian child was never automatically identified with the racial type of one or both parents, nor were there only two categories to choose from. Over a dozen racial categories are recognized in conformity with the combinations of hair color, hair texture, eye color, and skin color. These types grade into each other like the colors of the spectrum, and no one category stands significantly isolated from the rest. That is, race referred to appearance, not heredity.
Through this system of racial identification, parents and children and even brothers and sisters were frequently accepted as representatives of opposite racial types. In a fishing village in the state of Bahia
, an investigator showed 100 people pictures of three sisters and they were asked to identify the races of each. In only six responses were the sisters identified by the same racial term. Fourteen responses used a different term for each sister. In another experiment nine portraits were shown to a hundred people. Forty different racial types were elicited. It was found, in addition, that a given Brazilian might be called by as many as thirteen different terms by other members of the community. These terms are spread out across practically the entire spectrum of theoretical racial types. A further consequence of the absence of a descent rule was that Brazilians apparently not only disagreed about the racial identity of specific individuals, but they also seemed to be in disagreement about the abstract meaning of the racial terms as defined by words and phrases. For example, 40% of a sample ranked moreno claro as a lighter type than mulato claro, while 60% reversed this order. A further note of confusion is that one person might employ different racial terms to describe the same person over a short time span. The choice of which racial description to use may vary according to both the personal relationships and moods of the individuals involved. The Brazilian census lists one's race according to the preference of the person being interviewed. As a consequence, hundreds of races appeared in the census results, ranging from blue (which is blacker than the usual black) to pink (which is whiter than the usual white).
However, Brazilians are not so naive to ignore one's racial origins just because of his (or her) better social status. An interesting example of this phenomenon has occurred recently, when the famous football (soccer) player Ronaldo
declared publicly that he considered himself as White
, thus linking racism to a form or another of class conflict
. This caused a series of ironic notes on newspapers, which pointed out that he should have been proud of his African origin (which is obviously noticeable), a fact that must have made life for him (and for his ancestors) more difficult, so, being a successful personality was, in spite of that, a victory for him. What occurs in Brazil that differentiates it largely from the US or South Africa, for example, is that black or mixed-race people are, in fact, more accepted in social circles if they have more education, or have a successful life (a euphemism for "having a better salary"). As a consequence, inter-racial marriages are more common, and more accepted, among highly-educated Afro-Brazilian
s than lower-educated ones.
So, although the identification of a person by race is far more fluid and flexible in Brazil than in the U.S., there still are racial stereotypes and prejudices. African features have been considered less desirable; Blacks have been considered socially inferior, and Whites superior. These white supremacist values were a legacy of European colonization and the slave-based plantation system. The complexity of racial classifications in Brazil is reflective of the extent of miscegenation
in Brazilian society
, which remains highly, but not strictly, stratified
along color lines. Henceforth, Brazil's desired image as a perfect "post-racist" country, composed of the "cosmic race" celebrated in 1925 by José Vasconcelos
, must be met with caution, as sociologist Gilberto Freyre
demonstrated in 1933 in Casa Grande e Senzala.
argued the popular historical and political use of a non-essentialist notion of "race" used in the "race struggle" discourse during the 1688 Glorious Revolution
and under Louis XIV's end of reign. In Foucault's view, this discourse developed in two different directions: Marxism
, which seized the notion and transformed it into "class struggle
" discourse, and racists
, biologists and eugenicists, who paved the way for 20th century "state racism
".
During the Enlightenment, racial classifications were used to justify enslavement
of those deemed to be of "inferior", non-White races, and thus supposedly best fitted for lives of toil under White supervision. These classifications made the distance between races seem nearly as broad as that between species, easing unsettling questions about the appropriateness of such treatment of humans. The practice was at the time generally accepted by both scientific and lay communities.
Arthur Gobineau's An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races
(1853–1855) was one of the milestones in the new racist discourse
, along with Vacher de Lapouge's "anthroposociology" and Johann Gottfried Herder
(1744–1803), who applied race to nationalist
theory to develop militant ethnic nationalism
. They posited the historical existence of national races such as German and French, branching from basal races supposed to have existed for millennia, such as the Aryan race
, and believed political boundaries should mirror these supposed racial ones.
Later, one of Hitler
's favorite sayings was, "Politics is applied biology". Hitler's ideas of racial purity led to unprecedented atrocities in Europe. Since then, ethnic cleansing
has occurred in Cambodia
, the Balkans
, Sudan
, and Rwanda
. In one sense, ethnic cleansing is another name for the tribal warfare and mass murder that has afflicted human society for ages.
Racial inequality has been a concern of United States politicians and legislators since the country's founding. In the 19th century most White Americans (including abolitionists) explained racial inequality as an inevitable consequence of biological differences. Since the mid-20th century, political and civic leaders as well as scientists have debated to what extent racial inequality is cultural in origin. Some argue that current inequalities between Blacks and Whites are primarily cultural and historical, the result of past and present racism, slavery
and segregation
, and could be redressed through such programs as affirmative action
and Head Start. Others work to reduce tax funding of remedial programs for minorities. They have based their advocacy on aptitude test data that, according to them, shows that racial ability differences are biological in origin and cannot be leveled even by intensive educational efforts. In electoral politics
, many more ethnic minorities have won important offices in Western nations than in earlier times, although the highest offices tend to remain in the hands of Whites.
In his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail
, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. observed:
Dr. King's hope, expressed in his I Have a Dream
speech, was that the civil rights
struggle would one day produce a society where people were not "judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
Because of the identification of the concept of race with political oppression, many natural and social scientists today are wary of using the word "race" to refer to human variation, but instead use less emotive words such as "population" and "ethnicity." Some, however, argue that the concept of race, whatever the term used, is nevertheless of continuing utility and validity in scientific research. Science and politics frequently take opposite sides in debates that relate to human intelligence and biomedicine.
employs the term "race" to summarize the general appearance (skin color, hair texture, eye shape, and other such easily noticed characteristics) of individuals whom they are attempting to apprehend. From the perspective of law enforcement officers, a description needs to capture the features that stand out most clearly in the perception within the given society.
Thus, in the UK, Scotland Yard
use a classification based on the ethnic composition of British society: W1 (White British
), W2 (White Irish), W9 (Other White); M1 (White and black Caribbean), M2 (White and black African), M3 (White and Asian), M9 (Any other mixed background); A1 (Asian-Indian), A2 (Asian-Pakistani), A3 (Asian-Bangladeshi), A9 (Any other Asian background); B1 (Black Caribbean), B2 (Black African), B3 (Any other black background); O1 (Chinese), O9 (Any other).
In many countries, the state is legally banned from maintaining data based on race, which often makes the police issue wanted notices to the public that include labels like "light skin complexion", etc.
In the United States, the practice of racial profiling
has been ruled to be both unconstitutional and also to constitute a violation of civil rights
. There also an ongoing debate on the relationship between race and crime
regarding the disproportional representation of certain minorities in all stages of the criminal justice system.
Studies in racial taxonomy based on DNA cluster analysis (See Lewontin's Fallacy
) has led law enforcement to pursue suspects based on their racial classification as derived from their DNA evidence left at the crime scene. DNA analysis has been successful in helping police determine the race of both victims and perpetrators.
This classification is called "biogeographical ancestry"
Biological determinism
Biological determination is the interpretation of humans and human life from a strictly biological point of view, and it is closely related to genetic determinism...
tagging of particular "racial" attributes beyond mere anatomy, as more socially and culturally determined than based upon biology. Such interpretations are often deconstruction
Deconstruction
Deconstruction is a term introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1967 book Of Grammatology. Although he carefully avoided defining the term directly, he sought to apply Martin Heidegger's concept of Destruktion or Abbau, to textual reading...
ist and poststructuralist
Post-structuralism
Post-structuralism is a label formulated by American academics to denote the heterogeneous works of a series of French intellectuals who came to international prominence in the 1960s and '70s...
in that they critically analyze the historical construction and development of racial categories.
Incongruities of racial classifications
Marks (1995) argued that even as the idea of "race" was becoming a powerful organizing principle in many societies, the shortcomings of the concept were apparent. In the Old World, the gradual transition in appearances from one group to adjacent groups emphasized that "one variety of mankind does so sensibly pass into the other, that you cannot mark out the limits between them," as Blumenbach observed in his writings on human variation. In parts of the Americas, the situation was somewhat different. The immigrants to the New World came largely from widely separated regions of the Old World—western and northern Europe, western Africa, and, later, eastern Asia and southern and eastern Europe. In the Americas, the immigrant populations began to mixMiscegenation
Miscegenation is the mixing of different racial groups through marriage, cohabitation, sexual relations, and procreation....
among themselves and with the indigenous
Indigenous peoples of the Americas
The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
inhabitants of the continent. In the United States, for example, most people who self-identify as African American have some European ancestors—in one analysis of genetic markers that have differing frequencies between continents, European ancestry ranged from an estimated 7% for a sample of Jamaicans to ∼23% for a sample of African Americans from New Orleans. In a survey of college students who self-identified as white
White people
White people is a term which usually refers to human beings characterized, at least in part, by the light pigmentation of their skin...
in a northeastern U.S. university, the west African and native American genetic contribution were 0.7% and 3.2%.
In the United States, social and legal conventions developed over time that forced individuals of mixed ancestry into simplified racial categories. An example is the "one-drop rule
One-drop rule
The one-drop rule is a historical colloquial term in the United States for the social classification as black of individuals with any African ancestry; meaning any person with "one drop of black blood" was considered black...
" implemented in some state laws that treated anyone with a single known African American ancestor as black. The decennial censuses conducted since 1790 in the United States also created an incentive to establish racial categories and fit people into those categories. In other countries in the Americas where mixing among groups was more extensive, social categories have tended to be more numerous and fluid, with people moving into or out of categories on the basis of a combination of socioeconomic status, social class, ancestry, and appearance.
Efforts to sort the increasingly mixed population of the United States into discrete categories generated many difficulties. By the standards used in past censuses, many millions of children born in the United States have belonged to a different race than have one of their biological parents. Efforts to track mixing between groups led to a proliferation of categories (such as mulatto
Mulatto
Mulatto denotes a person with one white parent and one black parent, or more broadly, a person of mixed black and white ancestry. Contemporary usage of the term varies greatly, and the broader sense of the term makes its application rather subjective, as not all people of mixed white and black...
and octoroon) and "blood quantum" distinctions that became increasingly untethered from self-reported ancestry. A person's racial identity can change over time. One study found differences between self-ascribed race and Veterans Affairs
Veterans Affairs
Veterans Affairs is a term of the business that deals with the relation between a government and its veteran communities, usually administered by the designated government agency. It might refer to:*Department of Veterans' Affairs...
administrative data. Until the 2000 census, Latinos were required to identify with a single race despite the long history of mixing in Latin America.
Race as a social construct and populationism
Since the 1960s, some anthropologists and teachers of anthropology have re-conceived "race" as a cultural category or social construct, in other words, as a particular way that some people have of talking about themselves and others. As such it cannot be a useful analytical concept; rather, the use of the term "race" itself must be analyzed. Others have argued that the concept of race as a social construct is itself a social construct that has little validity outside of contemporary humanities.Historians
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
, anthropologists
Cultural anthropology
Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans, collecting data about the impact of global economic and political processes on local cultural realities. Anthropologists use a variety of methods, including participant observation,...
and social scientists
Social sciences
Social science is the field of study concerned with society. "Social science" is commonly used as an umbrella term to refer to a plurality of fields outside of the natural sciences usually exclusive of the administrative or managerial sciences...
often describe human races as a social construct, preferring instead the term population, which can be given a clear operational definition
Operational definition
An operational definition defines something in terms of the specific process or set of validation tests used to determine its presence and quantity. That is, one defines something in terms of the operations that count as measuring it. The term was coined by Percy Williams Bridgman and is a part of...
. Even those who reject the formal concept of race, however, still use the word race in day-to-day speech. This may either be a matter of semantics
Semantics
Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....
, or an effect of an underlying cultural significance of race in racist societies. Regardless of the name, a working concept of sub-species grouping can be useful, because in the absence of cheap and widespread genetic tests, various race-linked gene mutations (see Cystic fibrosis
Cystic fibrosis
Cystic fibrosis is a recessive genetic disease affecting most critically the lungs, and also the pancreas, liver, and intestine...
, Lactose intolerance
Lactose intolerance
Lactose intolerance, also called lactase deficiency or hypolactasia, is the inability to digest and metabolize lactose, a sugar found in milk...
, Tay-Sachs Disease
Tay-Sachs disease
Tay–Sachs disease is an autosomal recessive genetic disorder...
and Sickle cell anemia) are difficult to address without recourse to a category between "individual" and "species". As genetic tests for such conditions become cheaper, and as detailed haplotype
Haplotype
A haplotype in genetics is a combination of alleles at adjacent locations on the chromosome that are transmitted together...
maps and SNP
Single nucleotide polymorphism
A single-nucleotide polymorphism is a DNA sequence variation occurring when a single nucleotide — A, T, C or G — in the genome differs between members of a biological species or paired chromosomes in an individual...
databases become available, identifiers of race should diminish. Also, increasing interracial marriage is reducing the predictive power of race. For example, most babies born with Tay-Sachs Disease
Tay-Sachs disease
Tay–Sachs disease is an autosomal recessive genetic disorder...
in North America at present are not from Jewish families, despite stereotypes to contrary.
In everyday speech, race often describes populations better defined as ethnic group
Ethnic group
An ethnic group is a group of people whose members identify with each other, through a common heritage, often consisting of a common language, a common culture and/or an ideology that stresses common ancestry or endogamy...
s, often leading to discrepancies between scientific views on race and popular usage of the term. For instance in many parts of the United States, categories such as Hispanic or Latino
Latino
The demonyms Latino and Latina , are defined in English language dictionaries as:* "a person of Latin-American descent."* "A Latin American."* "A person of Hispanic, especially Latin-American, descent, often one living in the United States."...
are viewed to constitute a race, though others see Hispanic as a linguistic and cultural grouping with European, African, and Amerindian ancestries. Historically in the United States, when the one-drop rule
One-drop rule
The one-drop rule is a historical colloquial term in the United States for the social classification as black of individuals with any African ancestry; meaning any person with "one drop of black blood" was considered black...
was in existence, the term Black subsumed people with a broad range of ancestries under one label.
Some argue it is preferable when considering biological relations to think in terms of populations, and when considering cultural relations to think in terms of ethnicity, rather than of race.
These developments had important consequences. For example, some scientists developed the notion of "population" to take the place of race. It is argued that this substitution is not simply a matter of exchanging one word for another.
This view does not deny that there are physical differences among peoples; it simply claims that the historical conceptions of "race" are not particularly useful in accounting for these differences scientifically. In particular, it is claimed that:
- knowing someone's "race" does not provide comprehensive predictive information about biological characteristics, and only absolutely predicts those traits that have been selected to define the racial categories, e.g. knowing a person's skin color, which is generally acknowledged to be one of the markers of race (or taken as a defining characteristic of race), does not allow good predictions of a person's blood type to be made.
- in general, the worldwide distribution of human phenotypes exhibits gradual trends of difference across geographic zones, not the categorical differences of race; in particular, there are many peoples (like the San of S. W. Africa, or the people of northern India) who have phenotypes that do not neatly fit into the standard race categories.
- focusing on race has historically led not only to seemingly insoluble disputes about classification (e.g. are the Japanese a distinct race, a mixture of races, or part of the East Asian race? and what about the AinuAinu peopleThe , also called Aynu, Aino , and in historical texts Ezo , are indigenous people or groups in Japan and Russia. Historically they spoke the Ainu language and related varieties and lived in Hokkaidō, the Kuril Islands, and much of Sakhalin...
?) but has also exposed disagreement about the criteria for making decisions— the selection of phenotypic traits seemed arbitrary.
Neven Sesardic
Neven Sesardic
Neven Sesardić is a Croatian philosopher who has argued in favor of biological interpretations of the concept of race and against same-sex marriage.- Life and career :...
has argued that such arguments are unsupported by empirical evidence and politically motivated. Arguing that races are not completely discrete biologically is a straw man
Straw man
A straw man is a component of an argument and is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position, twisting his words or by means of [false] assumptions...
argument. He argues "racial recognition is not actually based on a single trait (like skin color) but rather on a number of characteristics that are to a certain extent concordant and that jointly make the classification not only possible but fairly reliable as well". Forensic anthropologists can classify a person's biological ancestry with an accuracy close to 100% using only skeletal remains if they take into consideration several characteristics at the same time. A.W.F. Edwards has argued similarly regarding genetic differences in "Human genetic diversity: Lewontin's fallacy".
Race and intelligence
Researchers have reported significant differences in the average IQ test scores of various racial groups. The interpretation and causes of these differences are controversial, as researchers disagree about whether this gap is caused by genetic differences. The social interpretations of the race concept is incompatible with the idea that the IQ gap between racial groups is caused by genetic factors, and those who see race as a social construction posit purely environmental and sociological explanations for the gap. Such explanations include different access to education for different racial groups, different social attitudes towards test-taking, stereotype threatStereotype threat
Stereotype threat is the experience of anxiety or concern in a situation where a person has the potential to confirm a negative stereotype about their social group. First described by social psychologist Claude Steele and his colleagues, stereotype threat has been shown to reduce the performance of...
, lack of effort optimism
Effort optimism
Effort optimism is the confidence that acquiring the skills valued by majority society, such as those skills measured by IQ tests, is worthwhile...
due to low social status and many other proposed explanations. For example psychologist Jefferson Fish
Jefferson Fish
Jefferson M. Fish is a professor emeritus of psychology at St. John's University in New York City, where he previously served as Chair of the Department of Psychology and as Director of the PhD Program in Clinical Psychology....
argues that race is a social construction and argues that for this reason the question of racial differences in intelligence is not scientific. For example, one might want to compare black-white IQ differences in Brazil with those in the United States. Since many people who are considered black in the U. S. would not be considered black in Brazil, and since many people who are considered white in Brazil would not be considered white in the U. S., such a comparison is not possible. However, Richard Lynn
Richard Lynn
Richard Lynn is a British Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Ulster who is known for his views on racial and ethnic differences. Lynn argues that there are hereditary differences in intelligence based on race and sex....
in his book Race differences in intelligence
Race Differences in Intelligence
Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis is a 2006 book by controversial race and intelligence writer Richard Lynn reviewing the worldwide literature on IQ testing and arguing for in part genetic racial differences and with a discussion on the causes and consequences.-Overview:As...
does not define races based on current social classification but on ancestral populations. Many current ethnic groups would be mixtures of several races in this classification. Arthur Jensen
Arthur Jensen
Arthur Robert Jensen is a Professor Emeritus of educational psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Jensen is known for his work in psychometrics and differential psychology, which is concerned with how and why individuals differ behaviorally from one another.He is a major proponent...
and J. Philippe Rushton
J. Philippe Rushton
Jean Philippe Rushton is a Canadian psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario who is most widely known for his work on racial group differences, such as research on race and intelligence, race and crime, and the application of r/K selection theory to humans in his book Race,...
have also defined race based on ancestral home, although somewhat differently from Lynn, when speaking of Black - White - East Asian IQ differences in the US. "Blacks (Africans, Negroids) are those who have most of their ancestors from sub-Saharan Africa; Whites (Europeans, Caucasoids) have most of their ancestors from Europe; and East Asians (Orientals, Mongoloids) have most of their ancestors from Pacific Rim countries"
Race in biomedicine
There is an active debate among biomedical researchers about the meaning and importance of race in their research. The primary impetus for considering race in biomedical research is the possibility of improving the prevention and treatment of diseaseDisease
A disease is an abnormal condition affecting the body of an organism. It is often construed to be a medical condition associated with specific symptoms and signs. It may be caused by external factors, such as infectious disease, or it may be caused by internal dysfunctions, such as autoimmune...
s by predicting hard-to-ascertain factors on the basis of more easily ascertained characteristics. The most well-known examples of genetically-determined disorders that vary in incidence between ethnic groups would be sickle cell disease and thalassemia
Thalassemia
Thalassemia is an inherited autosomal recessive blood disease that originated in the Mediterranean region. In thalassemia the genetic defect, which could be either mutation or deletion, results in reduced rate of synthesis or no synthesis of one of the globin chains that make up hemoglobin...
among black and Mediterranean populations and Tay-Sachs disease
Tay-Sachs disease
Tay–Sachs disease is an autosomal recessive genetic disorder...
among people of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. Some fear that the use of racial labels in biomedical research runs the risk of unintentionally exacerbating health disparities, so they suggest alternatives to the use of racial taxonomies.
Race in the United States
In the United States since its early history, Native Americans, African-Americans and European-Americans were classified as belonging to different races. For nearly three centuries, the criteria for membership in these groups were similar, comprising a person's appearance, his fraction of known non-White ancestry, and his social circle. But the criteria for membership in these races diverged in the late 19th century. During Reconstruction, increasing numbers of Americans began to consider anyone with "one drop" of "Black blood" to be Black. By the early 20th century, this notion of invisible blackness was made statutory in many states and widely adopted nationwide. In contrast, Amerindians continue to be defined by a certain percentage of "Indian blood" (called blood quantumBlood quantum laws
Blood Quantum Laws or Indian Blood Laws is an umbrella term that describes legislation enacted in the United States to define membership in Native American tribes or nations...
) due in large part to American slavery ethics.
Race Definitions in the United States
The concept of race as used by the Census Bureau reflects self-identification by people according to the race or races with which they most closely identify. These categories are sociopolitical constructs and should not be interpreted as being scientific or anthropological in nature. They change from one census to another, and the racial categories include both racial and national-origin groups.Race in Brazil
Compared to 19th-century United States, 20th-century BrazilDemographics of Brazil
Brazils population is very diverse, comprising many races and ethnic groups. In general, Brazilians trace their origins from four sources: Amerindians, Europeans, Africans and Asians....
was characterized by a relative absence of sharply defined racial groups. This pattern reflects a different history and different social relations. Basically, race in Brazil
Demographics of Brazil
Brazils population is very diverse, comprising many races and ethnic groups. In general, Brazilians trace their origins from four sources: Amerindians, Europeans, Africans and Asians....
was recognized as the difference between ancestry (which determines genotype) and phenotypic differences. Racial identity was not governed by a rigid descent rule. A Brazilian child was never automatically identified with the racial type of one or both parents, nor were there only two categories to choose from. Over a dozen racial categories are recognized in conformity with the combinations of hair color, hair texture, eye color, and skin color. These types grade into each other like the colors of the spectrum, and no one category stands significantly isolated from the rest. That is, race referred to appearance, not heredity.
Through this system of racial identification, parents and children and even brothers and sisters were frequently accepted as representatives of opposite racial types. In a fishing village in the state of Bahia
Bahia
Bahia is one of the 26 states of Brazil, and is located in the northeastern part of the country on the Atlantic coast. It is the fourth most populous Brazilian state after São Paulo, Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro, and the fifth-largest in size...
, an investigator showed 100 people pictures of three sisters and they were asked to identify the races of each. In only six responses were the sisters identified by the same racial term. Fourteen responses used a different term for each sister. In another experiment nine portraits were shown to a hundred people. Forty different racial types were elicited. It was found, in addition, that a given Brazilian might be called by as many as thirteen different terms by other members of the community. These terms are spread out across practically the entire spectrum of theoretical racial types. A further consequence of the absence of a descent rule was that Brazilians apparently not only disagreed about the racial identity of specific individuals, but they also seemed to be in disagreement about the abstract meaning of the racial terms as defined by words and phrases. For example, 40% of a sample ranked moreno claro as a lighter type than mulato claro, while 60% reversed this order. A further note of confusion is that one person might employ different racial terms to describe the same person over a short time span. The choice of which racial description to use may vary according to both the personal relationships and moods of the individuals involved. The Brazilian census lists one's race according to the preference of the person being interviewed. As a consequence, hundreds of races appeared in the census results, ranging from blue (which is blacker than the usual black) to pink (which is whiter than the usual white).
However, Brazilians are not so naive to ignore one's racial origins just because of his (or her) better social status. An interesting example of this phenomenon has occurred recently, when the famous football (soccer) player Ronaldo
Ronaldo
Ronaldo Luís Nazário de Lima , commonly known as Ronaldo, is a retired Brazilian footballer who last played for Corinthians. Ronaldo is widely considered to be the greatest 'pure' striker in the history of the modern game, and by some accounts, in the history of football. Ronaldo was one of the...
declared publicly that he considered himself as White
White people
White people is a term which usually refers to human beings characterized, at least in part, by the light pigmentation of their skin...
, thus linking racism to a form or another of class conflict
Class conflict
Class conflict is the tension or antagonism which exists in society due to competing socioeconomic interests between people of different classes....
. This caused a series of ironic notes on newspapers, which pointed out that he should have been proud of his African origin (which is obviously noticeable), a fact that must have made life for him (and for his ancestors) more difficult, so, being a successful personality was, in spite of that, a victory for him. What occurs in Brazil that differentiates it largely from the US or South Africa, for example, is that black or mixed-race people are, in fact, more accepted in social circles if they have more education, or have a successful life (a euphemism for "having a better salary"). As a consequence, inter-racial marriages are more common, and more accepted, among highly-educated Afro-Brazilian
Afro-Brazilian
In Brazil, the term "preto" is one of the five categories used by the Brazilian Census, along with "branco" , "pardo" , "amarelo" and "indígena"...
s than lower-educated ones.
So, although the identification of a person by race is far more fluid and flexible in Brazil than in the U.S., there still are racial stereotypes and prejudices. African features have been considered less desirable; Blacks have been considered socially inferior, and Whites superior. These white supremacist values were a legacy of European colonization and the slave-based plantation system. The complexity of racial classifications in Brazil is reflective of the extent of miscegenation
Miscegenation
Miscegenation is the mixing of different racial groups through marriage, cohabitation, sexual relations, and procreation....
in Brazilian society
Demographics of Brazil
Brazils population is very diverse, comprising many races and ethnic groups. In general, Brazilians trace their origins from four sources: Amerindians, Europeans, Africans and Asians....
, which remains highly, but not strictly, stratified
Social stratification
In sociology the social stratification is a concept of class, involving the "classification of persons into groups based on shared socio-economic conditions ... a relational set of inequalities with economic, social, political and ideological dimensions."...
along color lines. Henceforth, Brazil's desired image as a perfect "post-racist" country, composed of the "cosmic race" celebrated in 1925 by José Vasconcelos
José Vasconcelos
José Vasconcelos Calderón was a Mexican writer, philosopher and politician. He is one of the most influential and controversial personalities in the development of modern Mexico. His philosophy of "indigenismo" affected all aspects of Mexican sociocultural, political, and economic...
, must be met with caution, as sociologist Gilberto Freyre
Gilberto Freyre
Gilberto de Mello Freyre was a Brazilian sociologist, anthropologist, historian, writer, painter and congressman. His best-known work is a sociological treatise named Casa-Grande & Senzala...
demonstrated in 1933 in Casa Grande e Senzala.
Race in politics and ethics
Michel FoucaultMichel Foucault
Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
argued the popular historical and political use of a non-essentialist notion of "race" used in the "race struggle" discourse during the 1688 Glorious Revolution
Glorious Revolution
The Glorious Revolution, also called the Revolution of 1688, is the overthrow of King James II of England by a union of English Parliamentarians with the Dutch stadtholder William III of Orange-Nassau...
and under Louis XIV's end of reign. In Foucault's view, this discourse developed in two different directions: Marxism
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
, which seized the notion and transformed it into "class struggle
Class struggle
Class struggle is the active expression of a class conflict looked at from any kind of socialist perspective. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote "The [written] history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle"....
" discourse, and racists
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
, biologists and eugenicists, who paved the way for 20th century "state racism
State racism
State racism is a concept used by French philosopher Michel Foucault to designate the reappropriation of the historical and political discourse of "race struggle", in the late seventeenth century....
".
During the Enlightenment, racial classifications were used to justify enslavement
Slavery
Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation...
of those deemed to be of "inferior", non-White races, and thus supposedly best fitted for lives of toil under White supervision. These classifications made the distance between races seem nearly as broad as that between species, easing unsettling questions about the appropriateness of such treatment of humans. The practice was at the time generally accepted by both scientific and lay communities.
Arthur Gobineau's An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races
An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races
Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines by Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau was intended as a work of philosophical enquiry into decline and degeneration...
(1853–1855) was one of the milestones in the new racist discourse
Discourse
Discourse generally refers to "written or spoken communication". The following are three more specific definitions:...
, along with Vacher de Lapouge's "anthroposociology" and Johann Gottfried Herder
Johann Gottfried Herder
Johann Gottfried von Herder was a German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic. He is associated with the periods of Enlightenment, Sturm und Drang, and Weimar Classicism.-Biography:...
(1744–1803), who applied race to nationalist
Nationalism
Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...
theory to develop militant ethnic nationalism
Ethnic nationalism
Ethnic nationalism is a form of nationalism wherein the "nation" is defined in terms of ethnicity. Whatever specific ethnicity is involved, ethnic nationalism always includes some element of descent from previous generations and the implied claim of ethnic essentialism, i.e...
. They posited the historical existence of national races such as German and French, branching from basal races supposed to have existed for millennia, such as the Aryan race
Aryan race
The Aryan race is a concept historically influential in Western culture in the period of the late 19th century and early 20th century. It derives from the idea that the original speakers of the Indo-European languages and their descendants up to the present day constitute a distinctive race or...
, and believed political boundaries should mirror these supposed racial ones.
Later, one of Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
's favorite sayings was, "Politics is applied biology". Hitler's ideas of racial purity led to unprecedented atrocities in Europe. Since then, ethnic cleansing
Ethnic cleansing
Ethnic cleansing is a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic orreligious group from certain geographic areas....
has occurred in Cambodia
Cambodia
Cambodia , officially known as the Kingdom of Cambodia, is a country located in the southern portion of the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia...
, the Balkans
Balkans
The Balkans is a geopolitical and cultural region of southeastern Europe...
, Sudan
Darfur conflict
The Darfur Conflict was a guerrilla conflict or civil war centered on the Darfur region of Sudan. It began in February 2003 when the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army and Justice and Equality Movement groups in Darfur took up arms, accusing the Sudanese government of oppressing non-Arab Sudanese in...
, and Rwanda
Rwandan Genocide
The Rwandan Genocide was the 1994 mass murder of an estimated 800,000 people in the small East African nation of Rwanda. Over the course of approximately 100 days through mid-July, over 500,000 people were killed, according to a Human Rights Watch estimate...
. In one sense, ethnic cleansing is another name for the tribal warfare and mass murder that has afflicted human society for ages.
Racial inequality has been a concern of United States politicians and legislators since the country's founding. In the 19th century most White Americans (including abolitionists) explained racial inequality as an inevitable consequence of biological differences. Since the mid-20th century, political and civic leaders as well as scientists have debated to what extent racial inequality is cultural in origin. Some argue that current inequalities between Blacks and Whites are primarily cultural and historical, the result of past and present racism, slavery
Slavery
Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation...
and segregation
Racial segregation
Racial segregation is the separation of humans into racial groups in daily life. It may apply to activities such as eating in a restaurant, drinking from a water fountain, using a public toilet, attending school, going to the movies, or in the rental or purchase of a home...
, and could be redressed through such programs as affirmative action
Affirmative action
Affirmative action refers to policies that take factors including "race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation or national origin" into consideration in order to benefit an underrepresented group, usually as a means to counter the effects of a history of discrimination.-Origins:The term...
and Head Start. Others work to reduce tax funding of remedial programs for minorities. They have based their advocacy on aptitude test data that, according to them, shows that racial ability differences are biological in origin and cannot be leveled even by intensive educational efforts. In electoral politics
Election
An election is a formal decision-making process by which a population chooses an individual to hold public office. Elections have been the usual mechanism by which modern representative democracy operates since the 17th century. Elections may fill offices in the legislature, sometimes in the...
, many more ethnic minorities have won important offices in Western nations than in earlier times, although the highest offices tend to remain in the hands of Whites.
In his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail
Letter from Birmingham Jail
The Letter from Birmingham Jail or Letter from Birmingham City Jail, also known as The Negro Is Your Brother, is an open letter written on April 16, 1963, by Martin Luther King, Jr., an American civil rights leader...
, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. observed:
- History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but as Reinhold NiebuhrReinhold NiebuhrKarl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr was an American theologian and commentator on public affairs. Starting as a leftist minister in the 1920s indebted to theological liberalism, he shifted to the new Neo-Orthodox theology in the 1930s, explaining how the sin of pride created evil in the world...
has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals.
Dr. King's hope, expressed in his I Have a Dream
I Have a Dream
"I Have a Dream" is a 17-minute public speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered on August 28, 1963, in which he called for racial equality and an end to discrimination...
speech, was that the civil rights
Civil rights
Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from unwarranted infringement by governments and private organizations, and ensure one's ability to participate in the civil and political life of the state without discrimination or repression.Civil rights include...
struggle would one day produce a society where people were not "judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
Because of the identification of the concept of race with political oppression, many natural and social scientists today are wary of using the word "race" to refer to human variation, but instead use less emotive words such as "population" and "ethnicity." Some, however, argue that the concept of race, whatever the term used, is nevertheless of continuing utility and validity in scientific research. Science and politics frequently take opposite sides in debates that relate to human intelligence and biomedicine.
Race in law enforcement
In an attempt to provide general descriptions that may facilitate the job of law enforcement officers seeking to apprehend suspects, the United States FBIFederal Bureau of Investigation
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is an agency of the United States Department of Justice that serves as both a federal criminal investigative body and an internal intelligence agency . The FBI has investigative jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crime...
employs the term "race" to summarize the general appearance (skin color, hair texture, eye shape, and other such easily noticed characteristics) of individuals whom they are attempting to apprehend. From the perspective of law enforcement officers, a description needs to capture the features that stand out most clearly in the perception within the given society.
Thus, in the UK, Scotland Yard
Scotland Yard
Scotland Yard is a metonym for the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police Service of London, UK. It derives from the location of the original Metropolitan Police headquarters at 4 Whitehall Place, which had a rear entrance on a street called Great Scotland Yard. The Scotland Yard entrance became...
use a classification based on the ethnic composition of British society: W1 (White British
White British
White British was an ethnicity classification used in the 2001 United Kingdom Census. As a result of the census, 50,366,497 people in the United Kingdom were classified as White British. In Scotland the classification was broken down into two different categories: White Scottish and Other White...
), W2 (White Irish), W9 (Other White); M1 (White and black Caribbean), M2 (White and black African), M3 (White and Asian), M9 (Any other mixed background); A1 (Asian-Indian), A2 (Asian-Pakistani), A3 (Asian-Bangladeshi), A9 (Any other Asian background); B1 (Black Caribbean), B2 (Black African), B3 (Any other black background); O1 (Chinese), O9 (Any other).
In many countries, the state is legally banned from maintaining data based on race, which often makes the police issue wanted notices to the public that include labels like "light skin complexion", etc.
In the United States, the practice of racial profiling
Racial profiling
Racial profiling refers to the use of an individual’s race or ethnicity by law enforcement personnel as a key factor in deciding whether to engage in enforcement...
has been ruled to be both unconstitutional and also to constitute a violation of civil rights
Civil rights
Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from unwarranted infringement by governments and private organizations, and ensure one's ability to participate in the civil and political life of the state without discrimination or repression.Civil rights include...
. There also an ongoing debate on the relationship between race and crime
Race and crime in the United States
The relationship between race and crime in the United States has been a topic of public controversy and scholarly debate for more than a century...
regarding the disproportional representation of certain minorities in all stages of the criminal justice system.
Studies in racial taxonomy based on DNA cluster analysis (See Lewontin's Fallacy
Lewontin's Fallacy
Human genetic diversity: Lewontin's fallacy is a 2003 paper by A. W. F. Edwards that refers to an argument first made by Richard Lewontin in his 1972 article The apportionment of human diversity, which argued that race for humans is not a valid taxonomic construct. Edwards' paper criticized and...
) has led law enforcement to pursue suspects based on their racial classification as derived from their DNA evidence left at the crime scene. DNA analysis has been successful in helping police determine the race of both victims and perpetrators.
This classification is called "biogeographical ancestry"
See also
- AcculturationAcculturationAcculturation explains the process of cultural and psychological change that results following meeting between cultures. The effects of acculturation can be seen at multiple levels in both interacting cultures. At the group level, acculturation often results in changes to culture, customs, and...
- ColonialismColonialismColonialism is the establishment, maintenance, acquisition and expansion of colonies in one territory by people from another territory. It is a process whereby the metropole claims sovereignty over the colony and the social structure, government, and economics of the colony are changed by...
- ColorismColorismColorism is prejudice or discrimination in which human beings are accorded differing social treatment based on skin color. The preference often gets translated into economic status because of opportunities for work. Colorism can be found across the world...
- CreolizationCreolizationCreolization is a concept that refers to the process in which new African American cultures emerge in the New World. As a result of colonization there was a mixture between people of indigenous, African, and European decent, which became to be understood as Creolization...
- Cultural assimilationCultural assimilationCultural assimilation is a socio-political response to demographic multi-ethnicity that supports or promotes the assimilation of ethnic minorities into the dominant culture. The term assimilation is often used with regard to immigrants and various ethnic groups who have settled in a new land. New...
- Cultural identityCultural identityCultural identity is the identity of a group or culture, or of an individual as far as one is influenced by one's belonging to a group or culture. Cultural identity is similar to and has overlaps with, but is not synonymous with, identity politics....
- Colonial mentalityColonial mentalityColonial mentality is an area of study and a conceptual theory in Cultural anthropology that refers to institutionalized or systemic feelings of inferiority within some societies or people who have been subjected to colonialism, relative to the values of the foreign powers which had previously...
- Cultural AlienationCultural cringeCultural cringe, in cultural studies and social anthropology, is an internalized inferiority complex which causes people in a country to dismiss their own culture as inferior to the cultures of other countries...
- Cultural cringeCultural cringeCultural cringe, in cultural studies and social anthropology, is an internalized inferiority complex which causes people in a country to dismiss their own culture as inferior to the cultures of other countries...
- EnculturationEnculturationEnculturation is the process by which a person learns the requirements of the culture by which he or she is surrounded, and acquires values and behaviours that are appropriate or necessary in that culture. As part of this process, the influences which limit, direct, or shape the individual include...
- Ethnocide
- GlobalizationGlobalizationGlobalization refers to the increasingly global relationships of culture, people and economic activity. Most often, it refers to economics: the global distribution of the production of goods and services, through reduction of barriers to international trade such as tariffs, export fees, and import...
- Intercultural competenceIntercultural competenceIntercultural competence is the ability of successful communication with people of other cultures.A person who is interculturally competent captures and understands, in interaction with people from foreign cultures, their specific concepts in perception, thinking, feeling and acting...
- Language shiftLanguage shiftLanguage shift, sometimes referred to as language transfer or language replacement or assimilation, is the progressive process whereby a speech community of a language shifts to speaking another language. The rate of assimilation is the percentage of individuals with a given mother tongue who speak...
- Passing (racial identity)Passing (racial identity)Racial passing refers to a person classified as a member of one racial group attempting to be accepted as a member of a different racial group...
- Paper Bag PartyPaper Bag PartyPaper bag parties were 20th-century African-American social events at which only individuals with complexions at least as light as the color of a brown paper bag were admitted...
- Race
- Race of the Future
- RacialismRacialismRacialism is an emphasis on race or racial considerations. Currently, racialism entails a belief in the existence and significance of racial categories, but not necessarily that any absolute hierarchy between the races has been demonstrated by a rigorous and comprehensive scientific process...
- RacializationRacializationRacialization refers to processes of the discursive production of racial identities. It signifies the extension of dehumanizing and racial meanings to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group...
- RacismRacismRacism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
- SyncretismSyncretismSyncretism is the combining of different beliefs, often while melding practices of various schools of thought. The term means "combining", but see below for the origin of the word...
- WesternizationWesternizationWesternization or Westernisation , also occidentalization or occidentalisation , is a process whereby societies come under or adopt Western culture in such matters as industry, technology, law, politics, economics, lifestyle, diet, language, alphabet,...
Other references
- Collins-Schramm HE, et al., (2004) Mexican American ancestry-informative markers: examination of population structure and marker characteristics in European Americans, Mexican Americans, Amerindians and Asian. Human Genetics 114:263-71
- Condit CM, Parrott R, Harris TM (2002) Lay understandings of the relationship between race and genetics: development of a collectivized knowledge through shared discourse. Public Understand Sci 11:373–387
- Cornell S, Hartmann D (1998) Ethnicity and race: making identities in a changing world. Pine Forge Press, Thousand Oaks, CA
- Dikötter F (1992) The discourse of race in modern China. Stanford University Press, Stanford
- Elliott C, Brodwin P (2002) Identity and genetic ancestry tracing. BMJ 325:1469–1471
- Goldenberg DM (2003) The curse of ham: race and slavery in early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Princeton University Press, Princeton
- Huxley J, Haddon AC (1936) We Europeans: a survey of racial problems. Harper, New York
- Isaac B (2004) The invention of racism in classical antiquity. Princeton University Press, Princeton