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Modern scholarship views racial categories as socially constructed , that is, race is not intrinsic to human beings but rather an identity created, often by socially dominant groups, to establish meaning in a social context. This often involves the subjugation of groups defined as racially inferior, as in the one-drop rule used in the 19th-century United States to exclude those with any amount of African ancestry from the dominant racial grouping, defined as " white ".
Although commonalities in physical traits such as facial features, skin color, and hair texture comprise part of the race concept, the latter is a social distinction rather than an inherently biological one. For instance, African-American English is a language spoken by many African Americans , especially in areas of the United States where racial segregation exists.
Furthermore, people often self-identify as members of a race for political reasons. When people define and talk about a particular conception of race, they create a social reality through which social categorization is achieved. Socioeconomic factors, in combination with early but enduring views of race, have led to considerable suffering within disadvantaged racial groups. In some countries, law enforcement uses race to profile suspects.
This use of racial categories is frequently criticized for perpetuating an outmoded understanding of human biological variation, and promoting stereotypes. Because in some societies racial groupings correspond closely with patterns of social stratification , for social scientists studying social inequality, race can be a significant variable. As sociological factors, racial categories may in part reflect subjective attributions, self-identities , and social institutions. Scholars continue to debate the degrees to which racial categories are biologically warranted and socially constructed.
In the social sciences, theoretical frameworks such as racial formation theory and critical race theory investigate implications of race as social construction by exploring how the images, ideas and assumptions of race are expressed in everyday life. A large body of scholarship has traced the relationships between the historical, social production of race in legal and criminal language, and their effects on the policing and disproportionate incarceration of certain groups. Groups of humans have always identified themselves as distinct from neighboring groups, but such differences have not always been understood to be natural, immutable and global.
These features are the distinguishing features of how the concept of race is used today. In this way the idea of race as we understand it today came about during the historical process of exploration and conquest which brought Europeans into contact with groups from different continents, and of the ideology of classification and typology found in the natural sciences.
According to Smedley and Marks the European concept of "race", along with many of the ideas now associated with the term, arose at the time of the scientific revolution , which introduced and privileged the study of natural kinds , and the age of European imperialism and colonization which established political relations between Europeans and peoples with distinct cultural and political traditions.
The rise of the Atlantic slave trade , which gradually displaced an earlier trade in slaves from throughout the world, created a further incentive to categorize human groups in order to justify the subordination of African slaves. A set of folk beliefs took hold that linked inherited physical differences between groups to inherited intellectual , behavioral , and moral qualities. Brutal conflicts between ethnic groups have existed throughout history and across the world. But the scientific classification of phenotypic variation was frequently coupled with racist ideas about innate predispositions of different groups, always attributing the most desirable features to the White, European race and arranging the other races along a continuum of progressively undesirable attributes.
The classification of Carl Linnaeus , inventor of zoological taxonomy, divided the human species Homo sapiens into continental varieties of europaeus , asiaticus , americanus , and afer , each associated with a different humour: From the 17th through 19th centuries, the merging of folk beliefs about group differences with scientific explanations of those differences produced what Smedley has called an " ideology of race".
It was further argued that some groups may be the result of mixture between formerly distinct populations, but that careful study could distinguish the ancestral races that had combined to produce admixed groups. He saw Africans as inferior to Whites especially in regards to their intellect, and imbued with unnatural sexual appetites, but described Native Americans as equals to whites.
In the last two decades of the 18th century, the theory of polygenism , the belief that different races had evolved separately in each continent and shared no common ancestor, [50] was advocated in England by historian Edward Long and anatomist Charles White , in Germany by ethnographers Christoph Meiners and Georg Forster , and in France by Julien-Joseph Virey. Polygenism was popular and most widespread in the 19th century, culminating in the founding of the Anthropological Society of London , which, during the period of the American Civil War, broke away from the Ethnological Society of London and its monogenic stance , their underlined difference lying, relevantly, in the so-called "Negro question": Today, all humans are classified as belonging to the species Homo sapiens.
However, this is not the first species of homininae: Homo erectus evolved more than 1. Virtually all physical anthropologists agree that Archaic Homo sapiens A group including the possible species H. In the early 20th century, many anthropologists taught that race was an entirely biologically phenomenon and that this was core to a person's behavior and identity, a position commonly called racial essentialism.
The first to challenge the concept of race on empirical grounds were the anthropologists Franz Boas , who provided evidence of phenotypic plasticity due to environmental factors, [60] and Ashley Montagu , who relied on evidence from genetics.
Wilson then challenged the concept from the perspective of general animal systematics, and further rejected the claim that "races" were equivalent to "subspecies". Human genetic variation is predominantly within races, continuous, and complex in structure, which is inconsistent with the concept of genetic human races.
The term race in biology is used with caution because it can be ambiguous. Generally, when it is used it is effectively a synonym of subspecies. Traditionally, subspecies are seen as geographically isolated and genetically differentiated populations. In , Sewall Wright suggested that human populations that have long inhabited separated parts of the world should, in general, be considered different subspecies by the criterion that most individuals of such populations can be allocated correctly by inspection.
Some researchers [ who? A clade is a taxonomic group of organisms consisting of a single common ancestor and all the descendants of that ancestor a monophyletic group. Every creature produced by sexual reproduction has two immediate lineages, one maternal and one paternal. Philosopher Robin Andreasen proposes that cladistics can be used to categorize human races biologically, and that races can be both biologically real and socially constructed.
Evolutionary biologist Alan Templeton argues that while "Much of the recent scientific literature on human evolution portrays human populations as separate branches on an evolutionary tree," multiple lines of evidence falsify a phylogenetic tree structure, and confirm the presence of gene flow among populations. Anthropologists Lieberman and Jackson also critique the use of cladistics to support concepts of race.
They claim that "the molecular and biochemical proponents of this model explicitly use racial categories in their initial grouping of samples ". For example, the large and highly diverse macroethnic groups of East Indians, North Africans, and Europeans are presumptively grouped as Caucasians prior to the analysis of their DNA variation. This is claimed to limit and skew interpretations, obscure other lineage relationships, deemphasize the impact of more immediate clinal environmental factors on genomic diversity, and can cloud our understanding of the true patterns of affinity.
They suggest that the authors of these studies find support for racial distinctions only because they began by assuming the validity of race. Human population groups are not monophyletic, as there appears to always have been considerable gene flow between human populations. Population geneticists have debated whether the concept of population can provide a basis for a new conception of race.
To do this, a working definition of population must be found. Surprisingly, there is no generally accepted concept of population that biologists use. Although the concept of population is central to ecology, evolutionary biology and conservation biology, most definitions of population rely on qualitative descriptions such as "a group of organisms of the same species occupying a particular space at a particular time". Examples of such definitions are:. One crucial innovation in reconceptualizing genotypic and phenotypic variation was the anthropologist C.
Loring Brace 's observation that such variations, insofar as it is affected by natural selection , slow migration, or genetic drift , are distributed along geographic gradations or clines. To this day, skin color grades by imperceptible means from Europe southward around the eastern end of the Mediterranean and up the Nile into Africa.
From one end of this range to the other, there is no hint of a skin color boundary, and yet the spectrum runs from the lightest in the world at the northern edge to as dark as it is possible for humans to be at the equator. In part this is due to isolation by distance. This point called attention to a problem common to phenotype-based descriptions of races for example, those based on hair texture and skin color: Thus, anthropologist Frank Livingstone's conclusion, that since clines cross racial boundaries, "there are no races, only clines".
In a response to Livingstone, Theodore Dobzhansky argued that when talking about race one must be attentive to how the term is being used: Livingstone that if races have to be 'discrete units', then there are no races, and if 'race' is used as an 'explanation' of the human variability, rather than vice versa, then the explanation is invalid. The former refers to any distinction in gene frequencies between populations; the latter is "a matter of judgment".
He further observed that even when there is clinal variation, "Race differences are objectively ascertainable biological phenomena They differ on whether the race concept remains a meaningful and useful social convention. Patterns such as those seen in human physical and genetic variation as described above, have led to the consequence that the number and geographic location of any described races is highly dependent on the importance attributed to, and quantity of, the traits considered.
Scientists discovered a skin-lighting mutation that partially accounts for the appearance of Light skin in humans people who migrated out of Africa northward into what is now Europe which they estimate occurred 20, to 50, years ago. The East Asians owe their relatively light skin to different mutations.
Anthropologists long ago discovered that humans' physical traits vary gradually, with groups that are close geographic neighbors being more similar than groups that are geographically separated. This pattern of variation, known as clinal variation, is also observed for many alleles that vary from one human group to another.
Another observation is that traits or alleles that vary from one group to another do not vary at the same rate. This pattern is referred to as nonconcordant variation.
Because the variation of physical traits is clinal and nonconcordant, anthropologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries discovered that the more traits and the more human groups they measured, the fewer discrete differences they observed among races and the more categories they had to create to classify human beings. The number of races observed expanded to the s and s, and eventually anthropologists concluded that there were no discrete races.
Nature has not created four or five distinct, nonoverlapping genetic groups of people. Another way to look at differences between populations is to measure genetic differences rather than physical differences between groups. The midth-century anthropologist William C. Boyd defined race as: It is an arbitrary matter which, and how many, gene loci we choose to consider as a significant 'constellation'". Some biologists argue that racial categories correlate with biological traits e. For this reason, there is no current consensus about whether racial categories can be considered to have significance for understanding human genetic variation.
The distribution of genetic variants within and among human populations are impossible to describe succinctly because of the difficulty of defining a population, the clinal nature of variation, and heterogeneity across the genome Long and Kittles A study of random biallelic genetic loci found little to no evidence that humans were divided into distinct biological groups. In his paper, " Human Genetic Diversity: Lewontin's Fallacy ", A. Edwards argued that rather than using a locus-by-locus analysis of variation to derive taxonomy, it is possible to construct a human classification system based on characteristic genetic patterns, or clusters inferred from multilocus genetic data.
Does that mean we should throw it out? Any category you come up with is going to be imperfect, but that doesn't preclude you from using it or the fact that it has utility. Early human genetic cluster analysis studies were conducted with samples taken from ancestral population groups living at extreme geographic distances from each other. It was thought that such large geographic distances would maximize the genetic variation between the groups sampled in the analysis, and thus maximize the probability of finding cluster patterns unique to each group.
In light of the historically recent acceleration of human migration and correspondingly, human gene flow on a global scale, further studies were conducted to judge the degree to which genetic cluster analysis can pattern ancestrally identified groups as well as geographically separated groups. They found that many thousands of genetic markers had to be used in order for the answer to the question "How often is a pair of individuals from one population genetically more dissimilar than two individuals chosen from two different populations?
This assumed three population groups separated by large geographic ranges European, African and East Asian. The entire world population is much more complex and studying an increasing number of groups would require an increasing number of markers for the same answer. The authors conclude that "caution should be used when using geographic or genetic ancestry to make inferences about individual phenotypes.
Anthropologists such as C. Loring Brace , [] the philosophers Jonathan Kaplan and Rasmus Winther, [] [] [] [] and the geneticist Joseph Graves , [11] have argued that while there it is certainly possible to find biological and genetic variation that corresponds roughly to the groupings normally defined as "continental races", this is true for almost all geographically distinct populations. The cluster structure of the genetic data is therefore dependent on the initial hypotheses of the researcher and the populations sampled. When one samples continental groups, the clusters become continental; if one had chosen other sampling patterns, the clustering would be different.
Weiss and Fullerton have noted that if one sampled only Icelanders, Mayans and Maoris, three distinct clusters would form and all other populations could be described as being clinally composed of admixtures of Maori, Icelandic and Mayan genetic materials.
They conclude that while racial groups are characterized by different allele frequencies, this does not mean that racial classification is a natural taxonomy of the human species, because multiple other genetic patterns can be found in human populations that crosscut racial distinctions. Moreover, the genomic data underdetermines whether one wishes to see subdivisions i. Under Kaplan and Winther's view, racial groupings are objective social constructions see Mills [] that have conventional biological reality only insofar as the categories are chosen and constructed for pragmatic scientific reasons.
In earlier work, Winther had identified "diversity partitioning" and "clustering analysis" as two separate methodologies, with distinct questions, assumptions, and protocols. Each is also associated with opposing ontological consequences vis-a-vis the metaphysics of race. She argues that it is actually just a "local category shaped by the U. Recent studies of human genetic clustering have included a debate over how genetic variation is organized, with clusters and clines as the main possible orderings. Nonetheless, Rosenberg et al. Genetic differences among human populations derive mainly from gradations in allele frequencies rather than from distinctive 'diagnostic' genotypes.
Guido Barbujani has written that human genetic variation is generally distributed continuously in gradients across much of Earth, and that there is no evidence that genetic boundaries between human populations exist as would be necessary for human races to exist. Over time, human genetic variation has formed a nested structure that is inconsistent with the concept of races that have evolved independently of one another.
As anthropologists and other evolutionary scientists have shifted away from the language of race to the term population to talk about genetic differences, historians , cultural anthropologists and other social scientists re-conceptualized the term "race" as a cultural category or social construct , i. Many social scientists have replaced the word race with the word " ethnicity " to refer to self-identifying groups based on beliefs concerning shared culture, ancestry and history.
This questioning gained momentum in the s during the civil rights movement in the United States and the emergence of numerous anti-colonial movements worldwide.
They thus came to believe that race itself is a social construct , a concept that was believed to correspond to an objective reality but which was believed in because of its social functions. Craig Venter and Francis Collins of the National Institute of Health jointly made the announcement of the mapping of the human genome in Venter said, "Race is a social concept.
It's not a scientific one. There are no bright lines that would stand out , if we could compare all the sequenced genomes of everyone on the planet. Moreover, they argue that biology will not explain why or how people use the idea of race: History and social relationships will. Imani Perry has argued that race "is produced by social arrangements and political decision making.
It is dynamic, but it holds no objective truth. Some scholars have challenged the notion that race is primarily a social construction by arguing that race has a biological basis. We actually had a higher discordance rate between self-reported sex and markers on the X chromosome! So you could argue that sex is also a problematic category. And there are differences between sex and gender; self-identification may not be correlated with biology perfectly.
And there is sexism.
Compared to 19th-century United States, 20th-century Brazil was characterized by a perceived relative absence of sharply defined racial groups. According to anthropologist Marvin Harris , this pattern reflects a different history and different social relations. Basically, race in Brazil was "biologized", but in a way that recognized the difference between ancestry which determines genotype and phenotypic differences. There, racial identity was not governed by rigid descent rule, such as the one-drop rule , as it was in the United States.
A Brazilian child was never automatically identified with the racial type of one or both parents, nor were there only a very limited number of categories to choose from, [] to the extent that full siblings can pertain to different racial groups. Over a dozen racial categories would be recognized in conformity with all the possible combinations of hair color, hair texture, eye color, and skin color. These types grade into each other like the colors of the spectrum, and not one category stands significantly isolated from the rest.
That is, race referred preferentially to appearance, not heredity, and appearance is a poor indication of ancestry, because only a few genes are responsible for someone's skin color and traits: These socioeconomic factors are also significant to the limits of racial lines, because a minority of pardos , or brown people, are likely to start declaring themselves white or black if socially upward, [] and being seen as relatively "whiter" as their perceived social status increases much as in other regions of Latin America.
Fluidity of racial categories aside, the "biologification" of race in Brazil referred above would match contemporary concepts of race in the United States quite closely, though, if Brazilians are supposed to choose their race as one among, Asian and Indigenous apart, three IBGE's census categories. While assimilated Amerindians and people with very high quantities of Amerindian ancestry are usually grouped as caboclos , a subgroup of pardos which roughly translates as both mestizo and hillbilly , for those of lower quantity of Amerindian descent a higher European genetic contribution is expected to be grouped as a pardo.
If a more consistent report with the genetic groups in the gradation of miscegenation is to be considered e. From the last decades of the Empire until the s, the proportion of the white population increased significantly while Brazil welcomed 5. Between and , The European Union rejects theories which attempt to determine the existence of separate human races.
The European Union uses the terms racial origin and ethnic origin synonymously in its documents and according to it "the use of the term 'racial origin' in this directive does not imply an acceptance of such [racial] theories". In the diverse geographic context of Europe , ethnicity and ethnic origin are arguably more resonant and are less encumbered by the ideological baggage associated with "race". In European context, historical resonance of "race" underscores its problematic nature.
In some states, it is strongly associated with laws promulgated by the Nazi and Fascist governments in Europe during the s and s. Indeed, in , the European Parliament adopted a resolution stating that "the term should therefore be avoided in all official texts". The concept of racial origin relies on the notion that human beings can be separated into biologically distinct "races", an idea generally rejected by the scientific community. Since all human beings belong to the same species, the ECRI European Commission against Racism and Intolerance rejects theories based on the existence of different "races".
However, in its Recommendation ECRI uses this term in order to ensure that those persons who are generally and erroneously perceived as belonging to "another race" are not excluded from the protection provided for by the legislation. The law claims to reject the existence of "race", yet penalize situations where someone is treated less favourably on this ground.
Since the end of the Second World War, France has become an ethnically diverse country. Today, approximately five percent of the French population is non-European and non-white. Nevertheless, it amounts to at least three million people, and has forced the issues of ethnic diversity onto the French policy agenda. France has developed an approach to dealing with ethnic problems that stands in contrast to that of many advanced, industrialized countries.
Unlike the United States, Britain, or even the Netherlands, France maintains a " color-blind " model of public policy. This means that it targets virtually no policies directly at racial or ethnic groups. Instead, it uses geographic or class criteria to address issues of social inequalities. It has, however, developed an extensive anti-racist policy repertoire since the early s. In the United States, there is disagreement on the nature of race within the biological sciences, whereas the social constructionist view is dominant in the social sciences; over time, biological views on race have become more controversial across all disciplines, with clear divides along generational, cultural, and racial lines.
The immigrants to the Americas came from every region of Europe, Africa, and Asia.
They mixed among themselves and with the indigenous inhabitants of the continent. In the United States most people who self-identify as African—American have some European ancestors , while many people who identify as European American have some African or Amerindian ancestors. Since the early history of the United States, Amerindians, African—Americans, and European Americans have been classified as belonging to different races. Efforts to track mixing between groups led to a proliferation of categories, such as mulatto and octoroon.
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 known "Black blood" to be Black, regardless of appearance. By the early 20th century, this notion was made statutory in many states. Amerindians continue to be defined by a certain percentage of "Indian blood" called blood quantum. To be White one had to have perceived "pure" White ancestry.
The one-drop rule or hypodescent rule refers to the convention of defining a person as racially black if he or she has any known African ancestry. This rule meant that those that were mixed race but with some discernible African ancestry were defined as black. The one-drop rule is specific to not only those with African ancestry but to the United States, making it a particularly African-American experience.
The decennial censuses conducted since in the United States created an incentive to establish racial categories and fit people into these categories. The term " Hispanic " as an ethnonym emerged in the 20th century with the rise of migration of laborers from the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America to the United States. Today, the word "Latino" is often used as a synonym for "Hispanic". The definitions of both terms are non-race specific, and include people who consider themselves to be of distinct races Black, White, Amerindian, Asian, and mixed groups.
In contrast to "Latino" or "Hispanic", " Anglo " refers to non-Hispanic White Americans or non-Hispanic European Americans , most of whom speak the English language but are not necessarily of English descent. One result of debates over the meaning and validity of the concept of race is that the current literature across different disciplines regarding human variation lacks consensus , though within some fields, such as some branches of anthropology, there is strong consensus. Some studies use the word race in its early essentialist taxonomic sense.
Many others still use the term race, but use it to mean a population, clade , or haplogroup. Others eschew the concept of race altogether, and use the concept of population as a less problematic unit of analysis. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva , Sociology professor at Duke University, remarks, [] "I contend that racism is, more than anything else, a matter of group power; it is about a dominant racial group whites striving to maintain its systemic advantages and minorities fighting to subvert the racial status quo. Color-blind racism thrives on the idea that race is no longer an issue in the United States.
The concept of typological race classification in physical anthropology lost credibility around the s and is now considered untenable. They found a consensus among them that biological races do not exist in humans, but that race does exist insofar as the social experiences of members of different races can have significant effects on health.
The study showed that the race concept was widely used among Chinese anthropologists. Rejection of race ranged from high to low, with the highest rejection rate in the United States and Canada, a moderate rejection rate in Europe, and the lowest rejection rate in Russia and China. Methods used in the studies reported included questionnaires and content analysis. Three factors, country of academic education, discipline, and age, were found to be significant in differentiating the replies. Those educated in Western Europe, physical anthropologists, and middle-aged persons rejected race more frequently than those educated in Eastern Europe, people in other branches of science, and those from both younger and older generations.
Since the second half of the 20th century, physical anthropology in the United States has moved away from a typological understanding of human biological diversity towards a genomic and population-based perspective. Book 1 of 2. Add to Wish List. Available to ship in days. Book 2 of 2. More About the Authors. Della fell in love with books at an early age and began writing shortly thereafter.
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