McGraw-Hill © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 1 Race: A Discredited Concept in Biology In biological terms, a race is a geographically isolated subdivision

McGraw-Hill © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

1Race: A Discredited Concept in Biology

• In biological terms, a race is a geographically isolated subdivision of a species that can reproduce with individuals from other subspecies of the same species, but does not because of its geographic isolation.

– Human populations vary biologically, but there are no sharp breaks between populations.

– Human biological variation is distributed gradually between populations along clines.

• Ethnicity and race are not synonymous, although American culture does not discriminate between the two terms.


2 The Seven Daughters of Eve

Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes wrote The Seven Daughters Of Eve: The Science That Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry

http://www.oxfordancestors.com/glossary.html

Articles about racism in America:http://www.wolverton-mountain.com/articles/amistad.htm

http://www.wolverton-mountain.com/articles/manifest_destiny.htm


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4 Races Are Not Biologically Distinct• Race is supposed to describe genetic variation, but racial categories

(particularly early on) are based on phenotypes.– Phenotypes are the product of genetic, developmental, and

environmental factors.– There is no clear logical hierarchy to phenotypic traits, thus it is

difficult to demonstrate which should be a definitive racial feature.

• The so-called three great races (white, black, and yellow) are more a reflection of European colonialist politics than an accurate representation of human biological diversity.

• Even skin color-based race models that include more than three categories do not accurately represent the wide range of skin color diversity among human populations.


5Fundamental Problems with Phenotype-Based Race.

• Populations grouped into one race based upon phenotypic similarity may be genetically distinct; such similarities may be the result of parallel evolution or other factors.

• Genetic traits occur together due to the selective forces of the environments in which they evolved, and therefore do not constitute an internally coherent “type.”


6American Anthropological Association’s Statement on “Race”

• Human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups.

• There is greater genetic variation within racial groups than between them.

• Physical variations are distributed gradually rather than abruptly through space.


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• Physical variations in human populations have no meaning other than the social ones societies attribute to them.

• Historically, racial categories have been used to divide, rank, and control populations ethnically separate from Western Europe.

– Some populations have been assigned to a perpetual low status (e.g., African-Americans).

– Other populations have been assigned to a perpetual high status with access to privilege, power, and wealth.


8 Explaining Skin Color.

• Natural selection “is the process by which nature selects the forms most fit to survive and reproduce in a given environment.”

• Variation in skin color is determined by the amount of melanin in the skin cells, which is in turn genetically determined.

• Prior to the sixteenth century, darker skinned populations were closest to the equator, while lighter skinned populations were closer to the poles.


9Selective Advantages and Disadvantages of Skin Color

• Light skin in the tropics is selected against because it burns more easily, thus subjecting light-skinned individuals to a greater likelihood of infection and disease.

• Sunburn impairs the body's ability to withstand heat by reducing the skin’s ability to sweat.

• Light skin is more susceptible to skin cancer.


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• The effect of sunlight on vitamin D formation indicates how dark skin might have been selected for in tropical environments (protection against hypervitaminosis D), and against in lower-sunlight environments (protection against rickets); and it further indicates how light skin might have been selected for in low-sunlight environments, and against in the tropics.


11 Social Race

• “Race,” as it is used in everyday discourse, refers to a social category, rather than a biological category.

• Hypodescent: Race in the United States

– In the United States, race is most commonly ascribed to people without reference to genotype.

– In extreme cases, offspring of “genetically mixed” unions are ascribed entirely to the lower status race of one parent, an example of the process called hypodescent.


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– The arbitrary lumping of bisexuals with homosexuals and the controversy surrounding the casting of Eurasian roles in the play Miss Saigon are suggested as examples of hypodescent.

– In the U.S., there are a growing number of interracial, biracial, or multiracial individuals who do not identify themselves with one “racial” identity.


13 Race in the Census• The U.S. Census Bureau has been gathering data by race since

1790 because the Constitution specified that a slave counted as three-fifths of a white person, and because Indians were not taxed.

• More recently, the way in which information regarding race is collected has been hotly debated.– Some social scientists and interested citizens have been

working to add a “multiracial” category to the census.– This “multiracial” category has been opposed by the

NAACP and the National Council of La Raza because both groups feel that the communities they represent will lose access to funding, resources, and jobs.


14 Race in the Census (cont.)

• The choice of “some other race” has more than doubled from 1980 and 2000.

– This represents an imprecision in and dissatisfaction with the existing categories.

– Also, the number of interracial marriages and children is increasing.

• Comparing the U.S. with Canada, minorities represent a smaller percentage of the population, with a significantly smaller black population and a much larger percentage of people who identify themselves as Asian.


15 Not Us: Race in Japan

• Despite the presence of a substantial (10%), various minority population, the dominant racial ideology of Japan describes the country as racially and ethnically homogeneous.

• Dominant Japanese use a clear “us-not us” dichotomy as the basis for their construction of race.


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• While dominant Japanese perceive their construction of race to be based upon biology, the burakumin construct provides evidence to the contrary.

– Burakumin are descendants of a low-status social class.

– Despite the fact that burakumin are genetically indistinguishable from the dominant population, they are treated as a different race.

• The mixed Japanese-Koreans are treated as wholly foreign, despite otherwise complete cultural and linguistic assimilation.


17Phenotype and Fluidity: Race in Brazil

• While it has some historical and social similarities with the United States, race in Brazil is very different from race in the United States and Japan.

• The Brazilian construction of race is attuned to relatively slight phenotypic differences.– More than 500 distinct racial labels have been reported.– Brazilian “race” is far more flexible than the two other

examples cited, in that an individual's racial classification may change due to achieved status, developmental biological changes, and other irregular factors.

– The multiplicity and overlap of Brazilian race labels allow one individual to “be” more than one race.


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• The complex flexibility of Brazilian race categories has made racial discrimination less likely to occur on the same scale as in the United States and Japan.


19 Stratification and “Intelligence”

• Over the centuries, dominant groups have used racial ideology to justify, explain, and preserve their privileged social positions.

• Anthropologists know that most of the behavioral variation among human groups rests on culture not biology.

• The capacities for culture are equivalent in all human populations.


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• Within any stratified society, differences in performance between economic, social, and ethnic groups reflect their different experiences and opportunities, not biological differences.

• There is no conclusive evidence for biologically based contrasts in intelligence between rich and poor, black and white, or men and women.


21 Stratification and “Intelligence”

• The best indicators of how any individual will perform on an intelligence test are environmental, such as educational, economic, and social background.

• All standard tests are culture-bound and biased because they reflect the training and life experiences of those who develop and administer them.

• Try out this test for intelligence….


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• Jensenism asserts that African-Americans are hereditarily incapable of doing as well as whites.

– Named for Arthur Jensen, the educational psychologist who observed that on average African-Americans perform less well on intelligence tests that Euro-Americans and Asian-Americans.

– This racist notion of the inborn inferiority of African-Americans recently resurfaced in the 1994 book The Bell Curve by Richard Hernnstein and Charles Murray.


23 Standardized testing

• An environmental explanation acknowledges that for many reasons, both genetic and environmental, some people are smarter than others; however, these differences in intelligence cannot be generalized to characterize whole populations or social groups.

• Psychologists have come up with many ways to measure intelligence, but there are problems with all of them.


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• Intelligence tests reflect the people who write them.

– Middle- and upper-class children do well because they share the test makers’ educational expectations and standards.

– The SATs claim to measure intellectual aptitude but they also measure the type and quality of high school education, linguistic and cultural background, and parental wealth.

– Studies have shown that performance on the SATs can be improved by coaching and preparation, placing those students who can pay for an SAT preparation course at an advantage.


25 Standardized testing

• Cultural biases in testing affect performance by people in other cultures as well as different groups in the same nation.

• Native Americans scored the lowest of any group in the U.S., but when the environment during growth and development for Native Americans is similar to that of middle-class whites, the test scores tend to equalize (e.g., the Osage Indians).

• At the start of World War I, African-Americans living in the north scored on average better than whites living in the south due to the better public school systems in the north.


26 Ethnicity and Race• An ethnic group may define themselves as different because of

their language, religion, geography, history, ancestry, or physical traits.

• When an ethnic group is assumed to have a biological basis, it is called a race.

• Most Americans fail to distinguish between ethnicity and race.

– Many people think that ethnicity is just the politically correct term for race.

– Ethnicity is based on cultural traditions, while races are based mainly on biological traits.


27Ethnic Markers, Identities, and Statuses

• Ethnic groups are formed around virtually the same features as cultures: common beliefs, values, customs, history, and the like.

• Ethnicity entails identification with a given ethnic group, but it also involves the maintenance of a distinction from other groups.


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• Status refers to any position in a society that can be filled by an individual.

– Ascribed status is status into which people enter automatically without choice, usually at birth or through some other universal event in the life cycle.

– Achieved status is status that people acquire through their own actions.


29Ethnic Markers, Identities, and Statuses (cont.)

• Within complex societies, ascribed status can describe large subgroups: minority groups, majority groups, and races are all examples of ascribed statuses.

• Differences in ascribed status are commonly associated with differences in social-political power.

• The definitive feature of a minority group is that its members systematically experience lesser income, authority, and power than other members of their society; a minority group is not necessarily a smaller population than other groups.


30 Status Shifting

• Most status is susceptible to change, particular through the influence of social contexts.

• Adjusting or switching one's status in reaction to different social contexts is called the situational negotiation of social identity.

• The application of a social category label, such as an ethnic label, to a particular individual depends on perception by others of that person's status, as well as that person's own assertions of status.


31 Nation-States Defined

• Nation and nation-state now refer to an autonomous, centrally organized political entity.

• Ethnic groups are not necessarily so formally politically organized.

• The majority of all nation-states have more than one ethnic group in their constituent populations, and the multiethnicity of all countries is increasing.


32Nationalities and Imagined Communities

• Nationalities are ethnic groups that aspire to autonomous statehood (regardless of their political history).

• The term “imagined communities,” coined by Benedict Anderson, has been used to describe nationalities, since most of their member population feel a bond with each other in the absence of any “real” acquaintance.

• Mass media and the language arts have help to form such imagined communities by becoming the means of establishing a commonalty of values, motivations, language, and the like.


33 Colonialism

• Colonialism refers to the political, social, economic, and cultural domination of a territory and its people by a foreign power for an extended period of time.

• Colonialism helped create imagined communities as different ethnic groups under the control of the same colonial administration often pooled resources in opposition to the colonial power..


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• Négritude (“African identity”) developed out of the common experience of French colonial rule in a variety of African countries.

• The fact that negritude crosses several present-day national boundaries makes it no more or less an imagined community than any nation-state.

• Some links to articles regarding some of these issues: http://www.wolverton-mountain.com/articles/americatv.htm http://wolverton-mountain.com/articles/sydney.htm


35 Ethnic Nationalism Run Wild

• The breakup of Yugoslavia along ethnic lines in the early 1990s is outlined to provide an example of the interplay between history, ethnic identity, and nationalism.

• Serbs, Croats, and Muslim Slavs are divided into various groups based on religion, culture, and political and military history (particularly, Serb retaliation for actions taken against them by Croats during the Second World War).


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• The (largely) Serbian practice of “ethnic cleansing,” the policy of killing or driving out non-Serbs, is described.

• Kottak suggests, following Barth, that the highly blended nature of former Yugoslav society reduced the possibility for ecological specialization and the concomitant economic interdependence that (according to Barth) supports peaceful pluralism.


37 Assimilation

• Assimilation describes the process of change when a minority ethnic group adopts the patterns and norms of its host culture.

• Assimilation is not uniform: it may be forced or relatively benign depending on historical particularities.

• Brazil (as opposed to the United States and Canada) is cited as a highly assimilative society wherein ethnic neighborhoods are virtually unknown.


38 The Plural Society

• Plural society refers to a multiethnic nation-state wherein the subgroups do not assimilate but remain essentially distinct, in (relatively) stable coexistence.

• Barth defines plural society as a society combining ethnic contrasts and the economic interdependence of the ethnic groups.


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• Such interdependence tends to be structured by ecological specialization (use of different environment resources).

• Barth argued that cultural differences were part of the “natural” environment of ethnic groups, and thus peaceful, egalitarian coexistence was a possibility, particularly when there was no competition for resources.


40 Multiculturalism

• Multiculturalism is “the view of cultural diversity in a country as something good and desirable.”

• This is opposed to assimilationism, which expects subordinate groups to take on the culture of the dominant group while abandoning their own.

• Basic aspects of multiculturalism at the government level are the official espousal of some degree of cultural relativism along with the promotion of distinct ethnic practices.


41 Multiculturalism in the U.S.• A number of factors have caused the United States to move

away from an assimilationist and toward a multicultural model.

• Large-scale migration has brought in substantial minorities in a time span too short for assimilation to take place.

• An ethnic consciousness may take root in reaction to consistent discrimination.

• Studies have demonstrated that closely maintained ethnic ties have been a successful strategy for recent immigrants.


42 Prejudice and Discrimination

• Prejudice is the devaluation of a given group based upon the assumed characteristics of that group (see the description of the first King beating trial).

• Discrimination is disproportionately harmful treatment of a group: it may be de jure or de facto.

• Attitudinal discrimination is discrimination against a group based only upon its existence as a group.


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• Genocide, “the deliberate elimination of a group through mass murder,” is the most extreme form of discrimination.

• Institutional discrimination is the formalized pursuance of discriminatory practices by a government or similar institution.


44 Chips in the Multicultural Mosaic

• Despite the fact that the 1992 Los Angeles riot began as a reaction to the first Rodney King verdict, much of the violence played out along ethnic lines: prosperous, culturally isolated Korean merchants were targeted for looting and violence.

• Subsequent public discussion indicated that much of the enmity was due to culturally based miscommunication.


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• There is some suggestion that miscommunication and noncommunication between successful Korean store owners and the surrounding African-American population made it more likely that the Koreans would be subjected to such leveling mechanisms as looting and boycotts.


46 The Politics of Cultural Oppression.

• Ethnic differentiation sometimes interferes with the dominant group's consolidation of power.

• Such conditions, perceived or real, have resulted in brutal discrimination: forced assimilation, ethnocide, ethnic expulsion, and cultural colonialism.

• A discussion of the political, historical, and cultural motivations behind the Bosnia-Herzegovina civil war is used as an example.


47 Colonialism

• Colonialism “refers to the political, social, and cultural domination of a territory and its people by a foreign power for an extended time.”

• Colonialism perpetrated by both Western and Soviet bloc nations not only created a worldwide economic hierarchy, but also caused long-term ethnic oppression in the colonized countries.

• http://www.wolverton-mountain.com/articles/indias.htm

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McGraw-Hill © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 1 Race: A Discredited Concept in Biology In biological terms, a race is a geographically isolated subdivision