The Illusion of Race

This Unit's virtual lecture is a short discussion of the Anthropology of Race. Ironically, one of the first pursuits of Anthropology in the 19th century was to explain the phenotypical differences between the Earth's population, particularly skin color.  These early anthropologists ultimately determined that this diversity was proof of human "races".  For more than a century, generations of anthropologists sought to validate the concept of "Race", but ultimately, the concept ran into three problems that have led us to conclude that it is a "construct", rather than a natural category. Here are the three main reasons that anthropologists have had to discard the concept of race.

1. Race is an arbitrary concept.  When we look at the various racial schemes that have been employed to sort humans into "races", we see that there is no one phenotypic trait that can be used to define a race, and there is no agreement on how many traits make up a race.  If we choose skin color as the defining attribute, we will get completely different groupings than if we use blood group, hair type, facial structure, or any other single trait.  In America, we tend to primarily use skin color as the defining trait, but when that scheme fails us (as I'm sure you experienced in the "Sorting People" game), we move on to secondary traits. However, when we try sorting with a different trait, the skin color categories fall apart.  Furthermore, the traits are actually much more fluid than we often acknowledge. At what point does someone stop being one color and become another color? If you haven't already, take a moment to play the game "Sorting People" (http://www.pbs.org/race/002_SortingPeople/002_00-home.htm) and see for yourself.

2. There are no reproductive barriers for humans, thus no one racial category exclusively displays any particular trait. In the early days of Western Science, humans from one side of the globe seldom met people from the other side of the globe, so it is understandable that they saw these populations as "distinct". However, as we learned in the Evolution Unit, gene flow is always happening between populations. In the last 500 years, the amount of gene flow between populations has grown exponentially.  It is entirely possible (though I admit, unlikely), for a person to mate with someone from the other side of the globe one day, then find a mate in a completely different continent the next day!  This sort of global gene flow makes it impossible for any single trait to be the sole possession of one category of people.

Watch this short presentation by Dr. Rick Kittles for some specific examples: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAWrwexw-To).

3. The difference between individuals within categories are greater than the differences between individuals in different categories.  In the 1970's, as the genetic science was finally coming into it's own, Physical Anthropologist Richard Lewontin discovered that roughly 80% of all the variation between humans can be found within any given racial group. To put it simply, the people we think are the same can actually be very different, and the people we think are different can actually be the same! Here's a short interview with Dr. Lewontin, explaining this phenomenon: (https://youtu.be/GyuKJAG11Cw )

So, how do we explain the differences between Human Populations?  The first way is to look at this diversity on a trait by trait bases, such as Skin Color. Here Dr. Nina Jablonski, from the Penn State Department of Anthropology, explains why human populations display different skin colors: (https://youtu.be/QOSPNVunyFQ ).  The second way is to consider these categories Social Constructs. Read Ch. 7 for a detailed explanation of the Social Construction of Race.