Race (classification of human beings)

Race (human classification) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Race (human classification)

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Race is a social concept used to categorize humans into large and distinct populations or groups by anatomical, cultural, ethnic, genetic, geographical, historical, linguistic, religious, and/or social affiliation. First used to refer to speakers of a common language and then to denote national affiliations, in the 17th century, people began to use the term to relate to observable physical traits. Such use promoted hierarchies favorable to differing ethnic groups. Starting from the 19th century, the term was often used, in a taxonomic sense, to denote genetically differentiated human populations defined by phenotype.123

Social conceptions and groupings of races vary over time, involving folk taxonomies4 that define essential types of individuals based on perceived traits. Scientists consider biological essentialism obsolete,5 and generally discourage racial explanations for collective differentiation in both physical and behavioral traits.678910

Even though there is a broad scientific agreement that essentialist and typological conceptualizations of race are untenable, scientists around the world continue to conceptualize race in widely differing ways, some of which have essentialist implications.11 While some researchers sometimes use the concept of race to make distinctions among fuzzy sets of traits, others in the scientific community suggest that the idea of race often is used in a naive6 or simplistic way,12 and argue that, among humans, race has no taxonomic significance by pointing out that all living humans belong to the same species, Homo sapiens, and subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens.1314

Since the second half of the 20th century, the associations of race with the ideologies and theories that grew out of the work of 19th-century anthropologists and physiologists has led to the use of the word race itself becoming problematic. Although still used in general contexts, race has often been replaced by other words which are less ambiguous and emotionally charged, such as populations, people(s), ethnic groups, or communities, depending on context.1516

Complications and various definitions of the concept

There is a wide consensus that the racial categories that are common in everyday usage are socially constructed, and that racial groups cannot be biologically defined.171819202122 Nonetheless, some scholars argue that racial categories obviously correlate with biological traits (e.g. phenotype) to some degree, and that certain genetic markers have varying frequencies among human populations, some of which correspond more or less to traditional racial groupings. For this reason there is no current consensus about whether racial categories can be considered to have significance for understanding human genetic variation.23

When people define and talk about a particular conception of race, they create a social reality through which social categorization is achieved.24 In this sense, races are said to be social constructs.25 These constructs develop within various legal, economic, and sociopolitical contexts, and may be the effect, rather than the cause, of major social situations.26 While race is understood to be a social construct by many, most scholars agree that race has real material effects in the lives of people through institutionalized practices of preference and discrimination.

Socioeconomic factors, in combination with early but enduring views of race, have led to considerable suffering within disadvantaged racial groups.27 Racial discrimination often coincides with racist mindsets, whereby the individuals and ideologies of one group come to perceive the members of an outgroup as both racially defined and morally inferior.28 As a result, racial groups possessing relatively little power often find themselves excluded or oppressed, while hegemonic individuals and institutions are charged with holding racist attitudes.29 Racism has led to many instances of tragedy, including slavery and genocide.30

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.3132

Scholars continue to debate the degrees to which racial categories are biologically warranted and socially constructed, as well as the extent to which the realities of race must be acknowledged in order for society to comprehend and address racism adequately.33 Accordingly, the racial paradigms employed in different disciplines vary in their emphasis on biological reduction as contrasted with societal construction.

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.

Historical origins of racial classification

The three great races according to Meyers Konversations-Lexikon of 1885-90. The subtypes of the Mongoloid race are shown in yellow and orange tones, those of the Caucasoid race in light and medium grayish spring green-cyan tones and those of the Negroid race in brown tones. Dravidians and Sinhalese are in olive green and their classification is described as uncertain. The Mongoloid race sees the widest geographic distribution, including all of the Americas, North Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia, the entire inhabited Arctic while they form most of Central Asia and the Pacific Islands.
The racial diversity of Asia's peoples, Nordisk familjebok (1904)


Race and colonialism

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.3435 As Europeans encountered people from different parts of the world, they speculated about the physical, social, and cultural differences among various human groups. 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.36 Drawing on Classical sources and upon their own internal interactions — for example, the hostility between the English and Irish powerfully influenced early European thinking about the differences between people37 — Europeans began to sort themselves and others into groups based on physical appearance, and to attribute to individuals belonging to these groups behaviors and capacities which were claimed to be deeply ingrained. A set of folk beliefs took hold that linked inherited physical differences between groups to inherited intellectual, behavioral, and moral qualities.38 Similar ideas can be found in other cultures,39 for example in China, where a concept often translated as "race" was associated with supposed common descent from the Yellow Emperor, and used to stress the unity of ethnic groups in China. Brutal conflicts between ethnic groups have existed throughout history and across the world.40

Early taxonomic models

The first post-Classical published classification of humans into distinct races seems to be François Bernier's Nouvelle division de la terre par les différents espèces ou races qui l'habitent ("New division of Earth by the different species or races which inhabit it"), published in 1684.41 In the 18th century the differences among human groups became a focus of scientific investigation. 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 1735 classification of Carolus Linnaeus, inventor of zoological taxonomy, divided the human race Homo Sapiens into continental varieties of Europaeus, Asiaticus, Americanus and Afer, each associated with a different humour: sanguine, melancholic, choleric and phlegmatic respectively.4243 Homo Sapiens Europaeus was described as active, acute, and adventurous whereas Homo Sapiens Afer was crafty, lazy and careless.44

The 1775 treatise "The Natural Varieties of Mankind," by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach proposed five major divisions: the Caucasoid race, Mongoloid race, Ethiopian race (later termed the Negroid race), American Indian race, and Malayan race, but he did not propose any hierarchy among the races.44 Blumenbach also noted the graded transition in appearances from one group to adjacent groups and suggested that "one variety of mankind does so sensibly pass into the other, that you cannot mark out the limits between them".45

From the 17th through the 19th centuries, the merging of folk beliefs about group differences with scientific explanations of those differences produced what one scholar has called an "ideology of race".35 According to this ideology, races are primordial, natural, enduring and distinct. 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.40 Subsequent influential classifications by Georges Buffon, Petrus Camper and Christoph Meiners all classified "Negros" as inferior to Europeans.44 In the United States the racial theories of Thomas Jefferson were influential. 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.46

Race and polygenism

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,47 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. In the US, Samuel George Morton, Josiah Nott and Louis Agassiz promoted this theory in the late 19th century. Polygenism was popular and most widespread in the 19th century, culminating in the founding of the Anthropological Society of London (1863) during the period of the American Civil War, in opposition to the Ethnological Society, which had abolitionist sympathies.48

Modern debate

Models of human evolution

Today, all humans are classified as belonging to the species Homo sapiens and sub-species Homo sapiens sapiens. However, this is not the first species of homininae: the first species of genus Homo, Homo habilis, are theorized to have evolved in East Africa at least 2 million years ago, and members of this species populated different parts of Africa in a relatively short time. Homo erectus is theorized to have evolved more than 1.8 million years ago, and by 1.5 million years ago had spread throughout Europe and Asia. Virtually all physical anthropologists agree that Archaic Homo sapiens (A group including the possible species H. heidelbergensis, H. rhodesiensis and H. neanderthalensis) evolved out of African Homo erectus ((sensu lato) or Homo ergaster).4950

Today anthropologists increasingly believe that anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) evolved in North or East Africa from H. heidelbergensis and then migrated out of Africa, mixing with and replacing H. heidelbergensis and H. neanderthalensis populations throughout Europe and Asia, and H. rhodesiensis populations in Sub-Saharan Africa (a combination of the Out of Africa and Multiregional models).51verification needed


In the early 20th century, many anthropologists accepted and taught the belief that biologically distinct races were isomorphic with distinct linguistic, cultural, and social groups, while popularly applying that belief to the field of eugenics, in conjunction with a practice that is now called scientific racism.52 After the Nazi eugenics program, racial essentialism lost widespread popularity. Race anthropologists were pressured to acknowledge findings coming from studies of culture and population genetics, and to revise their conclusions about the sources of phenotypic variation.53 A significant number of modern anthropologists and biologists in the West came to view race as an invalid genetic or biological designation.54

The first to challenge the concept of race on empirical grounds were the anthropologists Franz Boas, who demonstrated phenotypic plasticity due to environmental factors,55 and Ashley Montagu who relied on evidence from genetics.56 E. O. Wilson then challenged the concept from the perspective of general animal systematics, and further rejected the claim that "races" were equivalent to "subspecies".57

According to Jonathan Marks,45



In biology the term "race" is used with caution because it can be ambiguous. Generally when it is used it is synonymous with subspecies.58 For mammals, the taxonomic unit below the species level is usually the subspecies.59

Population geneticists have debated whether the concept of population can provide a basis for a new conception of race. In order 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"60 Waples and Gaggiotti identify two broad types of definitions for populations; those that fall into an ecological paradigm, and those that fall into an evolutionary paradigm. Examples of such definitions are:


Morphologically differentiated populations

Traditionally, subspecies are seen as geographically isolated and genetically differentiated populations.61 That is, "the designation 'subspecies' is used to indicate an objective degree of microevolutionary divergence"13 One objection to this idea is that it does not specify what degree of differentiation is required. Therefore, any population that is somewhat biologically different could be considered a subspecies, even to the level of a local population. As a result, Templeton has argued that it is necessary to impose a threshold on the level of difference that is required for a population to be designated a subspecies.61



On the other hand in practice subspecies are often defined by easily observable physical appearance, but there is not necessarily any evolutionary significance to these observed differences, so this form of classification has become less acceptable to evolutionary biologists.64 Likewise this typological approach to race is generally regarded as discredited by biologists and anthropologists.



Sesardic argues that when several traits are analyzed at the same time, forensic anthropologists can classify a person's race with an accuracy of close to 100% based on only skeletal remains.65 This is discussed in a later section.

Ancestrally differentiated populations


Often taxonomists prefer to use phylogenetic analysis to determine whether a population can be considered a subspecies. Phylogenetic analysis relies on the concept of derived characteristics that are not shared between groups, usually applying to populations that are allopatric (geographically separated) and therefore discretely bounded. This would make a subspecies, evolutionarily speaking, a clade – a group with a common evolutionary ancestor population.61 The smooth gradation of human genetic variation in general tends to rule out any idea that human population groups can be considered monophyletic (cleanly divided), as there appears to always have been considerable gene flow between human populations.61 Rachel Caspari (2003) have argued that clades are by definition monophyletic groups (a taxon that includes all descendants of a given ancestor) and since no groups currently regarded as races are monophyletic, none of those groups can be clades.




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.68 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): they ignore a host of other similarities and differences (for example, blood type) that do not correlate highly with the markers for race. Thus, anthropologist Frank Livingstone's conclusion, that since clines cross racial boundaries, "there are no races, only clines".69


In 1964, the biologists Paul Ehrlich and Holm pointed out cases where two or more clines are distributed discordantly—for example, melanin is distributed in a decreasing pattern from the equator north and south; frequencies for the haplotype for beta-S hemoglobin, on the other hand, radiate out of specific geographical points in Africa.70 As the anthropologists Leonard Lieberman and Fatimah Linda Jackson observed, "Discordant patterns of heterogeneity falsify any description of a population as if it were genotypically or even phenotypically homogeneous".67





Coop et al. (2009) found "a selected allele that strongly differentiates the French from both the Yoruba and Han could be strongly clinal across Europe, or at high frequency in Europe and absent elsewhere, or follow any other distribution according to the geographic nature of the selective pressure. However, we see that the global geographic distributions of these putatively selected alleles are largely determined simply by their frequencies in Yoruba, French and Han (Figure 3). The global distributions fall into three major geographic patterns that we interpret as non-African sweeps, west Eurasian sweeps and East Asian sweeps, respectively."

Genetically differentiated populations

Main article: Race and genetics

Another way to look at differences between populations is to measure genetic differences rather than physical differences between groups. The mid-20th-century anthropologist William C. Boyd defined race as: "A population which differs significantly from other populations in regard to the frequency of one or more of the genes it possesses. It is an arbitrary matter which, and how many, gene loci we choose to consider as a significant 'constellation'".75 Leonard Lieberman and Rodney Kirk have pointed out that "the paramount weakness of this statement is that if one gene can distinguish races then the number of races is as numerous as the number of human couples reproducing."76 Moreover, the anthropologist Stephen Molnar has suggested that the discordance of clines inevitably results in a multiplication of races that renders the concept itself useless.77 The Human Genome Project states "People who have lived in the same geographic region for many generations may have some alleles in common, but no allele will be found in all members of one population and in no members of any other."78

Fixation index

The population geneticist Sewall Wright developed one way of measuring genetic differences between populations known as the Fixation index, which is often abbreviated to FST. This statistic is often used in taxonomy to compare differences between any two given populations by measuring the genetic differences among and between populations for individual genes, or for many genes simultaneously.79 It is often stated that the fixation index for humans is about 0.15. This translates to an estimated 85% of the variation measured in the overall human population is found within individuals of the same population, and about 15% of the variation occurs between populations. These estimates imply that any two individuals from different populations are almost as likely to be more similar to each other than either is to a member of their own group.136180 Richard Lewontin, who affirmed these ratios, thus concluded neither "race" nor "subspecies" were appropriate or useful ways to describe human populations.81 However, others have noticed that group variation was relatively similar to the variation observed in other mammalian species.8283

Wright himself believed that values >0.25 represent very great genetic variation and that an FST of 0.15–0.25 represented great variation. However, about 5% of human variation occurs between populations within continents, therefore FST values between continental groups of humans (or races) of as low as 0.1 (or possibly lower) have been found in some studies, suggesting more moderate levels of genetic variation.79 Graves (1996) has countered that FST should not be used as a marker of subspecies status, as the statistic is used to measure the degree of differentiation between populations,79 although see also Wright (1978).63

In an ongoing debate, some geneticistswho? argue that race is neither a meaningful concept nor a useful heuristic device,84 and even that genetic differences among groups are biologically meaningless,85 because more genetic variation exists within such races than among them, and that racial traits overlap without discrete boundaries.86


Cluster analysis
World map based on a genetic principal component analysis of human populations from Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza's book The History and Geography of Human Genes (1994).88

In his 2003 paper, "Human Genetic Diversity: Lewontin's Fallacy", A. W. F. 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.8990 Geographically based human studies since have shown that such genetic clusters can be derived from analyzing of a large number of loci which can assort individuals sampled into groups analogous to traditional continental racial groups.91 Joanna Mountain and Neil Risch cautioned that while genetic clusters may one day be shown to correspond to phenotypic variations between groups, such assumptions were premature as the relationship between genes and complex traits remains poorly understood.92 However, Risch denied such limitations render the analysis useless: "Perhaps just using someone's actual birth year is not a very good way of measuring age. 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."93



Anthropologists such as C. Loring Brace,96 the philosophers Jonathan Kaplan and Rasmus Winther,979899100 and the geneticist Joseph Graves,101 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.102 Kaplan and Winther therefore argue that, seen in this way, both Lewontin and Edwards are right in their arguments. 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.e., splitters) or a continuum (i.e., lumpers). Under Kaplan and Winther's view, racial groupings are objective social constructions (see Mills 1998 103) 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.104

Social constructions

Main articles: Race and society and Racialism




Stephan Palmié asserted that race "is not a thing but a social relation";107 or, in the words of Katya Gibel Mevorach, "a metonym," "a human invention whose criteria for differentiation are neither universal nor fixed but have always been used to manage difference."108 As such, the use of the term "race" itself must be analyzed. Moreover, they argue that biology will not explain why or how people use the idea of race: History and social relationships will.

Imani Perry, a professor in the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University, has made significant contributions to how we define race in America today. Perry’s work focuses on how race is experienced. Perry tells us that race, "is produced by social arrangements and political decision making."109 Perry explains race more in stating, "race is something that happens, rather than something that is. It is dynamic, but it holds no objective truth."110

The theory that race is merely a social construct has been challenged by the findings of researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine, published in the American Journal of Human Genetics as "Genetic Structure, Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity, and Confounding in Case-Control Association Studies".111 One of the researchers, Neil Risch, noted: "we looked at the correlation between genetic structure [based on microsatellite markers] versus self-description, we found 99.9% concordance between the two. 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."112


Main article: Race in Brazil
Portrait "Redenção do Can" (1895), showing a Brazilian family each generation becoming "whiter".

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.


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 none 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: a person who is considered white may have more African ancestry than a person who is considered black, and the reverse can be also true about European ancestry.115 The complexity of racial classifications in Brazil reflects the extent of miscegenation in Brazilian society, a society that remains highly, but not strictly, stratified along color lines. 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,116 and being seen as relatively "whiter" as their perceived social status increases (much as in other regions of Latin America).117

Self-reported ancestry of people from
Rio de Janeiro, by race or skin color (2000 survey)118
Ancestry brancos pardos pretos
European only 48% 6% -
African only 12% 25%
Amerindian only 2% -
African and European 23% 34% 31%
Amerindian and European 14% 6% -
African and Amerindian 4% 9%
African, Amerindian and European 15% 36% 35%
Total 100% 100% 100%
Any African 38% 86% 100%

Fluidity of racial categories apart, 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. In several genetic tests, people with less than 60-65% of European descent and 5-10% of Amerindian descent usually cluster with Afro-Brazilians (as reported by the individuals), or 6.9% of the population, and those with about 45% or more of Subsaharan contribution most times do so (in average, Afro-Brazilian DNA was reported to be about 50% Subsaharan African, 37% European and 13% Amerindian).119120121122

If a more consistent report with the genetic groups in the gradation of miscegenation is to be considered (e.g. that would not cluster people with a balanced degree of African and non-African ancestry in the black group instead of the multiracial one, unlike elsewhere in Latin America where people of high quantity of African descent tend to classify themselves as mixed), more people would report themselves as white and pardo in Brazil (47.7% and 42.4% of the population as of 2010, respectively), because by research its population is believed to have between 65 and 80% of autosomal European ancestry, in average (also >35% of European mt-DNA and >95% of European Y-DNA).119123124125

Ethnic groups in Brazil (census data)126
Ethnic group white black pardo
1872 3,787,289 1,954,452 4,188,737
1940 26,171,778 6,035,869 8,744,365
1991 75,704,927 7,335,136 62,316,064
Ethnic groups in Brazil (1872 and 1890)127
Years whites pardos blacks Indians Total
1872 38.1% 38.3% 19.7% 3.9% 100%
1890 44.0% 32.4% 14.6% 9% 100%

This is not surprising, though: While the greatest number of slaves imported from Africa were sent to Brazil, totalizing roughly 3.5 million people, they lived in such miserable conditions that male African Y-DNA there is significantly rare due to the lack of resources and time involved with raising of children, so that most African descent originarily came from relations between white masters and female slaves. From the last decades of the Empire until the 1950s, the proportion of the white population increased significantly while Brazil welcomed 5.5 million immigrants between 1821 and 1932, not much behind its neighbor Argentina with 6.4 million,128 and it received more European immigrants in its colonial history than the United States. Between 1500 and 1760, 700.000 Europeans settled in Brazil, while 530.000 Europeans settled in the United States for the same given time.129 Thus, the historical construction of race in Brazilian society dealt primarily with gradations between persons of majoritarily European ancestry and little minority groups with otherwise lower quantity therefrom in recent times.

European Union

According to European Union Council Directive,

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".130131 Haney López warns that using "race" as a category within the law tends to legitimize its existence in the popular imagination. 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 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, in 1996, the European Parliament adopted a resolution stating that “the term should therefore be avoided in all official texts”.132

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.132


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. This does not approach the number of non-white citizens in the United States (roughly 28–37%, depending on how Latinos are classified; see Demographics of the United States). 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 1970s. Until recently, French policies focused primarily on issues of hate speech—going much further than their American counterparts-and relatively less on issues of discrimination in jobs, housing, and in provision of goods and services.133

United States

In the United States, views of race that see racial groups as defined genetically are common in the biological sciences although controversial, whereas the social constructionist view is dominant in the social sciences.134


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.3 By the early 20th century, this notion was made statutory in many states.4 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.135

The decennial censuses conducted since 1790 in the United States created an incentive to establish racial categories and fit people into these categories.136


Views across disciplines over time

In Poland, the race concept was rejected by 25 percent of anthropologists in 2001, although: "Unlike the U.S. anthropologists, Polish anthropologists tend to regard race as a term without taxonomic value, often as a substitute for population."139

Wang, Štrkalj et al. (2003) examined the use of race as a biological concept in research papers published in China's only biological anthropology journal, Acta Anthropologica Sinica. The study showed that the race concept was widely used among Chinese anthropologists.140141 In a 2007 review paper, Štrkalj suggested that the stark contrast of the racial approach between the United States and China was due to the fact that race is a factor for social cohesion among the ethnically diverse people of China, whereas "race" is a very sensitive issue in America and the racial approach is considered to undermine social cohesion - with the result that in the socio-political context of US academics scientists are encouraged not to use racial categories, whereas in China they are encouraged to use them.142

Lieberman et al. in a 2004 study researched the acceptance of race as a concept among anthropologists in the United States, Canada, the Spanish speaking areas, Europe, Russia and China. 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.11


United States


Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Sociology professor at Duke University, remarks,144 "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." 145 The types of practices that take place under this new color-blind racism is subtle, institutionalized, and supposedly not racial. Color-blind racism thrives on the idea that race is no longer an issue in the United States.145 There are contradictions between the alleged color-blindness of most whites and the persistence of a color-coded system of inequality.

U.S. anthropology

The concept of biological race has declined significantly in frequency of use in physical anthropology in the United States during the 20th century. A majority of physical anthropologists in the United States have rejected the concept of biological races.146 Since 1932, an increasing number of college textbooks introducing physical anthropology have rejected race as a valid concept: from 1932 to 1976, only seven out of thirty-two rejected race; from 1975 to 1984, thirteen out of thirty-three rejected race; from 1985 to 1993, thirteen out of nineteen rejected race. According to one academic journal entry, where 78 percent of the articles in the 1931 Journal of Physical Anthropology employed these or nearly synonymous terms reflecting a bio-race paradigm, only 36 percent did so in 1965, and just 28 percent did in 1996.147





The figure for physical anthropologists at PhD granting departments was slightly higher, rising from 41% to 42%, with 50% agreeing. Lieberman's study also showed that more women reject the concept of race than men.150 This survey, however, did not specify any particular definition of race (although it did clearly specify biological race within the species Homo sapiens); it is difficult to say whether those who supported the statement thought of race in taxonomic or population terms.

The same survey, taken in 1999,151 showed the following changing results for anthropologists:

A line of research conducted by Cartmill (1998), however, seemed to limit the scope of Lieberman’s finding that there was "a significant degree of change in the status of the race concept". Goran Štrkalj has argued that this may be because Lieberman and collaborators had looked at all the members of the American Anthropological Association irrespective of their field of research interest, while Cartmill had looked specifically at biological anthropologists interested in human variation.152



Other fields

In the same 1985 survey (Lieberman et al. 1992), 16% of the surveyed biologists and 36% of the surveyed developmental psychologists disagreed with the proposition: "There are biological races in the species Homo sapiens."

The authors of the study also examined 77 college textbooks in biology and 69 in physical anthropology published between 1932 and 1989. Physical anthropology texts argued that biological races exist until the 1970s, when they began to argue that races do not exist. In contrast, biology textbooks did not undergo such a reversal but many instead dropped their discussion of race altogether. The authors attributed this to biologists trying to avoid discussing the political implications of racial classifications, instead of discussing them, and to the ongoing discussions in biology about the validity of the concept "subspecies". The authors also noted that some widely used textbooks in biology such as Douglas J. Futuyama's 1986 "Evolutionary Biology" had abandoned the race concept, "The concept of race, masking the overwhelming genetic similarity of all peoples and the mosaic patterns of variation that do not correspond to racial divisions, is not only socially dysfunctional but is biologically indefensible as well (pp. 5 18-5 19)." (Lieberman et al. 1992, pp. 316–17)


In February 2001, the editors of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine asked "authors to not use race and ethnicity when there is no biological, scientific, or sociological reason for doing so."158 The editors also stated that "analysis by race and ethnicity has become an analytical knee-jerk reflex."159 Nature Genetics now ask authors to "explain why they make use of particular ethnic groups or populations, and how classification was achieved."160




A 2010 examination of 18 widely used English anatomy textbooks found that they all represented human biological variation in superficial and outdated ways, many of them making use of the race concept in ways that were current in 1950s anthropology. The authors recommended that anatomical education should describe human anatomical variation in more detail and rely on newer research that demonstrates the inadequacies of simple racial typologies.164

Political and practical uses


Main article: Race and health

In the United States, federal government policy promotes the use of racially categorized data to identify and address health disparities between racial or ethnic groups.165 In clinical settings, race has sometimes been considered in the diagnosis and treatment of medical conditions. Doctors have noted that some medical conditions are more prevalent in certain racial or ethnic groups than in others, without being sure of the cause of those differences. Recent interest in race-based medicine, or race-targeted pharmacogenomics, has been fueled by the proliferation of human genetic data which followed the decoding of the human genome in the first decade of the twenty-first century. There is an active debate among biomedical researchers about the meaning and importance of race in their research. Proponents of the use of racial categories in biomedicine argue that continued use of racial categorizations in biomedical research and clinical practice makes possible the application of new genetic findings, and provides a clue to diagnosis.166167

Other researchers point out that finding a difference in disease prevalence between two socially defined groups does not necessarily imply genetic causation of the difference.168169 They suggest that medical practices should maintain their focus on the individual rather than an individual's membership to any group.170 They argue that overemphasizing genetic contributions to health disparities carries various risks such as reinforcing stereotypes, promoting racism or ignoring the contribution of non-genetic factors to health disparities.171 International epidemiological data show that living conditions rather than race make the biggest difference in health outcomes even for diseases that have "race-specific" treatments.172 Some studies have found that patients are reluctant to accept racial categorization in medical practice.173

Law enforcement

Main article: Racial profiling


Criminal justice agencies in England and Wales use at least two separate racial/ethnic classification systems when reporting crime, as of 2010. One is the system used in the 2001 Census when individuals identify themselves as belonging to a particular ethnic group: W1 (White-British), W2 (White-Irish), W9 (Any other white background); 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). The other is categories used by the police when they visually identify someone as belonging to an ethnic group, e.g. at the time of a stop and search or an arrest: White – North European (IC1), White – South European (IC2), Black (IC3), Asian (IC4), Chinese, Japanese, or South East Asian (IC5), Middle Eastern (IC6), and Unknown (IC0). "IC" stands for "Identification Code;" these items are also referred to as Phoenix classifications.174 Officers are instructed to "record the response that has been given" even if the person gives an answer which may be incorrect; their own perception of the person's ethnic background is recorded separately.175 Comparability of the information being recorded by officers was brought into question by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in September 2007, as part of its Equality Data Review; one problem cited was the number of reports that contained an ethnicity of "Not Stated."176



Mass incarceration in the United States disproportionately impacts African American and Latino communities. Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010), argues that mass incarceration is best understood as not only a system of overcrowded prisons. Mass incarceration is also, "the larger web of laws, rules, policies, and customs that control those labeled criminals both in and out of prison."177 She defines it further as "a system that locks people not only behind actual bars in actual prisons, but also behind virtual bars and virtual walls," illustrating the second-class citizenship that is imposed on a disproportionate number of people of color, specifically African-Americans. She compares mass incarceration to Jim Crow laws, stating that both work as racial caste systems.178

Recent work using DNA cluster analysis to determine race background has been used by some criminal investigators to narrow their search for the identity of both suspects and victims.179 Proponents of DNA profiling in criminal investigations cite cases where leads based on DNA analysis proved useful, but the practice remains controversial among medical ethicists, defense lawyers and some in law enforcement.180

Forensic anthropology

Main article: Forensic anthropology

Similarly, forensic anthropologists draw on highly heritable morphological features of human remains (e.g. cranial measurements) to aid in the identification of the body, including in terms of race. In a 1992 article, anthropologist Norman Sauer noted that anthropologists had generally abandoned the concept of race as a valid representation of human biological diversity, except for forensic anthropologists. He asked, "If races don't exist, why are forensic anthropologists so good at identifying them?"181 He concluded that


In a different approach, anthropologist C. Loring Brace said,


In association with a NOVA program in 2000 about race, he wrote an essay opposing use of the term.

Commercial determination of ancestry

New research in molecular genetics, and the marketing of genetic identities through the analysis of one's Y chromosome, mtDNA, or autosomal DNA to the general public in the form of "Personalized Genetic Histories" (PGH) has caused debate. Typically, a consumer of a commercial PGH service sends in a sample of DNA, which is analyzed by molecular biologists, and receives a report on ancestry. Shriver and Kittles remarked:


They noted that the general public was increasingly interested in such tests despite their lack of knowledge in some cases of what the results represent.183

Through these reports, advances in molecular genetics are used to create or confirm stories individuals have about social identities. Abu el-Haj argued that genetic lineages, like older notions of race, suggest some idea of biological relatedness. But, unlike older notions of race, they are not directly connected to claims about human behaviour or character. She said that "postgenomics does seem to be giving race a new lease on life."citation needed


citation needed

Abu el-Haj argues that genomics and the mapping of lineages and clusters liberates "the new racial science from the older one by disentangling ancestry from culture and capacity."citation needed As an example, she refers to recent work by Hammer et al., which aimed to test the claim that present-day Jews are more closely related to one another than to neighbouring non-Jewish populations. Hammer et al. found that the degree of genetic similarity among Jews shifted depending on the locus investigated, and suggested that this was the result of natural selection acting on particular loci. They focused on the non-recombining Y-chromosome to "circumvent some of the complications associated with selection".184




One problem with these assignments is admixture. Many people have a highly varied ancestry. For example, in the United States, colonial and early federal history were periods of numerous interracial relationships, both outside and inside slavery. This has resulted in a majority of people who identify as African American having some European ancestors. Similarly, many people who identify as white have some African ancestors. In a survey in a northeastern U.S. university of college students who identified as "white", about 30% were estimated to have up to 10% African ancestry.40

On the other hand, there are tests that rely on correlations between allele frequencies; often when allele frequencies correlate, these are called clusters. These sorts of tests use informative alleles called Ancestry-informative marker (AIM). These tests use contemporary people sampled from certain parts of the world as references to determine the likely proportion of ancestry for any given individual.

In a recent Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) programme on the subject of genetic ancestry testing, the academic Henry Louis Gates, who identifies as African American, said he "wasn’t thrilled with the AIM results (it turns out that 50 percent of his ancestors are likely European)."188 He said there had been family stories of white ancestors, but this was a higher proportion than he expected.188



As these decisions may each bias the results, he concluded that people should be very cautious about relating genetic lineages or clusters to their personal sense of identity.189

On the other hand, Rosenberg (2005) argued that if enough genetic markers and subjects are analyzed, then the clusters found are consistent.190 How many genetic markers a commercial service uses likely varies, although new technology has continually allowed increasing numbers to be analyzed. In the end, people usually base their individual identity more on family and personal relationships of community than data.

See also


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Further reading

  • Jorde, LB; Wooding, SP (November 2004). "Genetic variation, classification and 'race'". Nat. Genet. 36 (11 Suppl): S28–33. doi:10.1038/ng1435. PMID 15508000. 
  • Race, Ethnicity, and Genetics Working Group (2005). "The Use of Racial, Ethnic, and Ancestral Categories in Human Genetics Research". American Journal of Human Genetics 77 (4): 519–32. doi:10.1086/491747. PMC 1275602. PMID 16175499. Retrieved 23 September 2013. 
  • Smedley, Audrey (March 14, 2007). "The History of the Idea of Race... and Why It Matters". presented at the conference "Race, Human Variation and Disease: Consensus and Frontiers" sponsored by the American Anthropological Association (AAA). 
  • Whitmarsh, Ian; Jones, David S., eds. (2010). What's the Use of Race?: Modern Governance and the Biology of Difference. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-51424-8. Lay summary (28 April 2013).  This review of current research includes chapters by Ian Whitmarsh, David S. Jones, Jonathan Kahn, Pamela Sankar, Steven Epstein, Simon M. Outram, George T. H. Ellison, Richard Tutton, Andrew Smart, Richard Ashcroft, Paul Martin, George T. H. Ellison, Amy Hinterberger, Joan H. Fujimura, Ramya Rajagopalan, Pilar N. Ossorio, Kjell A. Doksum, Jay S. Kaufman, Richard S. Cooper, Angela C. Jenks, Nancy Krieger, and Dorothy Roberts.

External links

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