Trial of accessible chapter in webpage format.

ETHNICITY 

Geography plays a significant role in the creation, maintenance and erosion of ethnic identity. A person’s ethnic identity can be very complex because it is determined by many cross-cutting factors, including language, appearance, national heritage, and religion. Although all identities are social constructions, identity influences many cultural practices, including politics, religion, and economic behaviors.

Figure 9‑1 Many government documents ask people to report their identity, but provide the few categories thereby actively helping create or maintain identity categories into which people generally place themselves, even if they don’t fit well.

“What are you?” You need some sort of an answer to this question about your ethnic identity because you will be asked about it frequently. Employers, schools, banks, and the US Census are among the many institutions interested in placing you into a category based on your ethnicity and/or race. You may be asked the same question by new acquaintances or old friends. Despite the potential complexity of the answer to that question, our limited vocabulary and our political structures often prohibit people from answering that question in anything other than the most simplistic terms. The world seems to want you to check only one box. Some people find it easy to check a single box or provide a one-word answer to questions about ethnicity. Others find checking a single box or providing a simple answer difficult. Moving from one region of the world to another can make answering identity questions even more confusing because “what you are” can change when a person moves to a new location. This happens because the categories that governments and culture groups use for ethnicity are socially constructed. In other words, we made them up. Because these categories are socially constructed, they’re also subject to change through time and across space. Who you are - depends on where you are. Geography matters. A lot. 

A website dedicated to exposing how the US Census Bureau has fashioned notions of race and ethnicity since 1790

Racebox.org 

The idea of ethnicity has ancient roots. Slavery, once nearly a universal human practice, and perhaps as old agriculture itself, may well be the original impetus behind the creation of ethnic categories. Some of the criteria we use today in the US to determine ethnic identity were introduced by Europeans hundreds of years ago to make slavery more efficient and to increase the profitability of agriculture. 

Today, because the ethnic composition of our country is far different than it was in the 1800s, Americans use multiple strategies and frameworks to maintain categories of ethnic identity. The three main frameworks are race, language, and national ancestry. Americans regularly confuse race, ethnicity and/or national origin, mistakenly treating these concepts as one. The paragraph below describes how these ideas and concepts work together.

Race

Race is the identity category largely based on a person’s appearance or phenotypes. The specific traits used to determine racial categories change through time and across space. In the United States, notions of race are rooted in the slave economy of the colonial period. Nearly 100 years before the English established the Jamestown colony in Virginia, the Spanish brought African slaves to North America. To maximize profits in this agricultural system, the legal system required identity categories that easily marked who was eligible to be held as a slave and who was not. Africans became the preferred source for slaves partly because of their appearance, which is to say, their race allowed them to be easily identified by the legal system of the slave era. Although slavery was outlawed in the US during the 1860s, the Jim Crow legal system that followed continued to govern many aspects of American life for at least another 100 years, reconfiguring and making legal many American concepts of race. The US Census Bureau played an important role in eliminating some of those old categories, but in the process, it reinforced other strategies used by Americans to create race groups. 

Figure 9‑2: Fingerprint patterns vary across the globe much like skin color, but because they are difficult to see, they were not chosen as markers of race.  Source: FBI 

Today, Americans generally use only three criteria to classify someone by race. The first criterion is skin pigmentation. People with darker skin are distinguished from those with lighter skin, but in the US, skin color by itself is insufficient to classify anyone into a racial category. Therefore, people are further categorized by the texture and color of their hair. People with naturally straight hair or light-colored hair, are generally not considered “black” or “African-American” regardless of their skin tone. Finally, people are categorized by the shape and color of their eyes. People with brown “almond-shaped” eyes, and straight hair, are often placed in the “Asian” category. This “three-factor test” generates three groups: White, Black and Asian. Americans use this clumsy, old-fashioned test all the time although it works so poorly that millions of Americans, particularly those from Latin America, are left out requiring the creation of additional categories.

The notion of race is problematic for other reasons. Clearly, the “three-factor test” used by Americans is a social construction. People created both the test and each category. Anthropologists, biologists, and geneticists argue that the concept of race itself is not scientifically valid. While there are genetic markers for physical characteristics, like skin color and hair texture that are evident in the DNA of each person, only a few of the many thousands of DNA markers align with the convenient categories we use to categorize into racial groups. For example, only about 15 of our 45,000 genetic markers control for skin pigmentation If we wanted, we could choose from thousands of alternative genetic characteristics to classify people. If our social constructions were to change, and we suddenly decided to group people by height, fingerprint patterns or blood type (rather than skin color, hair texture, and eye shape), we would have an entirely different set of races across the globe.

Race is not a statistically valid concept. Because the overall amount of genetic variation within people of the same “race” is equal to or greater than the amount of genetic variation among people of different races, statisticians argue that race fails the simplest definition of what constitutes a “group”. Even though the concept of race has been rejected by statistics and science, it remains a vital reality in the lives of almost all people across most of the world, especially where there are many groups of people who look different living together. 

Marxism and Race

So why do we have “races” then? Marxists regularly argue that “race is the cultural clothing of capitalism”. Marxists note that racism and/or ethnic bias is one of the most important tools used by the elite to maintain power. According to Marxist theory, the construction and maintenance of racial and ethnic identities permit political and economic elites to justify their economic, political and military dominance over less powerful groups. Marxists also argue that ethnic biases and racial conflict distract working-class people from all groups from focusing their energy and anger against the capitalist class and capitalist system. 

Physical Geography of Race

Figure 9‑3: Tamil Nadu, India – People from Southern India tend to have darker skin, but also share many phenotypes with Europeans, and are generally lactose tolerant.  Source: Wikimedia

Human appearance does vary across the planet and geography played a role. Human phenotypes evolved over thousands of years to help humans thrive in various climates and environments. Skin pigmentation is the most noticeable adaptation. The traditional theory, which explains the process, known as directional selection, holds that dark skin is an evolutionary adaptation that helps protect people from the damaging effects of the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. The theory suggests that darker-skinned people had an evolutionary advantage over lighter-skinned people in sunny locations, so they became more numerous in sunny regions. However, dark skin may be disadvantageous in sunlight-deprived areas, like northern Europe, where darker skin prevents the body from producing adequate amounts of Vitamin D from sunlight. Vitamin D is an essential dietary nutrient, especially for lactating mothers, so pale skin provides an advantage in places where it is frequently cloudy or where winters are long and days are short for much of the year. Some evidence suggests that the variations in skin pigmentation may have taken as few as 100 generations to appear in humans. There is evidence that the process is reversible as well. There is also some emerging theory to suggest this old theory may not be valid.

The ability to absorb vitamin D into the human body may also have influenced the development of lactose tolerance, and the evolution of dairy agriculture culture in Europe. Most adult mammals cannot drink milk because of an inability to produce lactase, an enzyme that metabolizes lactose. Most Europeans can drink milk. Traditional thinking suggests this is because thousands of years ago, Europeans who had a genetic mutation that made them lactose tolerant had an evolutionary advantage over those who were lactose intolerant. In any case, where was, and continues to be, a foundational, causal variable in the construction and maintenance of our ideas about who we are, what we do and why we do it.

Baby’s Got Back – Geography and Standards of Beauty

Cultural factors also play a role in the evolution of our physical appearance. Some of our physical characteristics, like skin tone, height, or body morphology have been influenced by long-standing regional standards for physical attractiveness. This process is known as sexual selection. For thousands of years, standards of “beauty”, that are sometimes very local, even random fascinations, have lent themselves to regional evolutionary changes in body morphology that have contributed to human phenotypes. 

Figure 9‑4: Chillicothe, Ohio – Tiny shoes, a relic of pre-industrial China are displayed. The are artefacts of a period where footbinding was common in China.

Across the globe, differences emerged in what men and women consider attractive in the opposite sex. For example, for many generations, many Chinese men were attracted to women with tiny feet. The feet of some young Chinese women were bound. Presumably, tall women with naturally big feet were considered less desirable than short women with small feet. Did the presence of this sexual preference help make the Chinese much shorter on average, than, say, the Dutch where that particular sexual preference was uncommon?

In West Africa, where maternal societies and a cult of fertility characterized the religion of many cultures for untold generations, a preference for large buttocks, especially on females, emerged. In places where food insecurity threatened the lives of infants, a large derrière may have been interpreted as a sign of good health and some insurance to men seeking mates that their mate would produce many healthy children. In Japan, a place with a vastly different agricultural and religious history from West Africa, this taste preference for large buttocks is muted or even reversed. 

The Sneeches

This video cartoon, inspired by the Dr. Suess story, "The Sneetches" cleverly captures the desire of many groups to build an exclusive identity, largely by creating "the other" through reference to physical appearance. Read the Wikipedia article

(12:09 minutes)

Figure 9‑5: Chinatown, Los Angeles, CA: Chinese women, especially older ones are careful to avoid exposure to the sun as they cling to standards of beauty more common in agricultural China.

In the United States, especially during the 1970s and 1980s, many white people worked to darken or “tan” their skin to meet an evolving standard of beauty. Generations earlier, pale women sought instead to remain as pale as possible to ensure beauty. A geographer might explain this shift in cultural practice by arguing that in agricultural societies, darkly tanned skin was a sign of poverty because agricultural field laborers worked long hours in the sun. Starting with the Industrial Revolution, poor white people were more likely to live in cities and work in factories, and as a result, were kept pale by spending long hours indoors. The wealthier classes finding themselves now indistinguishable from the impoverished classes began to tan to signify their status via their ability to engage in outdoor leisure activities, like going to the beach. A good tan became a marker of wealth and exclusivity – which are desirable characteristics. In recent years, however, the threat of skin cancer and shifting demographics have confounded this American beauty standard once again.