Defining Race

"Color is only skin deep."

"We're all the same under the surface."

"There is no race, we're all the human race."

You've probably heard sentiments like these before. We learn them all through school. But here's a tip: if you write a college essay about race that reads like something your kindergarten teacher told you as you all sat around holding hands and singing Kumbaya, you're going to fail the next comprehension check. Because those statements aren't true. They aren't false, either, it's just that the reality of human diversity and the social reality of race is much more complicated than can be summed up in elementary-school slogans.

In this class, we are not learning that everyone is the same. In fact, as we will learn, everyone is unique and different. Those differences do pattern based on our ancestry, but also based on a number of complicating factors, most of which have nothing to do with race.

First, some definitions:

Before we can learn about this complexity, we need to have some common definitions of important vocabulary:

Human Biodiversity (or simply Human Diversity): This refers to the genetic and phenotypic diversity of people around the globe. This diversity can represent different adaptations to the environment (as we learned about in the section on human adaptation). It reflects ancestral backgrounds. It reflects the different social and physical environments that we grew up in (our phenotype). Human diversity encompasses all our individual variations within a population, such as differences in height, hair color, voice pitch, or love of cabbage.

Race: Race is the system of categories that a culture uses to divide human biodiversity into neat, discrete packages. Race is culturally constructed, not a biological reality. More on this below.

Bias: Bias is feeling negative or positive emotions about people in another group or category, based on stereotypical or incomplete information. This bias can be trivial ("Sarah, why don't you be recorder for this activity. Girls have better handwriting.") or harmful ("I refuse to hire a red-haired employee. They have such bad tempers!"). Even when trivial or positive, bias can be frustrating and demoralizing to the target. We all have biases, because we all have blind spots in our knowledge of others. We may not even know that the things we believe to be true are stereotypes, and we are often unaware of the influence media has on our understanding of the world. (If you want to explore your own biases, check out Project Implicit, a Harvard-run on-line experiment on implicit bias. Warning: you can learn some disturbing things about yourself with these tests! Remember, we all have biases.)

Institutional Racism (also called Structural Racism, or simply Racism): Institutional racism is when a society is structured to give automatic advantages or disadvantages to one race or another. Some of these advantages and disadvantages are overt, ugly, and obvious. For example, in the Jim Crow South, African-American leaders were targeted for lynching. So business-owners who were "too" successful, union-organizers, and people who tried to stand up for their rights were killed with impunity, which meant that African-Americans were kept by law and by threat of violence from obtaining the benefits of the American Dream. Since the police and judicial system supported Jim Crow by refusing to prosecute or stop lynchers, as well as through laws that codified the different rights based on race, this is an obvious example of institutional racism. Sometimes, the systemic advantages or disadvantages within a society are not as obvious. For example, today, only 23% of African-American school children attend schools that are majority white (this number was 44% in 1988). This matters, because in the United States, schools with 90% or more White pupils spend $733 more per student on average than schools that are 90% or more non-white. As school segregation increases (yes, school segregation is increasing in the U.S. right now), the problem gets worse.

How does biodiversity pattern?

We're all unique. Even identical twins are phenotypically different, although their genotypes are the same. Some patterns in biodiversity are based on the environment where our ancestors lived. For example, melanin is the pigment made in your skin. Melanin protects the folic acid in your body from being broken down by the sun's radiation. Folic acid is critical for successful pregnancies, so obviously natural selection favors individuals who produce enough melanin to protect it, especially in areas near the equator where there is always a lot of sunshine. However, when some populations moved to far northern or far southern latitudes, they were not exposed to as much sun. In fact, in cold, northern environments, people frequently don't get enough sun to create vitamin D, which is also critically needed by our bodies. The populations in these higher latitudes underwent natural selection to produce less melanin and allow more sun exposure to create vitamin D. Their skin still has the same number of cells for creating melanin, but they don't work as well. (That is, we are all trying to have dark skin, some of us are just really bad at it.) The result is much paler skin color in populations that adapted to higher latitudes.

Skin color, then, is an adaptation to the environment. If you were to compare someone whose ancestors were from Nigeria to someone whose ancestors were from Finland, you would see an obvious difference in their skin color. However, if you were to walk from Finland to Nigeria, you wouldn't pass a line with light-skinned people on one side and dark-skinned people on the other. There is no categorical change from light skin to dark skin. Instead, skin color changes are gradual. Melanin to protect folic acid becomes more important the closer you get to the equator, so you can see a slow change in the populations with skin color getting darker and darker. Skin color, like height and other polygenic traits, is a continuum, not categorical. This is true for most of the physical traits we use to distinguish different populations.

Most environmental adaptations, like skin color, are clinal in distribution. That means they change gradually over the landscape and don't form discrete categories. Skin color is not the only example of a clinal distribution of traits. Blood type is also clinally distributed across the landscape, as are other adaptations to the environment, like height/weight ratios, nose size, and hairiness.

Why do we say race is a cultural construct?

Race refers to the categories that different cultures use to describe human diversity. We humans like to categorize. It's a major part of our adaptation, and it's important for proper mental functioning. For example, we categorize plants into "edible" and "poisonous", and these categories allow us to think and talk about different plants without having to describe their exact biochemistry every time they are mentioned. We frequently use arbitrary categories to describe discrete segments of phenomena that aren't actually categorical.

For example, time is a reality, but our culture uses arbitrary divisions like "hours" and "minutes" to divide time into chunks so we can easily measure and discuss it. But "hours" and "minutes" don't have inherent reality. We could decide there were five long "floobars" in a day, each divided into seventeen "flipperdoos", and that would be an equally valid way of measuring time. What makes "hours" and "minutes" useful is that we share these concepts as a culture (and in fact worldwide). A similar argument could be made about temperature. Temperature is a reality, but the "degrees" we use to divide it into categories are arbitrary numbers that someone just made up. And, in fact, more than one way of categorizing temperature is used, even here in the United States. Some of us use Fahrenheit, some Celsius, some Kelvin, some the traditional Minnesotan temperature categories ("hot enough for ya?", "nice day, innit?", and "cold enough for ya?" and "oofdah!").

Race is a cultural construct, because different races are arbitrary categories imposed on human biodiversity. They are not biological realities. Just like measurements of time and temperature, racial categories are ways of breaking a continuum into convenient little boxes. In the modern U.S. our racial boxes are drawn using skin color and facial features, but we could create an entirely different way of categorizing human diversity, for example based on ear size or blood type, and it would be equally valid. How do we know this is true? Because cultures all over the world and through time have observed the same reality of human diversity and used radically different racial categories to describe it. If you were to travel outside of Europe and North America, you would find that people who would be considered "Black" in the United States might be called "White" or some other category entirely, in Brazil or Kenya or Indonesia. Even in the United States, racial categories vary by region. Here in the Midwest, I'm "White", but in the Southwest, I'm an "Anglo".

Please note, when I say that race is a "cultural construction", I'm not making a contentious claim. In fact, it's pure semantics. We use "race" to put people into discrete categories, but the reality of human diversity is clearly not discrete. For example, Thomas Jefferson, our second president and drafter of the Declaration of Independence, was a slave-owner. He married Martha Skelton, his third cousin, and they had a number of children, only two of whom survived to adulthood. Jefferson also had many children with one of his slaves, Sally Hemmings. Sally Hemmings was the half sister of Martha Skelton (they shared a father). Jefferson's children by Skelton and Hemmings, therefore, were not only half-siblings through their father, but also first cousins through their mothers. Genetically speaking, the children had a huge amount of genetic overlap. Yet, according to the racial categories used at the time (and now), the children of Sally Hemmings were Black, and the children of Martha Skelton were white.

Many societies did/do not recognize "race" at all. The early European colonists in North America, in fact, did not have a concept of race similar to our own. They knew about diversity; people from Europe, Asia, and Africa had come in frequent contact since the Roman period. They recognized that people from farther south had darker skin, and that people from farther east had a different facial structure, but until the last 500 years, European people did not divide the world's diversity into the racial categories we know today.

Systems of racial classification come from a particular historical context, and ours evolved as part of the cultural and economic system of the British American colonies. The first Black Americans were freemen, indentured servants, and slaves. The same could be said of the white and Native American laborers in the colonies, although white slavery was virtually non-existent. But the early colonists would not call people from Africa "Black". People were described mostly as Christian or non-Christian, and by their social class and labor status. Certainly, differences in skin color were recognized, but Christian people of African descent frequently married Europeans and Native Americans in the early colonial period. Slaves and indentured servants were at the bottom of the social order, regardless of their skin color, and were seen to have more in common with each other than with the upper classes.

But this changed as the labor needs of the new colonies grew. The European colonists tried to engage in European-style agriculture, which worked fine in Europe, where there were lots of people and little land. The colonies had lots of land but not enough people. Native American communities were susceptible to European diseases, so the wealthier colonists tried to meet their labor needs with kidnapped African slaves.

Slavery had existed in Europe for a very long time, but it wasn't racially based. People could be sold into slavery as a result of crimes or debt. War captives could be enslaved. Slavery wasn't necessarily for life, however. A slave might expect to be set free after a certain number of years, and the slave's children may never be slaves. This traditional European type of slavery didn't serve the needs of the colonial landowners, who wanted a lot of cheap labor. So, the slavery system that developed in the North American colonies was very different. Slaves were denied rights and opportunities for freedom that had traditionally been given to them, and their children were bound into the same institution.

European colonists recognized this new type of slavery was contrary to their traditional moral code. So, they developed a system of racial categories that could be used to justify slavery by claiming that people of African descent were inherently inferior. This is when the racial system we know today first developed. "Black" people didn't become slaves, slaves became "Black", as a way of justifying their treatment.

Because race is culturally constructed, our racial categorizations can change over time, and they have. Often these changes reflected the power dynamics within the country. During the first large wave of immigration from Ireland and Italy, the Irish and Italians were considered non-white. But as those communities integrated into the United States, and gained economic and political power, they became white. Their ancestry and physical features didn't change, but their racial category did, as they gained status.

This type of racial categorization is not just seen in the United States. During World War II, for example, the Nazi party defined people as "Jews" if they wanted to eliminate them for political, military, or economic reasons. Large numbers of Catholic Poles became "Jews", and the Poles in general were defined as a different race from the rest of Europe. This racial categorization was used to justify their conquest and extermination. Poland suffered 20% of the total casualties in World War II.

Humans are expert categorizers, but we categorize for a purpose. We create categories that fit our economic, political, social, or physical needs. These can be categories meant for good (categorizing plants as "edible" or "poisonous" for example), or they can be meant to disenfranchise, to enslave, or to destroy. But it's important to recognize that the categorization itself is the weapon, that it's tied into the political and economic aims of the people who are wielding it. The categories are not the reality of biological diversity.

When an anthropologist says that race is a culturally constructed category, she is saying that racial categories are arbitrary boxes placed on top of continuous diversity; that different cultures can define race differently; and that race isn't a reflection of ancestry, it's a reflection of power.