Race Flashcards
Who was the first natural philosopher to use the term “race” in a scientific application?
Buffon
Who was the first natural philosopher to divide up humans into geographic varieties of different color, but did NOT use the term “race”
Linnaeus
Linnaeus’s descriptions show that the same racial stereotypes have been used with us for three centuries
- skin color
- medical temperament
- posture
- physical traits
- behavior
- clothing
- form of government
The ideas of Buffon and Linnaeus got smooshed into the concept of____
race as a geographic variant
How has physical anthropology contributed to race?
- the field of physical anthropology has a long history of attempts to justify racism scientifically
- one preoccupation was determining the number of races
- a related aim was to rank the races in order of how “evolved” they were
Polygenism
- The idea that the different human races had different evolutionary origins
- races as different species
Monogenism
The idea that all humans share a single common origin
Race according to Darwin is polygenism…
“The diversity… shows that they graduate into each others, and that it is hardly possible to discover clear distinctive characters between them”
The classical rate concept:
A geographic variants/sub-species/species of Homo
The groups are defined by physical characteristics:
- especially skin color
- hair color and texture
- eye color and shape
- other facial features (nose and lip shape)
The groups are discrete
The groups are stable
The groups are deterministic
The scientific pursuit of race in the 18th and 19th centuries led to the establishment of the Eugenics movement, “Social Darwinism,” and the Nazi party
True
Human variation is not discrete
- There are no biological markers that appear in all members of one race and no members of another race
- the phenotypic features typically associated with race vary continuously
- the allele frequencies and genetic variation that human biologists study also vary continuously
“There are no races, there are only clines.”
Livingstone (1962)
Racial groups are not stable
- the number of groups has never been agreed on
- people racialize groups for the purpose of discrimination
(example of Italian and Irish immigrants in the US) - part of what is meant with the concept of “race as a cultural construct”
- the biological traits used to define groups are not fixed
What was used to show that southern Italians were like Africans
Head measurements
Boas challenged the idea that racial types were fixed with studies of American immigrants
He showed that measurements like cephalic index and facial width used to define racial groups changed between immigrants and their first-generation descendants
Researchers recently showed that genome of living Europeans is a mix of ____
three ancient groups
Human variation has always been______
continuous and changing
This research highlights how
- the genetic signature of a population is a snapshot in time
- populations living in those same places didn’t always have that same genetic signature
- the genetic signature of people living in a place changes over generations
An example of concordance between phenotype and genetic variation
- I can look at your skin color and guess your genotype
FALSE
Human phenotypic and genetic variation can be NON-concordant
different phenotypic traits can have different distributions
- also genotypes and phenotypes can have different distributions
An example of phenotypic NON-concordance
Where darkly pigmented skin is present with lightly pigmented hair
There are biological differences among people and _____
they are geographically patterned
The classical concept of race springs external
- present in the writings of Linnaeus in 1700s
- present in the Eugenicists/Social Darwinists in late 1800 and early 1900s
- present in the 20teens in A Troublesome Inheritance
- there are a number of discrete races
- these are “proven” by science
- these groups are associated with particular abilities
The “Anthropological Genetic Present”
- A time sometime in the mid-15th century before transoceanic European conquest, slave trade, and colonialism when we can be certain about what human variation was like
- “… allows us to talk about race, without talking about racism”
Humans distinguish themselves culturally
“… that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society”
- in other words, as the myriad things that we key on to differentiate “us” from our neighbors, “them”
- Recognizing modern humans in the fossil record is a matter of anatomically vs. behaviorally modern humans
- this is part of what it means for a group to be culturally constituted or culturally constructed… it is a grouping defined by culture
- degree of cultural distinction doesn’t always map onto the degree of genetic distinction
Boas challenged the idea that racial types were fixed with studies of American immigrants
- he showed that measurements like cephalic index and facial width used to define racial groups changed between immigrants and their first-generation descendants
- introduced the idea that race and culture are separate entities
TO understand race properly, we must:
- appreciate that it is a bicultural category
- the result of a negotiation between patterns of difference and perceptions of otherness
- sameness vs. otherness
There is NO set number of races
Arbitrary
Racial groups can encompass different things
- The Jewish race: Religious group
- The Teutonic or Nordic race: Geographic group
- The German race: Language or national group
- The White race: morphological group
Is Hispanic a race?
NO; it is an ethnicity
How is race and ancestry different?
Race is a social construct that categorizes people based on physical characteristics, while ancestry refers to a person’s familial or genetic background. While race is often used to make assumptions about individuals, ancestry provides a more specific and accurate understanding of a person’s heritage and lineage
Forensic anthropologists can take measurements from a skull and guess whether it. came from a Black American or White American with about 80-85% accuracy
ANCESTRY
Whether you find support for races in biology is a matter of confirmation bias
True
Races are NOT populations
True
Population
Group of individuals more likely to reproduce with one another than individuals outside of that group
- geographic component
- cultural component
- time component
Deme
An ecological and social unit in nature
- another word for race?
Boas
- Franz Boas that race is primary and that racism arises from conflict between races and can be mitigated primarily through race mixture (1921)
