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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The second edition of the bestselling title on modern notions of race, providing timely examination of perspectives on race, racism, and human biological variation
In this fully updated second edition of this popular text on the study of race, Alan Goodman, Yolanda Moses, and Joseph Jones take a timely look at modern ideas surrounding race, racism, and human diversity, and consider the ways that ideas about race have changed over time. New material in the second edition covers recent history and emerging topics in the study of race. The second edition has also been updated to account for advancements in the study of human genetic variation, which provide further evidence that race is an entirely social phenomenon. RACE compels readers to carefully consider their own ideas about race and the role that race plays in the world around them.
- Examines the ways perceptions of race influence laws, customs, and social institutions in the US and around the world
- Explores the impact of race and racism on health, wealth, education, and other domains of life
- Includes guest essays by noted scholars, a complete bibliography, and a full glossary
- Stands as an ideal text for courses on race, racism, and cultural and economic divides
- Combines insights and examples from science, history, and personal narrative
- Includes engaging photos, illustrations, timelines, and diagrams to illustrate important concepts
To read author Alan Goodman's recent blog post on the complicated relationship between race and biology, please click here.
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Table of Contents
Cover
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
1 Introducing Race, Human Variation, and Racism
PART 1: HISTORIES OF RACE, DIFFERENCE, AND RACISM
2 Inventing Race
Race: The Unnatural History of an Idea
A Recent Human Invention
References
Additional Resources
3 Creating Race
AUDREY SMEDLEY
The Origin of the Ideology of Race
Creating Race
Conclusions
References
Additional Resources
4 Human Mismeasure
JOE WATKINS
Deracializing the Past Archaeologists and Native American Relationships in the Age of Racialization
Mismeasuring Humans
References
Additional Resources
5 Inventing Whiteness
NELL IRVIN PAINTER
Early American White People Observed
CAROL C. MUKHOPADHYAY
“Caucasian”
Whiteness
Conclusions
References
Additional Resources
6 Separate and Unequal
JONATHAN ODELL
Learning Jim Crow
IAN F. HANEY LÓPEZ
Colorblindness
Separate and Unequal
References
Additional Resources
PART 2: WHY HUMAN VARIATION IS
NOT
RACIAL
7 Introduction: Race ≠ Human Biological Variation
Isn't Race Biologically Obvious?
Humans Do Vary Biologically
Variation ≠ Race
Conclusions
References
Additional Resources
8 Skin Deep?
Life Under the Sun: An Evolutionary Balance
Skin Color
Skin Color, the Sun, and Evolution
NINA G. JABLONSKI
The Evolution and Meaning of Human Skin Color Variation
Skin Color Varies Gradually and Does Not Explain Deeper Traits
Conclusions
References
Additional Resources
9 Sickle Cell Disease: Not for Blacks Only
Medical History: The Discovery of “Strangely Shaped” Red Blood Cells
What Is Sickle Cell? Genetics and Physiological Consequences
An Unnatural History of the Mosquito, Humans, and Malaria
Race and Sickle Cell
Race and Athletic Performance
Conclusions
References
Additional Resources
10 The Apportionment of Variation,
or …
: Why We Are All Africans Under the Skin
Ashley Montagu: Exposing the Myth of Race
Richard Lewontin: The Apportionment of Variation
An Interview with Richard Lewontin
Updating Lewontin 1: Weak Correlations and Ancestry Testing
Updating Lewontin 2: The Structure of Genetic Variation Today
Conclusions
References
Additional Resources
11 The Evolution of Variation
A History of Moving and Mixing
The Evolution of Human Variation
KENNETH KIDD
The Evolutionary Dispersal of Human Variation
Always Mixing and Moving
Conclusions
References
Additional Resources
PART 3: LIVING WITH RACE AND RACISM
12 Introduction: Living with Race and Racism
BONNIE URCIUOLI
Language and Race
References
Additional Resources
13 The Census and Making Race “Official”
History of the U.S. Census and Race
Why Is Race a Question on the Census?
Separating Black from White
The 2000 Census
How Was the 2010 Census Different for Counting Race?
ARLENE TORRES
AfroLatinx Culture in the 21st Century
Conclusions
References
Additional Resources
14 Race and Education
Closing the “Achievement Gap”
Affirmative Action
MICHAEL OMI
Asian Americans
The Unbearable Whiteness of Being?
MICA POLLOCK
Some Myths about Race that Every Educator Needs to Unlearn
Conclusions
References
Additional Resources
15 Linking Race and Wealth: An American Dilemma
Land Ownership in Colonial Times
The Housing Market
How Do Recent Immigrants Manage to Enter the Housing Market?
The Wealth Gap Persists
Wealth and Housing
Conclusions
References
Additional Resources
16 Race and Health Inequalities
Race as Risk Factor: The Case of Low Birthweight
Race, Class, and Life Expectancy
Race, Discrimination, and Stress
Race and Hypertension: The Cultural Meaning of Skin Color
Environmental Racism
BiDil and Racialized Medicine
SUSAN REVERBY
Concepts of Race, Practices of Racism
Conclusions
References
Additional Resources
17 Conclusion
What Still Needs to Be Done: The Future of Race in America and Beyond
Intersectionality
Race and Immigration
Race and the Criminal Justice System
The Study of Whiteness from the Inside Out
The Cultural, Political, and Economic Implications of Changing Demographics
The Paradox of “Colorblindness” and the United States’ Continual Focus on Race
Race and Human Rights
DEBORAH THOMAS AND KAMARI CLARKE
Globalizing Race
FAYE V. HARRISONV
Race, Racism, and Antiracism
Conclusions
References
Glossary
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 14
Table 14.1 Occupational employment in private industry, 2003, by percent
List of Illustrations
Preface
Figure 0.1 Are we so different?
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1 White supremacists in Charlottesville, VA, 2017. They marched thr...
Chapter 3
FIGURE 3.1 The “Great Chain of Being.” From Diego Valadés,
Rhetorica Christi
...
FIGURE 3.2 Lorenz Fries’ Caribbean cannibals.
FIGURE 3.3 The landing of the pilgrims at Plymouth.
FIGURE 3.4 Pocahontas.
FIGURE 3.5 The first Africans arrive in Jamestown.
FIGURE 3.6 Metacom, or King Philip.
FIGURE 3.7 Carolus Linnaeus.
FIGURE 3.8
Systema Naturae
. Scanned book cover provided by Science Museum of...
FIGURE 3.9 Thomas Jefferson.
Chapter 4
FIGURE 4.1 Illustration of skulls representing Blumenbach's five races from
FIGURE 4.2 Samuel Morton.
FIGURE 4.3 Nott and Gliddon's
Types of Mankind
. In the mid‐1800s, Josiah Not...
FIGURE 4.4 Frederick Douglass.
FIGURE 4.5 Native American lifeways on display at the American Museum of Nat...
FIGURE 4.6 Anténor Firmin.
FIGURE 4.7 Minik. In 1897, Minik, along with several relatives, was brought ...
FIGURE 4.8 Franz Boas. Boas’ study of American immigrants challenged prevail...
FIGURE 4.9 1917 Army Beta test for “innate intelligence.” Test‐takers were a...
FIGURE 4.10 Jesse Owens at the start of his record‐breaking 200‐meter race i...
FIGURE 4.11 “The Inheritance of Racial Features.” From the poster series “Th...
FIGURE 4.12 Kennewick Man. This reconstruction of his head by anthropologist...
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1 Map of the distribution of European race. In the early part of th...
FIGURE 5.2 Caricature of the unassimilable Irish.
FIGURE 5.3
Visit of the Ku‐Klux
.
FIGURE 5.4 Native children forced to attend boarding school.
FIGURE 5.5 Anti‐Chinese “Workingmen's Party” poster.
FIGURE 5.6 The Cliff Dwellers’ Village at the 1904 World's Fair.
FIGURE 5.7 Booker T. Washington.
FIGURE 5.8
The Birth of a Nation
.
FIGURE 5.9 Lucky Brown Pressing Oil.
FIGURE 5.10 The cast of
Leave It to Beaver
.
FIGURE 5.11 “Race tag.”
Chapter 6
FIGURE 6.1 Slave auction advertisement.
FIGURE 6.2 Harriet Tubman.
FIGURE 6.3 Dred Scott.
FIGURE 6.4 Mid‐19th‐century advertisement encouraging westward migration....
FIGURE 6.5 “Some reasons for Chinese exclusion.” 1902 American Federation of...
FIGURE 6.6 Wong Kim Ark.
FIGURE 6.7 Copy of a composite photograph of the heads of justices from vari...
FIGURE 6.8 Thurgood Marshall.
FIGURE 6.9 Social Security poster.
FIGURE 6.10 Japanese Americans bound for Manzanar “war relocation authority ...
FIGURE 6.11 George McLaurin, required to sit apart from white students.
FIGURE 6.12 Rosa Parks following her arrest for violating segregation law....
FIGURE 6.13 President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act into law, July 2, 1...
FIGURE 6.14 U.S. presidents to 2016.
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1 Jeff Van Gundy and Yao Ming. Race does not describe or explain th...
Figure 7.2 Race is like a gun. One could say it is not the gun that maims an...
Figure 7.3 Kenyan children.
Figure 7.4 Girls from Oslo.
Figure 7.5 Cube of variation. The cube visually shows the idea of trait inde...
Figure 7.6 “The Tall and Short of It.” Photograph # NH 45759.
Figure 7.7 Silhouettes of individuals, from short to tall.
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1 Rainbow of human skin colors. Note the continuous variation in sk...
Figure 8.2 Vitamin D metabolism. Vitamin D can come from the sun, turning a ...
Figure 8.3 Map of human skin color distribution in native populations by reg...
Figure 8.4 The layers of human skin. Cutaway of a layer of skin, showing the...
Figure 8.5 Inuit children. Their skin color (melanization) is relatively dar...
Figure 8.6 Radiograph of a child with rickets, a condition due to vitamin D ...
Figure 8.7 Von Luschan color tiles. These tiles were used to match skin colo...
Figure 8.8 Skin reflectance spectrophotometer.
Figure 8.9 Walk from Nairobi to Oslo.
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1 (a) Normal red blood cells and (b) sickled red blood cells. Rich ...
Figure 9.2 The structure of hemoglobin. Human hemoglobin molecules consist o...
Figure 9.3 Cross‐section of a blood vessel with (a) normally shaped red bloo...
Figure 9.4 How individuals might inherit sickle cell disease and sickle cell...
Figure 9.5 Pathway by which individuals contract malaria. An
Anopheles
mosqu...
Figure 9.6 Farming in humid climates, producing pools of stagnant water, is ...
Figure 9.7
Anopheles minimus
. In order to contract malaria, humans must come...
Figure 9.8 Distribution of malaria (left) and the sickle cell allele (right)...
Figure 9.9 Frank Giacomazza and his daughter, Angelina.
Chapter 10
Figure 10.1 Venn diagrams representing three views of human genetic variatio...
Figure 10.2 Bar graph of the average genetic differences within and between ...
Figure 10.3 Venn diagram of human genetic diversity based on data from Yu et...
Chapter 11
Figure 11.1 “21 A Bus” (part of Lake Street USA series, 1997–2000).
Figure 11.2 Dominos as a metaphor for the spread of genetic variation. The f...
Figure 11.3 A pointillist view of human evolution and variation. (a) The gen...
Figure 11.4 Major routes of migration of males (as shown by Y chromosome dat...
Figure 11.5 Trade routes ca. 800 to 1000 years ago, based on archeological e...
Figure 11.6 Ear ornament made of seashell from the Gulf Coast, produced some...
Figure 11.7 Costa Rican jade pendant. Beginning around 2600 years ago, jade ...
Figure 11.8 Henry Greely.
Figure 11.9 Alondra Nelson.
Figure 11.10 Kim TallBear.
Figure 11.11 Duana Fullwiley.
Chapter 12
Figure 12.1 Taking a knee. Taking a knee has historically been a way to pray...
Chapter 13
Figure 13.1 Students and a faculty advisor from Macalester College in St. Pa...
Figure 13.2 U.S. census race (and “color”) categories, 1790–2010.
Figure 13.3 Enslaved African American family.
Figure 13.4 Closing the gate on racially undesirable Chinese immigrants. Car...
Figure 13.5 Japanese Americans being relocated to internment camps.
Figure 13.6 Alabama physician Josiah Nott.
Figure 13.7 Asian immigrants arriving at Angel Island, about 1910.
Figure 13.8 Romina Takimoto.
Figure 13.9 South Asian girl.
Figure 13.10 Deportees waiting at a train station in Los Angeles, March 9, 1...
Figure 13.11 Immigration reform activists protest in Washington, DC (May 201...
Figure 13.12 The children in this family can now choose how the census class...
Figure 13.13 Kemi Adeyemi.
Figure 13.14 “I am a person.” Used with permission of Chronicle Books LLC, S...
Figure 13.15 “I'm a grown man who just exposed my breasts to a complete stra...
Figure 13.16 A wide range of people are classified together within the censu...
Figure 13.17 Tinbete Ermyas.
Figure 13.18 Jessica Masterson.
Figure 13.19 United States Census Bureau 2010 questionnaire.
Chapter 14
Figure 14.1 Busing. Boston, 1976.
Figure 14.2 Students in classroom.
Figure 14.3 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the GI Bill into law.
Figure 14.4 Tuskegee Institute (later, Tuskegee University).
Figure 14.5 Supporters and opponents of affirmative action.
Figure 14.6 President Lyndon B. Johnson. LBJ Library.
Figure 14.7 2003 U.S. Supreme Court.
Chapter 15
Figure 15.1 Native lands today. More than 60 percent of the land on Indian r...
Figure 15.2 Map of Cherokee lands. The red outline shows their extent prior ...
Figure 15.3 President Andrew Jackson.
Figure 15.4
The Trail of Tears
, 1942. One‐fourth of the Cherokee Nation, a...
Figure 15.5
American Progress
, 1872. An angelic personification of the Uni...
Figure 15.6 Land transferred to the United States at the end of the Mexican–...
Figure 15.7 Del Valle family, Rancho Camulos, Ventura County, 1888.
Figure 15.8 Anti‐Japanese discrimination in California, c. 1920.
Figure 15.9 Heart Mountain Relocation Center, Heart Mountain, Wyoming, 1942....
Figure 15.10 U.S. home‐ownership rates, 2005.
Figure 15.11 1937 map of Syracuse, New York, showing “undesirable” neighborh...
Figure 15.12 Displaced New Orleans residents take shelter in the Houston Ast...
Figure 15.13 Lynju Yang and John Sou Yang.
Figure 15.14 Race and the wealth gap. These piles of cash represent the aver...
Chapter 16
Figure 16.1 Distribution of birth weights in Illinois, 1980–95.
Figure 16.2 Life expectancy at birth by education, race, and gender.
Figure 16.3
Salud
, 2003 (acrylic on canvas) by Xavier Cortada (contemporary ...
Figure 16.4 Prevalence of hypertension in Africa and in diasporic Africans....
Figure 16.5 Measuring blood pressure.
Figure 16.6 Socioeconomic status, skin color, and blood pressure.
Figure 16.7 Race, pollution, and health. Industrial pollutants have a dispro...
Figure 16.8 BiDil.
Chapter 17
Figure 17.1 I can't breathe. Protest march. Wikimedia creative commons.
Figure 17.2 Rates of incarceration by race.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
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The Authors
Alan H. Goodman is Professor of biological anthropology at Hampshire College and former Vice President of Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty. He has written extensively on human variation and the biological consequences of inequality and poverty and co‐leads the RACE national public education project sponsored by the AAA and funded by NSF and the Ford Foundation. Goodman is a former President of the AAA.
Yolanda T. Moses is Professor of anthropology and recent Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Excellence and Equity at the University of California, Riverside. A cultural anthropologist, she has published extensively on issues of social inequality in complex societies and cultural diversity in higher education. She co‐leads the RACE national education project and is a former President of the AAA.
Joseph L. Jones is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the College of William & Mary. A biological anthropologist, his work involves descendant community engagement and skeletal research on African diasporic biohistory and health. He has published on slavery and environmental lead exposure at the New York African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan. Jones is former RACE project manager for the American Anthropological Association.
RACE
Are We So Different?
Second Edition
Alan H. GoodmanYolanda T. MosesJoseph L. Jones
This second edition first published 2020© 2020 American Anthropological Association
Edition history: American Anthropological Association (1e, 2012)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
The right of Alan H. Goodman, Yolanda T. Moses, and Joseph L. Jones to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with law.
Registered OfficesJohn Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USAJohn Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Goodman, Alan H., author. | Moses, Yolanda T., author. | Jones, Joseph L., author.Title: Race : are we so different? / Alan H. Goodman, Yolanda T. Moses, Joseph L. Jones.Description: Second edition. | Hoboken, NJ : Wiley‐Blackwell, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2019040592 (print) | LCCN 2019040593 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119472476 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119472377 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119472414 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Race–Social aspects–United States. | Race–Social aspects. | Racism–United States. | Racism.Classification: LCC E185.86 . G637 2020 (print) | LCC E185.86 (ebook) | DDC 305.800973–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040592LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040593
Cover Design: WileyCover Image: Courtesy of American Anthropological Association
List of Illustrations
1.1
White supremacists in Charlottesville, VA, 2017
The imaginary of whiteness
3.1
The “Great Chain of Being”
3.2
Lorenz Fries’ Caribbean cannibals
3.3
The Landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth
3.4
Pocahontas
3.5
The first Africans arrive in Jamestown
3.6
Metacom, or King Philip
3.7
Carolus Linnaeus
3.8
Systema Naturae
3.9
Thomas Jefferson
4.1
Blumenbach’s five races
4.2
Samuel Morton
4.3
Nott and Gliddon’s
Types of Mankind
4.4
Frederick Douglass
4.5
Native American lifeways display c. 1902
4.6
Anténor Firmin
4.7
Minik
4.8
Franz Boas
4.9
1917 Army Beta test for “innate intelligence”
4.10
Jesse Owens at the start of his record‐breaking 200‐meter race in the 1936 Olympics
4.11
“The Inheritance of Racial Features”
4.12
Kennewick Man
5.1
Map of the distribution of the European race
5.2
Caricature of the unassimilable Irish
5.3
Visit of the Ku‐Klux
5.4
Native children forced to attend boarding school
5.5
Anti‐Chinese “Workingmen’s Party” poster
5.6
The Cliff Dwellers’ Village at the 1904 World’s Fair
5.7
Booker T. Washington
5.8
The Birth of a Nation
5.9
Lucky Brown Pressing Oil
5.10
The cast of
Leave It to Beaver
5.11
“Race tag”
6.1
Slave auction advertisement
6.2
Harriet Tubman
6.3
Dred Scott
6.4
Mid‐19th‐century advertisement encouraging westward migration
6.5
“Some reasons for Chinese exclusion”
6.6
Wong Kim Ark
6.7
Composite photograph of the heads of justices from various years
6.8
Thurgood Marshall
6.9
Social Security poster
6.10
Japanese Americans bound for Manzanar
6.11
George McLaurin, required to sit apart from white students
6.12
Rosa Parks following her arrest for violating segregation law
6.13
President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act into law
6.14
U.S. presidents to 2016
Race is not “in the blood”
7.1
Jeff Van Gundy and Yao Ming
7.2
Race is like a gun
7.3
Kenyan children
7.4
Girls from Oslo
7.5
Cube of variation
7.6
“The Tall and Short of It”
7.7
Silhouettes of individuals, from short to tall
8.1
Rainbow of human skin colors
8.2
Vitamin D metabolism
8.3
Map of human skin color distribution
8.4
The layers of human skin
8.5
Inuit children
8.6
Radiograph of a child with rickets
8.7
Von Luschan color tiles
8.8
Skin reflectance spectrophotometer
8.9
Walk from Nairobi to Oslo
9.1
Normal and sickled red blood cells
9.2
The structure of hemoglobin
9.3
Cross‐section of a blood vessel with normal and sickled red blood cells
9.4
How individuals might inherit sickle cell disease and sickle cell trait
9.5
Pathway by which individuals contract malaria
9.6
Farming in humid climates, producing pools of stagnant water
9.7
Anopheles minimus
9.8
Distributions of malaria and sickle cell allele
9.9
Frank Giacomazza and his daughter, Angelina
10.1
Venn diagrams representing three views of human genetic variation
10.2
Bar graph of the average genetic differences within and between “races” or continental groups
10.3
Venn diagram of human genetic diversity
11.1
“21 A Bus”
11.2
Dominos as a metaphor for the spread of genetic variation
11.3
A pointillist view of human evolution and variation
11.4
Major routes of migration
11.5
Trade routes ca. 800 to 1000 years ago
11.6
Ear ornament made of seashell from the Gulf Coast
11.7
Costa Rican jade pendant
11.8
Henry Greely
11.9
Alondra Nelson
11.10
Kim TallBear
11.11
Duana Fullwiley
“Chief Illiniwek,” the mascot of the University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign
12.1
Taking a knee
13.1
Students and a faculty advisor from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota
13.2
U.S. census race categories, 1790–2010
13.3
Enslaved African American family
13.4
Closing the gate on racially undesirable Chinese immigrants
13.5
Japanese Americans being relocated to internment camps
13.6
Alabama physician Josiah Nott
13.7
Asian immigrants arriving at Angel Island, about 1910
13.8
Romina Takimoto
13.9
South Asian girl
13.10
Deportees waiting at a train station in Los Angeles, March 9, 1932
13.11
Immigration reform activists protest in Washington, DC
13.12
The children in this family can now choose how the census classifies them
13.13
Kemi Adeyemi
13.14
“I am a person”
13.15
“I’m a grown man who just exposed my breasts to a complete stranger”
13.16
A wide range of people are classified together within the census’s “black or African American, or Negro” category
13.17
Tinbete Ermyas
13.18
Jessica Masterson
13.19
United States Census Bureau 2010 questionnaire
14.1
Busing. Boston, 1976
14.2
Students in classroom
14.3
President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the GI Bill into law
14.4
Tuskegee Institute (later, Tuskegee University)
14.5
Supporters and opponents of affirmative action
14.6
President Lyndon Baines Johnson
14.7
2003 U.S. Supreme Court
15.1
Native lands today
15.2
Cherokee lands
15.3
President Andrew Jackson
15.4
The Trail of Tears
15.5
American Progress
15.6
Land transferred to the United States at the end of the Mexican–American War
15.7
Del Valle family
15.8
Anti‐Japanese discrimination in California, c. 1920
15.9
Heart Mountain Relocation Center
15.10
U.S. home‐ownership rates, 2005
15.11
1937 map of Syracuse, New York
15.12
Displaced New Orleans residents take shelter in the Houston Astrodome
15.13
Lynju Yang and John Sou Yang
15.14
Race and the wealth gap
16.1
Distribution of birth weights in Illinois, 1980–95
16.2
Life expectancy at birth by education, race, and gender
16.3
Salud
16.4
Prevalence of hypertension in Africa and in diasporic Africans
16.5
Measuring blood pressure
16.6
Socioeconomic status, skin color, and blood pressure
16.7
Race, pollution, and health
16.8
BiDil
17.1
I can’t breathe
17.2
Incarceration rates by race
Preface
Figure 0.1 Are we so different?
Not unlike the networks of meaning and actions that coalesce and continually refashion the powerful idea of race, writing a multiauthored book on race comes about through the synergies of multiple personal, institutional, and professional connections. In writing this book, we have had the benefit of a large, complex, active, and supportive network. This has been invaluable in our project.
Race looks different depending on one’s experience, place, and history. We expect, then, that this book will strike each reader in slightly different ways. They may gravitate to areas that have particular, individual interest and meaning. However, this book is meant to be read from front to back as a sort of primer on race, human biological variations, and racism. It is unique with respect to the breadth of subjects covered, as well as the depth of information and analysis presented for each.
In three parts, we explain how politicians, scientists, and others created and made race biological as a justification for inequalities; why human biological categories of race are nothing more than science fiction; and how race and racism nonetheless continue to influence most aspects of our lives today. As a companion to the larger project called RACE: Are We So Different?, we have designed this book to show, in broadly accessible language, how these three topics are linked inextricably. Seeing these connections, whether they are obvious or hidden, is fundamental to any real understanding of race and racism. We hope that our main messages are expressed in ways that resonate with all readers.
The project that led to this book first took recognizable shape in 1997. One of us, Yolanda Moses, then president of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), the world’s largest and foremost organization of professional anthropologists, called together a group of scholars from the subfields of anthropology to talk to each other about what race means in each.
The participants came out of that session with a clear consensus that, rather than occupying conceptually different universes, we had many points of agreement: much more agreement than difference. We came to these points from different intellectual histories and with different observations and data. We found that the subfields of anthropology, such as linguistic anthropology, archaeology, biological anthropology, and political anthropology, highlighted diverse aspects of the complexly protean idea of race and the dynamics of racism.
Remember the parable of the blindfolded individuals touching different parts of an elephant? One touches the tail and thinks she has a snake. Another touches the trunk and thinks he is feeling a wall. It was much like that. It was clear that working together, and ultimately with colleagues from other fields from physics to the humanities, was the best way of describing and understanding the whole of the elephant that is race and racism.
Finally, it was also clear just how harmful the idea of race had been and continues to be in the hands of individuals with the power to maintain and benefit from a racial status quo. Systems of inequalities were built and are maintained around the unchallenged idea that racial differences and inequalities are biological and natural. These notions reverberate even more widely today. However, it is apparent that they are refutable and simply based on bad science. This is why we felt compelled to educate that race is powerful, but not based in genes or biology, rather on a deeply held cultural and therefore changeable concept. We hope this book helps to change how we understand biological and cultural diversity.
We concluded then that we had the potential through anthropology and other sciences to talk to one another and to articulate to a larger public that race as we know it is a social construct. Through the lenses of biology (human variation), history, and lived experience, we created a multi‐layered framework to talk about what race is, and what it is not. We needed to do more than talk to our colleagues about this approach. Our students have been invaluable in this process. This book would not have been possible without them, and we hope that we will reach more college classrooms in this second edition. We need to continue to elevate the public discussions about race, bringing it back to fundamental issues such as how race came about in history and was invented, and how race and human variation are different. And we needed to try and include everyone in the discussion.
The RACE public education program, of which this book is a part, was launched by a steering committee under the guidance of the AAA and the staff leadership of Dr. Peggy Overbey. The tangible results include a website (www.understandingrace.org), created by S2N Media, Inc. (led by Kathy Prusinksi), and a museum exhibit, designed and built with our museum partners, the exceptional staff of the Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM), led by then president Eric Jolly, with the project headed by Robert Garfinkle and Joanne Jones‐Rizzi. To them, we owe our first and deepest gratitude. This book simply would never have happened if not for Robert and Joanne, their creative and resourceful team, and their courageous and collaborative spirit.
Due to the success of the first edition of this book, and because race and racism remain all too salient, we undertook an expanded and updated second edition, designed to reach a wider audience. Many of the essays are revised and will help to shed new light on topics such as slavery, scientific racism, and health and educational disparities. The science section has been updated to reflect current information on human genetic diversity. New data and analyses appear rapidly, but reaffirm a basic structure of genetic diversity completely incompatible with the idea of race.
The racial landscape has shifted since we wrote the first edition of RACE. Today, few would suggest we have entered a “post‐racial” era of American life. Unfortunately, recent years instead have seen a resurgence of antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of racism, especially since Donald Trump succeeded Barack Obama as U.S. president. Terms like “white nationalism” and “white supremacy” are once again common in public discourse amid increased police violence against communities of color and a sharp rise in anti‐immigrant sentiment. With this edition, then, we thought it important to make even clearer the connections between racial ideology – beginning with the basic belief in human biological races – and racism. Thus, we greatly expanded the sections on the politics of race and the struggles for racial justice in policing, law enforcement, and related domains.
Once again, this book is about a bad but powerful idea. We tell the story of how, at a critical point in history, some people managed to transform aspects of human variation into social vulnerability. We explore the consequences of this decision, which range from subtle but damaging microaggressions to public symbols, and from displays of hatred to state‐sanctioned separation of families and even genocide. At the same time, we acknowledge that people have always fashioned from their troubled histories collective identities. These identities engender pride and take on shared meanings beyond whatever negative experiences or attributes may be associated with them by others. Social racial identities are no different.
Ultimately, though, we ask: are we really so different, if human races never evolved but the idea of race did? For most, this question has no simple or single answer. So, we offer this book as a resource for discussing, reflecting on, and drawing your own conclusions about race and human diversity. We also invite you to join us in reclaiming human diversity from race and racism – and in celebrating the fact that our differences pale in comparison to what makes us the same.
Acknowledgments
The second edition of RACE is an outgrowth of almost two decades of work that went into the conceptualization, research, and construction of the website and especially into the creation of the components of the museum exhibit. Many people and organizations assisted AAA in developing, producing, and implementing the RACE: Are We So Different? public education program. They include the Project Advisory Board members: Michael L. Blakey (College of William and Mary), Louis Casagrande (Children’s Museum of Boston), Robert Hahn (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), Faye Harrison (University of Illinois), Thomas Holt (University of Chicago), Janis Hutchinson (University of Houston), Marvin Krislov (formerly of Oberlin College), Richard Lewontin (Harvard University), Jeffrey Long (University of New Mexico), Shirley Malcom (American Association for the Advancement of Science), Carol Mukhopadhyay (San Jose State University), Michael Omi (University of California, Berkeley), Kyeyoung Park (University of California, Los Angeles), Kenneth Prewitt (Columbia University), Enid Schildkrout (Museum for African Art), Theodore Shaw (Columbia University), Marcelo Suarez‐Orozco (New York University), David Hurst Thomas (American Museum of Natural History), Russell Thornton (University of California, Los Angeles), and Arlene Torres (City University of New York).
Additionally, AAA staff contributed extensively to the project. They include executive directors William Davis and Ed Liebow; Elaine Lynch, deputy executive director; Suzanne Mattingly, former controller; Susannah Bodman and Lauren Schwartz, former media relations associates; Lucille Horn, former meetings director; Khara Minter, former meetings coordinator; Stacy Lathrop and Dinah Winnick, former managing editors, Anthropology News; Oona Schmid, former director of publishing; Damon Dozier, former director of public affairs; Amy Goldenberg, managing editor, Anthropology News; Mark Booker, production editor, Anthropology News; and Carla Fernandez, meetings planner and exhibits manager.
Felica Gomez worked as an intern on the project and coauthored the family guide published on the RACE Project website. Amy Beckrich served as project assistant, helping to coordinate the massive project and keep everyone in line. Because of her excitement about the project, Mary Margaret Overbey left a permanent position at AAA and was for many years the force behind the project as its director through to the completion of the website and exhibit. Leslie Walker and Alexandra Frankel were invaluable in helping to pull together images for the second edition.
The exhibit and the book have benefited immensely from collaborations with California Newsreel. Under the directorship of Larry Adelman, California Newsreel produced the exceptional video “Race: The Power of an Illusion” (see www.pbs.org/race). This award‐winning documentary film has been an inspiration to our project, and in fact we have portions of two interviews from it in this book.
A number of eminent scholars from a cross‐section of disciplines graciously agreed, under tight deadlines and time constraints, to write and include their voices in the form of guest essays; our profound thanks go to Kamari Clarke, Faye Harrison, Nina Jablonski, Kenneth Kidd, Ian Haney López, Carol Mukhopadhyay, Michael Omi, Nell Irvin Painter, Mica Pollock, Susan Reverby, Audrey Smedley, Deborah Thomas, Arlene Torres, Bonnie Urciuoli, and Joseph Watkins for participating in the first edition and for their timely updates to the second. Other individuals have been directly quoted or featured in the book via excerpts from “Race: The Power of an Illusion” or their inclusion in the museum exhibit. These include scientists Joseph Graves and Richard Lewontin. The story of sickle cell is movingly told by Frank and Vickie Giacomazza.
At Wiley Blackwell, we were guided and encouraged through the first edition by Rosalie Robertson and Julia Kirk. Rosalie saw at the very start the importance of our project. In an incredibly efficient manner, she and Julia were able to elicit seven insightful and very constructive manuscript reviews, which we used to enhance our final product. We also wish to thank these anonymous reviewers.
For the second edition, we were guided and encouraged by Rachel Greenberg and Richard Sampson. Richard doggedly helped secure permissions and Rachel expertly oversaw all aspects of production. The cover was designed by Joanna Vieira.
Neither would this project have come about without the many individuals who have allowed us to use their images and text (see individual credits). Major financial support for the project was provided by the AAA and the National Science Foundation (NSF). The Ford Foundation specifically provided funding to start the project and to produce the book that you are now holding. We express our deep gratitude to the funding program officers: Al Desena at NSF and Margaret Wilkerson, Gertrude Fraser, Irma McClaurin, and Irene Korenfield at the Ford Foundation.
In the course of this project, we have all benefited from help in many forms and from many people. Alan Goodman wishes to thank numerous students, staff, and faculty at Hampshire College and other venues, not least the 8th graders at Amherst Regional Middle School, Massachusetts, who helped in thinking through the best way to communicate ideas around race and human variation: In the early 1990s, my colleagues and I helped organized “teach‐ins” on race, not because of any crisis but just to educate about the myriad ways that race permeates our (mostly white) lives. My father taught me to be critical and always question my position. I learned about the power of stories from filmmakers Larry Adelman, Christine Sommers, and Lew Smith and exhibit developers including Joanne Jones‐Rizzi and Robert Garfinkle. In addition to advisory board members, many colleagues have helped me, including, but not limited to, Larry Adelman, George Armelagos, Lee Baker, Michael Blakey, Joseph Graves, Faye Harrison, Evelynn Hammonds, Thomas Leatherman, Richard Lewontin, Jonathan Marks, Michael Montoya, Lynn Morgan, Leith Mullings, Dean Robinson, and Banu Subramanian. Chaia Heller, my spouse and a cultural anthropologist, added tremendous insight into how to communicate the power of the idea of race, not to mention giving me daily moral support. I hope this book will help to unveil some of the systems behind race and racism, and why racism hurts.
Yolanda Moses wishes to thank the many people who have helped to make this project a reality for her and who have given her personal support over the years: At UC Riverside, the intellectual contributions of Tom Patterson, Wendy Ashmore, Christine Gailey, Sang Hee Lee, T. S. Harvey, and Juliet McMullin have been invaluable to me as I have worked on ideas for this book. I thank them for that support. A special thanks goes to the students in my classes who challenged me to explain the intricacies of the social construction of race and human variation in ways that tracked with their everyday experiences of race and racism. I want to thank the following graduate students who helped me with various tasks connected to this book, from basic research to helping to track down numerous permissions: Scott Smith, John Gust, Jenny Banh, Priscilla LoForte, Isabel Placentia, Richard Alvarez, Linda Hall, Holly Okonkwo, and Doris Logan. Special thanks to staff members Felecia Garrett and Sonia Zamora who helped me to type early drafts. And finally, thanks to my family, my husband of almost 45 years James F. Bawek, and my two grown daughters, Shana and Toni, who have been my sounding board for my ideas, research, and activities for this project since its inception. To my 97‐year‐old mother, Willie Lee Moses, I give thanks for her encouragement to complete this project so that others may know what it means “to not live a day of your life without thinking about race.”
Joseph Jones would first like to thank Alan Goodman and Yolanda Moses for their invaluable support and guidance towards realizing a vision of public anthropology and social justice. Numerous others who share this vision gave generously of their time and knowledge: They include Michael Blakey and Mark Mack (who together introduced me to the worlds of anthropology at Howard University), Faye Harrison, Audrey Smedley, R. Brooke Thomas, Alan Swedlund, Bob Paynter, John Bracey, Maddie Marquez, Dula Amarasiriwardena, Warren Perry, John Higginson, and many more at University of Massachusetts–Amherst and outside of the academy. I hope their varied insights and influences come through as you read this text. My work has also been supported by numerous colleagues and students at the College of William and Mary. A special thanks goes to Deans Kate Conley and Virginia Torczon, and to Katie Bragdon, Brad Weiss and Martin Gallivan, Linda Triponi, and Marisa LeForge for institutional support. I also want to thank Chardé Reid for being such an inspiring graduate student and the students of my biocultural courses for keeping me hopeful! Danielle and Nia, my wife and daughter, graciously provided necessary time and encouragement. To my mother and late father, Mary and Robert Jones, I am grateful for so many enduring lessons and of course for your decades of steadfast support and confidence. My efforts here are an extension of your inability to settle for racism. May this book help others to see through social inequality to the truth of human equality.
1Introducing Race, Human Variation, and Racism
Figure 1.1 White supremacists in Charlottesville, VA, 2017. They marched through the streets while shouting “White Lives Matter!” and “Jews Will Not Replace Us!” The Charlottesville protests spurred the need to better understand race, racism, and human variation (Getty Images).
Telling me that I'm obsessed with talking about racism in America is like telling me I'm obsessed with swimming when I'm drowning.
Hari Kondabolu
I don't see color. People tell me I'm white and I believe then because police officers call me “sir.”
Stephen Colbert
Talking about race or being afraid to talk about race; talking too much or too little. It doesn't matter. We never seem to get very far.
How do we get out of this gridlock? How do we get beyond misunderstandings?
Our answer: Start asking and resolving different questions about race.
Most people think race is real, and they are obviously right. Race is real. But race isn't real in the way we have come to think of it as being real: as deep, primordial, and biological. Race, rather, is a powerful idea about biological variation that was has been used to separate and rank groups.
The purpose of this book is to lead readers to understand how race is and is not real. Simply focusing on diversity and acceptance, as is common today, misses the deeper roots of race, racial thinking, and overt racism. On the other hand, a purely scientific and objective approach to human variation fails to tell the full story of how the idea of race has shaped historical events and continues to be a powerful influence on all our lives. Importantly, it does not provide insight into the varied ways that being “raced” is experienced by individuals in different places and over time. Neither approach helps much in dislodging centuries of racial thinking and distrust.
In this book, we aim to bring together a combination of science, history, and personal experiences. The result we are hoping for is surprisingly liberating. Race has come to be a knotted ball of history, culture, identity, and biology. We aim to untangle that ball. Once unraveled, we hope you, the reader, will come to better understand the origins and significance of the biological differences among us and how the idea of race – how we misguidedly came to conceive of those differences – became such a formidable worldview.
We know that race seems obviously real to anyone immersed in North America's dominant culture. Race seems visually real. Every day, one can observe difference in outward form between individuals. Interestingly, rather than biology, race is real because of the everyday ways in which we interpret differences and invest meaning into them. It might seem counterintuitive, but race is also biological because living in a racial society with differential access to resources has effects on the body. The constant stress of racism and the economic effects of living in a racial society continue to lead to gross racial inequalities in nearly every measure of health and longevity. If race is an illusion, then it is an unusually powerful one.
Yet, what we have internalized as evidence that we have seen with our own eyes the “facts” of race, such as differences in skin color and other so‐called markers of race, simply have no inherent or deeper sociopolitical significance other than what our culture attaches to them. There is human linguistic, cultural, biological, and genetic variation. But such variation is not racial in that it does not “naturally” partition individuals into races.
A key insight from anthropology is that what we see as real is often due to what our worldviews predispose our minds to see. In much the same way that we used to think the sun revolved around the earth, we see variation as race only because the idea is all around us and is unquestioned. As former Spellman College president Beverly Tatum says, race is like smog. If we are in it, it is all we see. Moreover, it obstructs a clear vision of the true nature of difference. It is time to lift the smog.
If you are white, generally speaking you do not need to think much about your race. You might be able to think race is about others. The comedian Stephen Colbert jokes that he doesn't see race or color. Because he is white, he does not daily confront race. But then he says, “People tell me I am white and I believe them because police officers call me ‘sir’.” Colbert, here, demonstrates an insight into the fact that he does have a race. But, of course he does. It is just that his white race is “unmarked.”
While white individuals may not see or understand the salience of race, the United States and the world are most certainly enveloped in racial smog, as Tatum says. Or, to use another metaphor, race in the United States is like water for fish: it is everywhere. As Hari Kondabolu says, “Telling me that I'm obsessed with talking about racism in America is like telling me I'm obsessed with swimming when I'm drowning.”
In this book, we hope to show how the idea of race continues to have consequences, every day, for all of our lives. Race is not just a social construct, it is a social contract that has changed our minds, our bodies, and our world. The Constitution of the United States listed enslaved Africans as three‐fifths of a person. While the Thirteenth Amendment changed this formulation,1 the racial worldview is much deeper than laws and “official” statements. It is particularly enduring because the idea of race is deeply etched into our minds and institutions. We want to expose the social contract and thereby the deep roots of racial thinking. Just as weeds will return if they are not pulled out by the roots, so we will not get beyond racism unless we pay attention to its foundational ideas.
Since the first edition of this book in 2012, a series of events and actions have shown all too clearly that racial thinking is alive in well. In 2017, we witnessed the Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, with the death of Heather Heyer and chants of “Jews Will Not Replace Us” (see Figure 1.1). And in just one week in October 2018, Trump railed against immigrants from Central America and the Middle East, two African Americans were shot in a supermarket, and eleven Jews were shot in a temple in Pittsburgh.
As fundamentally woven into our minds and institutions as the idea of race is, we can change the way we understand it, and even how it is embedded in institutions. We will not do so by avoiding race or pretending that it is not salient. Rather, we will do so by engaging with the science of human variation, the history, culture, and politics of race, and everyday lived experiences of race and racism.
Our students and those who visit the exhibit that helped launch this book often have “a‐ha” moments in which they come to forever see race differently. Suddenly, race is not natural but an idea and a product of culture. Amazing! Fortunately, these insightful moments do not require advanced training in genomics, anthropology, philosophy, or any other discipline. Rather, the only requirement is openness to questioning assumptions that one thought were obviously true.
Imagine that you have lived your life in a landscape that has never led you or those around you to question that the earth is anything but flat. You go to a mountaintop and you look into the clear distance and notice that the horizon appears to bend down. That bend is a sign that the earth is round. It is time to pay attention to signs like that. However, be forewarned. The results are mind‐bending. Changes like going from seeing the earth as flat to round are what scientists call paradigm shifts. A paradigm shift, or a change in worldview, can be disorienting, and it takes a while to readjust. The good news is that paradigm shifts are how societies can become more just and how science advances.
The book in your hands aims to be a fundamental primer on the idea and reality of race and how it connects to institutional and everyday racism. Human races, we argue, are not “out there, in nature.” Rather, humans invented race. This book is organized around sections on history, science, and lived experience. The main themes are that: (1) race is a recent human invention; (2) race is about culture and not about biology;2 and (3) race and racism are imbedded in institutions and in everyday life.
Combining insights and examples from the realms of science, history, and individual stories, our aim was to write and assemble a book that is serious yet engaging and lively. Our main goal is to move readers beyond the false dichotomy of human races as being real or not. We want readers to appreciate how contemporary social and biological analyses show that race is real and how they show that it is surprisingly outmoded (chiefly, as a way to think about genetic differences among us). We want this to be a book that deeply transforms its readers. We want everyone to have an “a‐ha” moment.
Five central arguments of this book are as follows:
The idea of race was invented
. Race was invented as a way to categorize and rank groups and, by extension, individuals. The invention did not happen in an isolated laboratory or at one place and one time. Rather, this scientific and social idea slowly took hold and became more and more real through European exploration and colonization, and slavery in the Americas. In the 18th century, race may have made sense because the physical (or phenotypic) differences between Europeans and others seemed to be great.
While just a human invention, as explored in the first part of this book, the idea was politically powerful because the belief in separate and unequal races was the only potentially moral and ethical justification for the inhumanities of colonization and slavery. In Part 1, we will tell the gripping story of the interlinked social, religious, political, and scientific histories of race. Closely following the exhibit, the story is outlined in four parts.
Human biological variation is real, obvious, wonderful, and necessary
. We do vary.
Part 2
provides a primer on human genetic variation; that is, how variation is patterned within individuals and among individuals and groups. Evolutionarily speaking, even if it is not the spice of life, variety is certainly a required ingredient for the survival of our species.
The idea of race does
not
explain human variation
. The biggest myth of race is that we humans have biological races and that on a biological or, more precisely, a genetic level our race determines a good deal about how we differ from one another and our potentialities. The science of human variation, however, tells us otherwise. Race‐as‐genetic‐variation is a myth. Race neither explains variation, nor is it a useful genetic construct. In this book, we will use a number of interrelated examples to show why this is so.
Race is both stable and protean
. The idea of race is something we all share – to a degree. We argue that race today is much the same, on a fundamental level, as it was a hundred or even three hundred years ago. But the realities of race – how the ideas get into lived experiences – morph from place to place and time to time. Here, we have the opportunity to explore how some of those diverse lives were lived racially. What was it like to be a Native American and to see Europeans for the first time? What was it like to be a Japanese American during World War II? It is our expectation that understanding how race differs among diverse groups provides a deeper understanding of each group and about the idea of race itself.
We own the future of race
. How we continue to understand and use race is up to us. We hold the core belief that our book will contribute to a fundamental overhaul of how various publics think and talk about race. By explaining how the power of race was used in the past to divide us, we will show how this knowledge provides the power to understand and reunite. Once we understand what race is and is not, it ceases to become a ready excuse for the intolerable differences in our wealth, health, and other core indicators of equality and life experience.
Race is a Recent Human Invention
It's only a few hundred years old, in comparison to the lengthy span of human history. Although not scientific, the idea of race proposed that there were significant differences among people that allowed them to be grouped into a limited number of categories or races. Yet, are we so different? All humans share a common ancestry and, because each of us represents a unique combination of ancestral traits, all humans exhibit biological variation.
From the beginning, the idea of race was tied to power and hierarchy among people, with one group being viewed as superior and others as inferior. Despite disproving notions of hierarchy and removing social, economic, and political barriers, the legacy of race continues to shape the lives and relationships of people in the U.S. and around the world.
This book may challenge popular understandings about race, raise questions, and spark critical thinking. We hope the exhibition, public website, and educational materials produced by the RACE Project will foster dialogue in families and communities around the U.S. and help better relations among us all.
From American Anthropological Association (AAA) Exhibit on RACE
RACE Exhibit Introductory Video Transcript (2007)
Race.
What is race?
What do we really know about race?
Here's what we do know: Race is a short word with a long history in the United States of America. Think of the history of America and our ideas of race together, mixed up, and ever changing. Just like this painting, race was created. It is a powerful idea that was invented by society.
Race is an enduring concept that has molded our nation's economy, laws, and social institutions. It is a complex notion that has shaped each of our destinies. Many of the ideas we now associate with race originated during the European era of exploration.
Europeans like Christopher Columbus traveled overseas and encountered, and then colonized or conquered, peoples in Africa, Asia, and the Americas who looked, talked, and acted much differently from them. Naturalists and scientists then classified these differences into systems that became the foundation for the notion of race as we know it today.
In the American colonies, the first laborers were European indentured servants.
When African laborers were forcibly brought to Virginia beginning in 1619, status was defined by wealth and religion, not by physical characteristics such as skin color.
But this would change.
Over time, physical difference mattered, and with the development of the transatlantic slave trade, landowners began replacing their temporary European laborers with enslaved Africans who were held in permanent bondage. Soon a new social structure emerged based primarily on skin color, with those of English ancestry at the top and African slaves and American Indians at the bottom.
By 1776, when “all men are created equal” was written into the Declaration of Independence by a slaveholder named Thomas Jefferson, a democratic nation was born with a major contradiction about race at its core. As our new nation asserted its independence from European tyranny, blacks and American Indians were viewed as less than human and not deserving of the same liberties as whites.
