Throughout history, people have used the concept of race to categorize humans into groups, based on their physical appearance and characteristics. Those groups became known as races, and the term is still widely used today. While many scholars believe that biological concepts of race have a role in human classification, others see the racial idea as a cultural construct. The article below examines the debate between the two views and highlights some of the research that anthropologists have conducted in order to understand the meaning of race.
Historically, races have referred to hierarchical categories that were established by different cultures for various purposes. For example, European Enlightenment philosophers of the 17th century categorized the world into categories based on secular reasoning and rationality, as opposed to faith-based understandings of the world. This new way of thinking expanded into a belief that the natural laws of the world included the ability to categorize the people of the world by race.
The idea of a fixed, distinguishable group based on physical characteristics was brought to the United States by European colonists and was reinforced with the arrival of African slaves in the 1800s. The race concept became a justification for exploitation of the labor of Africans and other nonwhite people in American society. The idea of race also served to justify discrimination against these groups, such as limiting opportunities for education, housing, employment and other benefits.
In the early 1900s, academic anthropologists, such as Franz Boas, began to challenge the validity of the concept of biological race, and other scholars criticized its scientific basis. Boas argued that anthropologists had relied too much on the idea of innate differences when analyzing human variation. Among other things, he contested the notion that cranium size was a significant distinguishing feature of human races.
Boas shifted the focus of anthropological study from the assumption that physical traits were universally present across all individuals to a more cultural analysis. He believed that a person’s culture and environment had a much greater influence on his or her physical characteristics than did the person’s genes. Other academics followed suit and shifted their attention from the biology of a person’s ancestry to the cultural definition of a person’s race (Bernasconi and Lott, 2000).
Social constructivists, like Sally Haslanger, argue that the idea of a human race is entirely cultural. They define a person’s membership in a particular race as requiring three criteria: 1) that members are observable or imagined to have certain bodily features that are evidence of certain ancestry from certain geographical locations; 2) that the satisfaction of the first two criteria allows for systemic subordination or privilege; and 3) that the fulfillment of these requirements plays a direct role in members’ systems of power relations. However, they do not exclude the possibility of a genetic component to racial identity (Haslanger, 2010; 2019). This is called the hybrid hypothesis. This view is a synthesis of the ideas of the sociocultural and biological constructivists.