A grouping of humans based on shared physical or social characteristics, such as skin tone, hair texture and where their ancestors are from. The word race is also used as a verb, meaning to engage in a speed contest with another person or thing.
The concept of race is both a biological and cultural term, with the scientific term population being more appropriate to use when talking about human groups. Despite its widespread usage, modern science no longer supports the idea of discrete, essentialist races. This is because a significant proportion of the traits that we associate with racial distinctions are actually the result of a combination of genetic variation (either by mutation or by gene mixing) and environmental influences, and cannot be simply attributed to a single ancestral lineage.
This is a key point for understanding the evolution of the concept of race and its relationship to racism, which is the belief that certain people are inherently inferior to others. For example, a white person’s skin is darker than the skin of an African American due to a mixture of different genes and the fact that the white individual lives in a colder climate.
In the 1700s, Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy and a man not without an ego, began the process of dividing the world into a number of different races. This was done as a means of ordering the world in his image and, in particular, to make his scientific theories seem more legitimate. The racial theory was further popularized in the 1800s by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, an early proponent of the American School of Anthropology, which adhered to Romantic ideas about the origins of human diversity. This school of thought was split between monogenesis and polygenesis. Monogenesis adhered to the Biblical creation story, arguing that all human races descended from one common ancestor; polygenesis argued that each of the world’s populations had their own unique evolutionary history.
The idea of a genetically distinct human race was further eroded by the development of modern molecular genetics, which demonstrated that most of the differences traditionally associated with racial differentiation are the result of a combination of genetic variation and environmental influences. As a result, the term race has largely been discarded as an explanation of human diversity.
However, the notion of a grouping of individuals into a category called a “race” still persists as a part of our culture and language. The question, then, is not whether or not people should use the term, but rather what is a meaningful definition of race?
A number of properties have been suggested as necessary for being a person: Intelligence, the ability to speak a language, creativity, moral judgments, self-awareness and consciousness. Ultimately, the answer will depend on what society values and how it decides to categorize its members. As of now, anthropologists have no agreement on this question. Those who support the idea of a meaningful and biologically valid definition of race have adopted a position known as racial population naturalism.