The idea of race, as practiced by people all over the world, is deeply problematic. It has led to discrimination and oppression of entire groups of people. It also causes racial and ethnic tensions in our societies. Many scholars have argued that the concept of race is an illusion, or at best a social construct. They claim that most of the differences between people are based on superficial physical characteristics and have no biological significance.
The anthropological and genetic research supporting this argument is overwhelming. Nevertheless, the idea of race continues to be a central part of our culture and society. It persists in a range of ways, including in how we think about ourselves, how we organize our societies, and even in the decisions that we make about health care.
In the 1700s, Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy, reified the idea of races when he classified humans into several types. These included Americanus, Europeanus, and Asianus. He envisioned each type having certain essential defining traits and arranged them in a hierarchy, with Europeaus at the top of the ladder and Asianus at the bottom, just above apes and monkeys.
Linnaeus’s ideas were heavily influenced by social beliefs of the time. In particular, the early Christian notion that different races were separated from each other by divine favor fueled his thinking about race. This helped stoke the opposition of indentured Irish and other European workers to African slaves in the American colonies by dividing them into distinct “races.”
Modern biological anthropologists have worked hard to fashion Linnaeus’s typological, static concept of race into an evolutionary one. Some have tried to do this by describing a number of “distinct” races that evolved separately and at different times from one another. However, there is a nontrivial problem with this line of reasoning: all the archaeological and genetic evidence shows abundant flows of individuals, genes, and ideas among continents where modern humans originated, and where they became one species that developed into different cultures.
Moreover, the human genome shows that most genetic variation is within, rather than between, population groups. For example, if six people are sampled from populations with different average amounts of African ancestry, their DNA will be remarkably similar. This means that there is more genetic variation among a group of African Americans than between them and a group of European Americans or Asian Americans.
For these reasons, a large majority of anthropologists have rejected the idea that there are such things as racial categories. This is evident in the way we word our census questions, which ask respondents to identify their racial heritage. In the US Census, we offer five minimum options: White; Black or African American; Hispanic or Latino (or American Indian or Alaska Native); Asian; and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander. The categories we use reflect a social definition of race recognized in our country and the way that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) requires federal agencies to report data on their populations.