Why do scholars say race is an illusion

These findings reinforced programs of segregation, enforced poverty and violence. Panelist john a. He argued that this line of thinking is used to justify acts of racist police violence, such as the murder of George Floyd and the beating of Rodney King. But, he added, we are not stuck with the structures we are given.

The conversation shifted to the work of education. Since obviously you're dead, you don't get to say what race you are when you die. And so there are a few percent of people who are born one race and die another race. And historically, in order to be a naturalized citizen in this country, as an immigrant, you had to be categorized as white or black.

And almost everybody who tried to naturalize - all but, I think, one case that went to the Supreme Court - all of them were people trying to be categorized as white. So the courts had to make decisions about who was white and who was not. Is an Armenian person white? There were a number of cases dealing with Asian people, and are they white or not white.

And so one of the things that would happen is the person would come into court and say, "Look, my skin color is as white as anybody else's skin color in here who is categorized as white.

It's about other things too, like your attitudes about family, your attitudes about politics. And sometimes it was pretty explicit that this was what the court was doing. And I don't think the court is different from other people in our society, even today, that we understand race in a very complex way that takes into account all of these other aspects of a person besides simply their skin color, or whether their nose is flat or narrow, or the shape of their eyes and how almond shaped they are.

Should race be used as a category in biological research? I think as scientists we are still pretty confused about race, and what relevance race has to the things that we study, and whether or not race is a biological category.

In part that's because scientists are human beings who have been socialized in this same society. I think it's too simplistic to say that we should throw out the concept of race when we're doing science, because although race is not genetically definable, race is still, because of its social power, it still influences us in ways that may influence our health.

So whether you live near a toxic waste dump of some sort, that's correlated with what race you are. Whether or not you have health insurance is also correlated with what race you are. And so there are many things in this society that are correlated with race that may influence our health.

So I think it's too simplistic to say that we should just never use race as an analytical variable when we're doing science, because there are important things that we could learn, and that we should learn. But the problem is that we shouldn't always assume that if we see racial disparities or differences, that those are due to genetic causes, as opposed to some other kind of cause. I personally think that, usually, if we want to understand something about inheritance, we probably ought to be using categories that are much narrower and more clearly defined than race.

We know, for instance, that on the continent of Africa, there is a lot of genetic diversity there. And so trying to understand something about ancestry, back to particular parts of Africa, might be very interesting. But if it is, then categorizing by "black" is not going to be a very helpful categorization. And likewise, what does the category white mean?

If you want to understand something about somebody's ancestry, and whether their ancestry goes back to northern Europe, or whether they have Celtic ancestry, and their ancestry goes back to the British isles, that might be much more important than the category "white. The people who are captured within those categories are so genetically and biologically diverse, and their ancestries might be very, very different. There could be people in this country who are black, who might now be categorized as African American, whose ancestry actually is Australian indigenous.

Very, very different ancestry. Yet, if we look at them, we might categorize them as black, the same way we might categorize somebody whose family is recently from Africa as black. A lot of times when we're doing the science, we're not extremely careful about the descriptions of the populations that we're using, and so we will use 1, white people, people whose samples are gathered from various different points in the United States, for instance.

But the ancestry of those people may be quite diverse. And then we will compare that to or 50 samples of perhaps people from one town or small village from Africa. And then we will use the African sample to stand for "black people" and the sample of 1, white people from across the United States to stand for "white people.

And so it's not clear to me, necessarily, what the validity of those comparisons is. But however we can legitimately use those data, I think it's really important that we're very clear about who those data derive from. That one town in Africa should not necessarily represent all of Africa, or all black people, any more than northern Wisconsin should represent all white people. And we have a lot of confusion about that, and it's problematic for a lot of reasons.

But one reason is because of how race and racism work. And one of the things that happens is that the less socially powerful group is perceived as being more homogeneous in general, as being less complex, less in need of individual attention, in some ways. And I think we play into that with the science when we use just a very small sample of African people, or African Americans, to stand for a whole "race" of people.

It's critical that we use terminology carefully and thoughtfully. If we don't, we confuse ourselves. And by reify I mean, take something that's an abstract notion and make it seem physically real. And that, I think, is very dangerous in the sense that, at the same time that the science is suggesting that these common-sense notions of separate, deep human racial categories are not really accurate or true, if we use racial terminology loosely and inappropriately we can reinforce people's notions that these racial categories are genetically real.

What do we make of newspaper stories about genetic differences between races? We often see reported stories about genetic differences between groups of people.

Now, what does that really mean? Usually it doesn't mean that in a certain group there's a version of a gene that's just absent completely from another group. That does occasionally happen, but it's very rare. Usually what it means is that, say there's one gene that has two different versions, or two "alleles. Those are statistically significant differences, but it doesn't mean that you could look at somebody from the first group and say, "I know that they have allele B," and somebody from the second group, you could look at them and say, "I know they have allele A.

The other thing we need to think about is, the statistics change depending on the denominator. So how you draw the circle around the population, or each of those populations, could change the number that you get. So those numbers, they're things that you can find. They're real data. They're statistically significant. One must be cautious, however, not to assume that children are prejudiced or deliberately using stereotypes when they over-generalize.

They simply may be thinking typically for young children trying to make sense out of their limited experiences with other groups Ramsey, Research indicates that children in the United States come to understand race and ethnicity concepts between the ages of 3 and 4.

At around age 6, children become accurate at sorting people by ethnicity. At around age 7 or 8, children understand that race and ethnicity do not change. According to Margo Monteith, Ph. The goal of this lesson is to have students investigate both genetic and societal consequences of these often-artificial and evolving classifications.

Students will examine the long-term repercussions of these classifications that have resulted in racism, wars, and genocide. In order to do this lesson, therefore, students should have basic knowledge of DNA and natural selection. As a way to stimulate discussion, get students thinking about the idea of classification based on a random assignment such as month of birth date.

You can pick a random way to divide students into categories. For instance, you could divide students according to where their birthdays fall in the year—fall, winter, spring, or summer months.

Then you should choose one particular group—students with spring birthdays for instance—to receive special privileges for the day while the rest of the class would be left out or ineligible. You can provide each student with the print out of this quiz. Once students have finished the quiz, hold a class discussion about their answers and their thoughts about the quiz in general.

Ask students these questions:. Leave the third column blank. At the end of the lesson, have students retake the quiz and compare their answers from the first quiz and the re-taken quiz and then fill in the third column. Once students read this resource, they should answer these questions on The Illusion of Race student sheet:.

They should read the material in the Explore Diversity section. Once students have read the resource, ask these questions:. Finally, have students use their esheet to go to and read Race is an illusion, say researchers , a science article about research that scientists conducted in Brazil.

Students should answer these questions when they are done reading:. To assess student understanding, divide students into groups and assign each group a question from Ask the Experts on the Race—Power of an Illusion site. But I think that's an interesting story, that there isn't a simple answer.

It wasn't located in one place, it was located in the complexities of his historical development in a culture with his biological basis, whatever he was born with, biologically, genetically, culturally, how it came that he was motivated in All of those things came into play.

It's not a simple answer. What made Jesse Owens great? Many things made him great and unique. Aren't great sprinters more genetically endowed with fast twitch muscles? Let's take fast twitch muscles and go forward and back with them. Let's go back with them and try to understand, what are the genetics of fast twitch muscles.

Well, three words - I don't know. I don't really know. I think nobody really knows what the genetics are behind something that's really quite complicated. Let's go forward again. Is there a pure genetics to that? Is fast twitch, that phenotype, is it a straight expression of genotype? Most scientists would say no, that actually you can train your muscles, and the amount of fast twitch you have, changes over time.

So, actually muscle use affects the amount of fast twitch and slow twitch muscle. Then let's go forward a little bit more. Does fast twitch make you fast? Not so sure, it turns out. It may be just one factor in making you fast. Is it the primary factor, or is it just like looking for long bones in Jessie Owens' feet? You know, looking for that one answer to it. My guess is it's trying to simplify something that's very, very complicated.

To try to just explain the greatness of West African descended sprinters by fast twitch muscles involves many, many things we don't know - all assumptions. How does Social Darwinism - and race - rationalize inequality? Social Darwinism was really just an explanation for the order of things. We had to come up with an explanation for why certain Europeans had more access to power and were wealthier than others.

So we use nature as an explanation for what we saw, or seem to think we saw in nature: those who were more aggressive, or more intelligent, got things, and those who weren't got less. So that became the continuing justification for taking over lands, for slavery, for competition. That competition was good. And to the winners went the spoils.

And there's no need to feel guilt or anxiety about that, because that's natural, it's a reflection of nature. And to the winner go the advantages of having been a winner. I think there are many, many legacies of social Darwinism today. We don't see how uneven the playing field is, for one. We don't acknowledge that individuals grow up with less advantage and more advantage.

We seem to think that in America we all are born with a blank slate and an equal ability to get ahead. What about studies equating race with intelligence? Scientific work abetting the idea that race is real, typological, and hierarchically arranged is actually rather an old occupation, you know.

In the mids we see Samuel Morton measuring crania to get at cranial capacity and then to try to rank the races on the amount of cranial capacity they have, and to equate that with racial differences and intelligence. And really about every 20 years somebody else comes along, almost with a best-seller, perhaps with a new method for measuring intelligence, ultimately to show that there is a ranking in intelligence, usually with whites up top. The most recent effort was The Bell Curve, which came out in and literally reached number two on the best-seller list in , behind a book, by the way, written by Pope John Paul.

The Bell Curve threw a couple spins into this. One is that it actually promoted Asians as being closer to the top, also broke down whites a little bit more. But fundamentally it was the same type of book as was written by Morton in ; you use the same basic methods and the same basic logic. Their argument went something like this: there is something called intelligence that we can put our fingers on, that we can measure; intelligence is some sort of univariable; it's one-dimensional.

That intelligence then is measurable by something called an intelligence test that actually measures intelligence. And then that intelligence is highly heritable; it's something we really do get in our chromosomes, in our genes; it comes to us that way, it is highly heritable.

Then one has to say that there is such a thing as white, black, and Asian, or whatever groups you're comparing, that they are real, that they are measurable, that they are reproducible. But then let's to back and look at the assumptions again.

Is there a white group, a black group, an Asian group? Are these reproducible? Are they trained equally?

Can we really measure a variable called intelligence? Is it really something that's not affected by environment, about how we're trained, how we grow up, what stimulation we have by children? I'll give you an example. One test has shown that just a little bit of lead in the blood can affect intelligence - a little bit of lead in the blood, prenatal, can affect intelligence by easily eight points on an intelligence score.

Are we to believe that those factors were unimportant in looking at the differences in IQ scores? Of course not. The assumptions that go into believing that there are racial differences in intelligence are absurd ones.

They're ones that we shouldn't even be coming close to as scientists. The chief one is that here's such a thing as race, that there are races, and that a score on a test, an average group score, has any meaning for an individual. What was the significance of Franz Boas' skull experiments? Franz Boaz was a very prominent public intellectual, and he taught at Columbia and gave birth to a brand of anthropology that was labeled "cultural relativism.

But earlier he found himself in an unremarkable place and did remarkable things with it. He actually worked with the immigration office at Ellis Island, and had the opportunity to measure skulls of individuals in families - of which some of the siblings were born in Europe and some were born in the United States.

It was assumed that different groups of Europeans - Slavs, Jews, Italian, Irish - that they had distinct skull types and shapes, and that these wouldn't change with environmental circumstances; they were primordial. There was an Irish type, a Jewish type - all were types and races, and all unchanging. So if you knew that, you could then read into the skull certain characteristics such as intelligence. But what Boaz noticed and wrote about in the early s was that the skulls differed depending on whether the individuals were born overseas or here in the United States.

In fact, as Eastern European immigrants' children were born in the United States, they began to look more like the Western Europeans that were already here in the United States. They became more Americanized, rounded in their skull shape. His assumption, although he wasn't so sure of it then - the assumption now is the diet changed and the diet allowed for greater skull growth and allowed it to round out a little bit. So within the same family he saw changes in skull shape.

And the bottom line of all this is that it really showed that skulls don't reflect something deep and genetic, or if they do, it's definitely hidden by the way the skull reflects even subtle changes in nutrition - changes that we didn't expect would have dramatic effects on the skull shape.

Boaz would not have done his experiment, would not have asked the question, "Do skull shapes change between boys who were born in the United States and those who were born in Europe? If he had believed that race and culture were the same, that culture was a reflection of racial biology, he would not have asked the question, he would not have done the experiment.

And so that, I think, is the fascinating point. Somehow he had his suspicions and he went ahead and asked the question and did the experiment, and that was what I think his real contribution was. Why is it important to overturn the idea of race as biology?

We live in racial smog. This is a world of racial smog. We can't help but breathe that smog. Everybody breathes it. But what's nice is that you can recognize that you are breathing that smog, and that's the first step.

We all live in a racialized society. And individuals of color are exposed to it more obviously, with more virulence, more force, than anybody is. But what is important is that race is a very salient social and historical concept, a social and historical idea. It's shaped institutions, it's shaped our legal system, it shapes interactions in law offices and housing offices and in medical schools, in dentist's offices.

It shapes that. And I think by stripping the biology from it, by stripping the idea that race is somehow based in biology, we show the emperor to have no clothes, we show race for what it is: it's an idea that's constantly being reinvented, and it's up to us about how we want to invent it and go ahead and reinvent it.

But it's up to us to do it. Racism rests in part on the idea that race is biology; it is based on biology. So, the biology becomes an excuse for social differences.