Race

Are We So Different?

Alan H. Goodman, Yolanda T. Moses, Joseph L. Jones

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781119472414
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia culturale e sociale

The second editionof the bestselling titleonmodern notions of race, providingtimely 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.

1
Introducing 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 sho...