What is Race?

Question

going down the path of evolution, it stops at species right? so what is race?
reason i ask is because i believe that everyone is trully the same, we are all one species, human. the only reason some poeple hate is out of bordem, small deferences, or because your better or they have it better.
i understand race, but what is it?

Answer 1

Race is, as the first responder stated, a social construct, not a biological one. It is a way to group people in discrete categories based on skin color and other physical features. In fact, race is actually a very new idea, originating with colonists in around the 1400's exploring Africa and "the new world" and coming across people that looked distinctly different from them. From this stemmed the belief that people with darker skin were somehow inferior and acted differently based on this one trait. Often, "race" is confused with "culture," in that behavioral traits are mistakenly attributed to one's physical appearance. This is, obviously, quite incorrect; how you look doesn't determine how you act; rather, it is the environment you are brought up in.

So, there you go, race in a nutshell.

EDIT: Good question, by the way. It seems like such a simple, obvious concept, but in reality it is far from it. Good on you for thinking critically!

Answer 2

Race is tricky, and a much debated topic in the public arena. I'll try and be comprehensive without going overboard, but no promises.

Before we talk about what race is, let's make sure you understand something about how scientific inquiry works. Science is about gathering evidence in a very specific way, and then making interpretations and conclusions about that evidence. The better the body of evidence, and the better that body of evidence was gathered, the more confident we can be about those conclusions. Scientists are not looking for some lofty "truth." They are simply trying to determine what is factually true, and what isn't. When we talk about something like gravity, or about acid/base reactions, there is generally little argument in the scientific community. Those ideas have been around a long time, and have a large body of well-gathered evidence to back them up. Other theories, like that the Earth is hollow and houses some sort of inner world, have virtually no body of evidence, and the evidence that has been gathered is faulty in some way. There is little problem with a theory like this either, because basically no one at all gives it any credit.

Ideas like race, on the other hand, can be problematic. And race isn't alone, there are other theories and ideas that are hotly contested. Clearly, race has supporters. Lots of them. So if we want to evaluate race like a good scientist, we need to look at the body of evidence that has been gathered about race. What we find is a body of evidence that is very contradictory. Some of it says race is real and is indicative of a host of traits. Some says race is statistically insiginificant. Others run a gradient, giving race varying degrees of importance.

Historically, the problem with race-based studies has been defining the term. When a chemist studies acids, he can rely on a standard definition of the term, so he's confident that he's studying the same thing every else who studies acids is. He can look it up. People who study race have a harder time of things. It's very difficult to actually define race without resorting to synonyms or analogies. Simply put, we can't be dead certain that different studies of race are all researching the same thing. That's problem number 1.

The second problem is the evidence that has been gathered. It's clear that many race-based studies from the last several centuries were constructed with the purpose of proving that a particular race was superior than another. Looking at many old studies like this, we can see that the researcher used this skull over that skull so that black people appeared to have smaller cranial capacities (never mind the fact that no one back then bothered to check to see if there was a correlation between CC and intelligence), or found an extra large skull for white people. A great deal of our body of evidence just isn't up to snuff, scientifically.

Further muddying the waters is the fact that race has a very strong social component. Race exists in our everyday lives, people use race in many of their day-to-day interactions, whether they are racist or not. The Census Bureau wants to know what race you are, as do your scholarship applications. Race is very real and powerful in a cultural sense. This leads to a sense, among average people who aren't fully aware of difficulties with the evidence, that race can be quantified and studied like anything else, that since race is so prevalent and imporant in society, it must have some kind of scientific backing. As an anthropologist, I can tell you it's not that simple.

You might hear anthropologists say that race is not scientifically valid. According to the evidence we have, I think this is a reasonable conclusion. Others disagree, and this should be your first clue about the nature of race as a science. When we look at something like Evolution vs Creation, we have people arguing who have clearly different goals, and who are probably studying different things. When we see researchers argue about race, we see people disagree when they are studying the same thing.

But perhaps the most important thing to remember is why we study race. If we get above the arguments for a moment, we see that the study of race is all about classifying human variety. We might be surprised to see that even though race is pulled back and forth around the arena, there are researchers out there who study human variety for a living (like biological anthropologists). In case you're wondering, they don't use race. They study people in groups they call populations, and what exactly they might be studying about those populations can vary. The advantage is that we can precisely define what a population is in any instance, and so different studies are comparable.

As a simile, arguing about race is like arguing about whether or not Snickers bars are healthy, when you could just be eating an apple.

Answer 3

'Race' is a synomym for 'subspecies'. A subspecies is a division
of a species that can breed with other subspecies. A subspecies
is characterized by multiple genetic traits that occur together in
a geographical population, due to adaptation and/or random genetic
drift. Human phenotypes clearly show that there are multiple regional
human subspecies, each of which is characterized by several distinctive
traits. I don't desire to prove that one group is better than another group
or whatever; I only care about scientific truth, because I am motivated by
an emotion that you have probably never felt in your life: curiosity.
Funny how many humans acknowledge the existence of subspecies
among non-human species, but when it comes to humans, they are too
anthropocentric to apply the same logic to ourselves.

Why then, do humans delude themselves into believing that human
subspecies (aka race) is a social construct? That self-delusion behavior
tells us more about certain humans than does their physical traits.
Funny that Jen-ee-fur (the first answerer) states the polar opposite of the
truth, stating that belief of the truth is caused by an instinctive bias,
when in fact the belief in the non-existence of human subspecies is
caused by an instinctive bias. That behavior of stating the polar opposite
of the truth is also telling. Such self-delusion behaviors are caused by the
desire to disrupt the fundamental logical truth that different entities are not
necessarily equivalent. That desire is a mental focus of crude blind seeping
oneness. Such people state the polar opposite of the truth because nothing
disrupts the truth more than it's polar opposite.

Answer 4

In the evolution of man, race is nothing more than a classification of physical characteristics. The most important aspect is skin colour, at least in the eyes of society.

Answer 5

actually it doesn't stop with species. Canine is a species. Basset is a breed and so it is with humans. Humans are a species, white or black are breeds or races. Minute differences in our DNA that make one group different from another. Not better or worse just different.

Answer 6

I always figured different races to be the same, by nature, as different breads. Yes, science shows that the differences are small. And in this day and age there have been a lot of mixing so there is even less of a difference.

Answer 7

according to the Oxford dictionary: " each of the major divisions of humankind, having distinct physical characteristics"... we are all the same within, true... on the outer, we are different and that is what many bigots look at... racism has always been a problem in this Christian nation, USA... It is only those who truly practice "Love one another" that racism is banished...

Answer 8

actually race is heritage and biological. there are 3 races" caucasian, ******* and mongoloid. everything else is ethnicity.

Answer 9

race is a cultural construct, not a biological reality... it came about as a way to classify the groups of people that were being encountered... as humans we need to make groups, and sort things according to criteria... it really says more about us than it does about the people we put into these groups...

Answer 10

A social construct.