Desmond McGrath Race Paper 9/23/12 Race: A Social construction or historical reality?

Race is a powerful concept that can simultaneously bring people together and draw them apart. Although it is an idea that has been given great significance in human societies throughout the world, the legitimacy of the basis of this significance is questionable. In modern culture, people have come to associate race with intangible, personal traits such as athletic ability, intelligence, or skill in any other particular field1. There is a widespread misconception that there is concrete biological justification for why we associate traits like these with race, when in reality our concept of race has little to no biological merit whatsoever. Race in modern society has taken on identities of culture and social status, but this is due to historical reasons rather than anything else. Segregation policies, racially charged court rulings, and detrimental economic initiatives by the government were among the things that have caused racial disparities to remain entrenched in American life. From the countless reclassifications over time of what it means to belong to a certain race to the entrenched inequalities that have unfortunately fallen largely along racial lines, it is clear that race is a more fluid and less legitimate concept than many people believe. The social constructs we associate today with race are much more products of historical events and past government policies rather than any inherent biological fact.

PBS Documentary: Race The Power of an Illusion.

Biologically speaking, there is very little difference between any two humans, regardless of their perceived race or skin color. Clearly it is a natural tendency for humans to make associations or group based on appearance, but at the end of the day those associations are purely superficial. Extensive scientific research has revealed no genetic differences that are consistent with racial identities, or any other human trait one could use to separate people. This research has proven individual humans to be more genetically similar than individual members of almost any other species in the animal kingdom. Even genetically simpler organisms like fruit flies have many times more biological variation within their populations than humans do, regardless of race2. After extensively studying the success of black Olympic track runner Jesse Owens in the face of Hitlers comments about Aryan athletic superiority, anthropologist Montague Cobb came to the conclusion that, There is not one single, physical feature, including skin color, which all of our Negro champions have in common which would identify them as Negro3. And indeed, this holds true for all races. Any discerning scholar will run in to problems very quickly when trying to measure someones race, as the infinite number of variables one could use are all equally imperfect. Biological Anthropologist Alan Goodman has referred to race as a biological myth4, and this characterization could not be more apt. Although the scientific proof behind this idea is indisputable, it has not fully stopped the pervasive idea that race is founded in biological differences. Many people today still believe in these
2 3

Race: The Power of an Illusion. PBS, 2003. Race: The Power of an Illusion. PBS, 2003. 4 Race: The Power of an Illusion. PBS, 2003.

misconceptions, like the idea that Black people have an extra muscle in their legs that helps them run faster. And even beliefs like that seem horribly inconsequential when one considers the fact that for several hundred years the physiology of Black people was a subject of genuine curiosity and endless study for many doctors and scientists who could not wrap their head around the possibility that Black people were no different genetically from whites. This idea was explicitly shown in Race, Traits, and Tendencies of the American Negro. Written by Fredrick Hoffman in 1898, this text was one of the most influential of its time in promoting the idea that racial hierarchy was based in biological principles rather than social circumstances. Like many others, Hoffman concluded that the higher death and disease rates among African Americans and other statistical disparities between races were the result of an innate biological inferiority5. It was not until later that the scientific community came to accept the ridiculousness of such ideas with full force, yet in the context of the general public there are still a number of people who still believe on some level that humans are fundamentally different from each other, just because of their race. However, regardless of what some may think, the idea of race comes instead from entrenched inequalities with deep historical roots. Ever since the advent of racialized slavery in colonial America, different races have not been on an equal playing field. Whites in power have enjoyed hierarchal advantages in wealth, opportunity, and access to a plethora of resources solely due to the fact that these sorts of things tend to naturally get passed down within families for generations. After slavery was abolished in the middle of
5

Race: The Power of an Illusion. PBS, 2003.

the 19th century, Jim Crow laws and the American segregation system kept the inequalities entrenched. Generations of minority Americans remained unable to escape the cycle of poverty they were stuck in, and waves of immigrants from Europe with little opportunity fell in to the same trap. As a result of these circumstances and with the aid of detrimental government polices, inequality became entrenched along racial lines and forced people into racial identities based on that inequality that would not have needed to exist otherwise. One of the formative government actions that led to this was an act passed in 1790 that stated only free white immigrants could become citizens. This set the basis for many inconsistent court rulings on the subject of peoples race, as there were an infinite number of ways one could classify themselves as white or black. Different states had different formulas for classifying people in this way, and as a result some people were considered white in once place and black in another based on the percentages of their racial makeup. Later immigrants to the United States were treated with the same kind of ambiguity, and virtually all groups went through periods in which they were ostracized as an other before being eventually ingrained in society, albeit to different degrees. When the Supreme Court ruled in 1922 that Bhagat Singh Thind and Takao Ozawa could not be citizens because of their respective South Asian and Japanese heritages, many Americans of Asian descent that had previously granted citizenship were stripped of their rights and lost control of their property. Even though Singh Thind proved to the court that scientifically people with Indian heritage such as himself could

be considered white, the judges determined that whiteness was something to be judged by common sense and social status rather than evidence based in science6. Another important factor that set the stage for modern racial inequalities was the enactment of racially focused housing policies by the government in the middle of the 20th century. The creation of a National Appraisal system that calculated property values based on the race of the homeowner led to neighborhoods being divided by skin color. These policies led to a large migration of white Americans to suburbs across America, and created a uniform white identity that did not exist before. In contrast to the early 1900s, a broad white identity now existed that dropped hierarchal significance of being labeled German or Irish, and came to include all those of European descent. Economic status quickly became ingrained by these policies as well, as property values that were correlated with race led to blackness now being associated with inner city poverty, and whiteness with comfortable suburban living and access to resources and opportunity. Clearly, race is much more a social and cultural construction than a biological principle. Modern science has revealed the illegitimate biological bases for racial identity, but nothing can reverse the strong associations race now has with cultural identity and social status. But form the countless reclassifications of different racial groups to the different laws and rights that have been attributed to ethnic backgrounds, race is clearly a fluid concept that has changed over time and is sure to continue to in the future.

Race: The Power of an Illusion. PBS, 2003.