Race (social)

See race (biology) for the biological concept of races (of any species). The following article concerns the notion of human races.

A race is a subdivision of humans who are related to each other in a way which they are not related to other humans. The nature of the relationship is dependent on the use of the term; in popular use in the United States, the relationship is mostly about skin color and some other visible features, while geneticists use the term to refer to clusters of populations which have similar population distributions of specific genes.

Categorizing people into different races flows naturally from the human urge to categorize and the realization that there are "people like us" and "people not like us". Historically, differences considered to be "racial" have patterned with differences in skin color and facial features.

Anthropologists of the 19th century performed a great deal of research into racial classification, but absent a knowledge of genetics, many of their conclusions have not held up. However, the broad divisions into four races have been confirmed by modern genetic research. Broadly, the races among humans which have been recognized include the sub-Saharan African (also called Black, from their skin color), European/Caucasian (also called white), East Asian (sometimes called "yellow"), and Native American (sometimes called "red"). Some racial classifications have separated southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders as a "Malay" race distinct from the East Asian group, while others have included Native Americans as a subset of East Asians. People of South Asian origin have typically been seen as "European" or "Caucasian", but often not considered "white", especially as immigrant communities in England, due to their significantly darker skin coloring.

Folk classifications have evolved over time, and have not always matched scientific or pseudoscientific classifications. In the mid to late 19th century in the United States, immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were not considered "white", though the distinction between Europeans on the one hand and blacks on the other, and economic advancement and intermarriage between various European groups eventually led to the acceptance of most or all Europeans as "white", even if some discrimination against "Latins" persisted.

It has often been claimed that "race is a social construct". Given the widely divergent definitions of "race" which have been in common and specialist use, it is true that there is some amount of arbitrariness in the definitions. Modern genetics and population biology recognizes continental-sized population groups as fuzzy sets, where classification at the margins is difficult.

The question of whether the socially-defined category of race corresponds to a biological reality is hotly disputed. Some social and political classifications do not match population groups recognized by geneticists, for example, the American and English tendency to group people from south Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc) together with people from east Asia (China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, etc) in a category of "Asian", and the American category of "Hispanic" which groups (as an ethnicity or a race, depending on the specific government agency involved) all persons whose ancestry passes through the Americas other than the United States or Canada, and sometimes persons from Spain and Portugal.

Racial distinctions have often been a source of conflict where distinctive racial groups have settled in the same area, even when religious and linguistic differences have been minimized. In support of these conflicts, many anthropologists and pseudoscientists made claims about racial differences which have been proven untrue, or which confused the results of cultural and economic conditions with hereditary characteristics. Quite often, such claims included claims of racial "superiority", usually for the superiority of White/European people over people of other races; these claims often included claims of moral justification for racial segregation, racial discrimination, and imperial conquest.

Many countries had policies of racial segregation, limiting access to various public services, government benefits, or certain jobs and industries to a preferred race, and/or requiring separation of races while using certain amenities; for example, in the southern U.S. through the 1960s, blacks and whites could ride the same bus, but blacks had to sit at the back of the bus, and were not allowed to take empty "white" seats. Many countries maintained separate school systems for children of different races, even when instruction occurred in the same language in both sets of schools. Separated facilities were usually distinctly different in quality, with the favored race (usually white) having better-quality services.

Through the 1920s and 1930s, many countries maintained policies which aimed at "improving the race", usually referring to the politically dominant race in the country. Such policies usually forbade marriage or sexual relations between people of different races, and also often included eugenic policies to discourage persons considered "unfit" from having children. Eugenic policies reached a climax in Nazi Germany, where "pure" Germans were encouraged to have many children, people with various handicaps were forcibly sterilized or killed, and members of "lower races" were murdered by the millions.

After the defeat of the Nazis, movements to guarantee equal legal rights for members of all races gained significant ground in most countries, and led to social attitudes turning against racial discrimination, acceptance of racial mixing, and laws forbidding racial discrimination. Explicit eugenic concerns became taboo, and most laws discouraging certain people from having children were repealed.