Race (social)

“Race” as a distinction between different types of humans entered the European vocabulary as early as the end of the 15th century,[1] particularly in Iberia. It quickly came to mark Europe over the next few centuries, especially in the drive to state sovereignty; by the late 19th century, the race concept had assumed throughout Europe a sense of naturalness and a taken-for-granted ordering of social arrangements. “Science and literature, scripture and law, culture and political rhetoric all worked in subtle and blunt ways to establish the presumption of white supremacy… and black disenfranchisement”.[2] Nor was this confined to the western hemisphere: Yan-Fu (1853-1902), the Chinese scholar who promoted Darwinian theory, considered that there were “four main races on the earth: the yellow, the white, the brown and the black… The black race is the lowest…” [3]

By the end of the 20th century, a rather different consensus had emerged amongst academics from all disciplines – the humanities, the social sciences and the biological sciences – that biological races do not exist in humans.[4] Nevertheless, for a lay person the idea of race seems to have retained its value as a useful concept in managing and interpreting the world at the individual level. This “commonsense approach” thus marks out popular discourse from that of the scientific community; nor do advocates of “racialism” feel the need to justify what is, to them, obvious. The task of social science is to explain the persistence of racial beliefs, the patterns of behaviour and their consequences: it is not sufficient to deny that race exists,[5] although social science is far from unanimous in how to deal with issues of studying racism and racial phenomena.

Different or confused concepts?

Race in its popular usage appears to be a categorization of people according to specific physical attributes: most commonly, these are skin colour, facial characteristics and sometimes hair type. As these are supposed to be genetic differences, culture and environment should have no role to play.

Ethnicity, or membership of a particular ethnic group, on the other hand, is linked specifically with historical and cultural commonalities shared by all members of that ethnic group. Although genetic differences may occur between groups, and be visible in the same way as claimed for racial differences, these are not a necessary feature. Nor are visible similarities with a group a necessary condition. Thus, ethnicity is historically and socially constructed.

Identity is a complex concept, which defies easy definition. It constitutes the connection between individuals and society, although the precise nature of this connection is the focus of a multitude of competing social theories. It is associated with time, place and membership of social groups, and is thus relevant to both ethnicity and race.

What can be observed over the last few centuries, is that race, ethnicity and even social class have co-existed and merged in complex ways. Few people distinguish between ethnicity and race, and to a great extent these are determinative of social class. Given the inability of biologists, and most recently geneticists, to provide any support for the biological concept of race, the almost unanimous view of social science is that Race is a social construction. This is applied to both the historical and contemporary world.

References

[1] Michel Wieviorka (1995): The Arena of Racism, London: Sage, p. 2

[2] David Goldberg (2004): ‘The end(s) of race’, Postcolonial Studies, 7/2, p. 212

[3] cited in Frank Díkötter (1996): ‘The Idea of “race” in Modern China’, in J. Hutchinson and A.D. Smith (eds), Ethnicity, Oxford: Oxford University Press

[4] Lisa Gannett (2004): ‘The Biological Reification of Race’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 55, p. 323

[5] Bob Carter (2000): Realism and Racism, London: Routledge

See also the following:

• See race (biology) for the biological concept of human races.
• See subspecies for the broader concept of race (of any species).
• See race (sports) for sports racing.