9.1.1: Race: Reality and Myth

 9.1.1: Race: Reality and Myth As humans spread throughout the world, their adaptations to diverse climates and other living conditions, combined with genetic mutations, added distinct characteristics to the peoples of the globe. 

Humans show remarkable diversity. Shown here is just one example—He Pingping, from China, who at 2 feet 4 inches, was the world’s shortest man, and Svetlana Pankratova, from Russia, who, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, is the woman with the longest legs. Race–ethnicity shows similar diversity. Credit: John Stillwell/PA Images/Alamy Stock Photo The Reality of Human Variety With its more than 7 billion people, the world offers a fascinating variety of human shapes and colors. Skin colors come in all shades between black and white, heightened by reddish and yellowish hues. Eyes come in shades of blue, brown, and green. Lips are thick and thin. Hair is straight, curly, kinky, black, blonde, red—and, of course, all shades of brown. In this sense, the concept of race—a group of people with inherited physical characteristics that distinguish it from another group—is a reality. Humans do, indeed, come in a variety of colors and shapes. The Myth of Pure Races Humans show such a mixture of physical characteristics that there are no “pure” races. Instead of falling into distinct types that are clearly separate from one another, human characteristics—skin color, hair texture, nose shape, head shape, eye color, and so on—flow endlessly together. The mapping of the human genome system shows how similar humans around the world are, and how little biological variation, even at the molecular level, there is in what are called racial groups (Torres 2019). As you can see from the example of Tiger Woods, discussed in the following Cultural Diversity in the United States, these minute gradations among humans make any attempt to draw lines of pure race purely arbitrary. Cultural Diversity in the United States Tiger Woods: Mapping the Changing Ethnic Terrain Tiger Woods, perhaps the top golfer of all time, calls himself Cablinasian. Woods invented this term as a boy to try to explain to himself just who he was—a combination of Caucasian, Black, Indian, and Asian (Leland and Beals 1997; McKibbin 2014). Woods wanted to embrace all sides of his family. Like many of us, Tiger Woods’ heritage is difficult to specify. Analysts who like to quantify ethnic heritage put Woods at one-quarter Thai, one-quarter Chinese, one-quarter white, an eighth Native American, and an eighth African American. From this chapter, you know how ridiculous such computations are, but the sociological question is why many people consider Tiger Woods to be African American. The U.S. racial scene is indeed complex, but a good part of the reason is that Woods has dark skin, and this is the label the media placed on him. The attitude seems to be “Everyone has to fit somewhere.” And for Tiger Woods, the media chose African American. Tiger Woods as he answers questions at a news conference. Credit: Steve Helber/AP Images The United States once had a firm “color line”—barriers between racial–ethnic groups that you didn’t dare cross, especially in dating or marriage. This barrier has broken down, and today such marriages are common (Statistical Abstract 2019:Table 60). Children born in these marriages have a difficult time figuring out how to classify themselves. To help them make an adjustment in college, some colleges have interracial student organizations. As we enter unfamiliar ethnic terrain, our classifications are bursting at the seams. Here is how Kwame Anthony Appiah, of Harvard’s Philosophy and Afro-American Studies Departments, described his situation: My mother is English; my father is Ghanaian. My sisters are married to a Nigerian and a Norwegian. I have nephews who range from blond-haired kids to very black kids. They are all first cousins. Now according to the American scheme of things, they’re all black—even the guy with blond hair who skis in Oslo. (Wright 1994) I marvel at what racial experts the U.S. census takers once were. When they took the national census, which is done every 10 years, they looked at people and assigned them a race. At various points, the census contained these categories: mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, Negro, black, Mexican, white, Indian, Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, and Hindu. Quadroon (one-fourth black and three-fourths white) and octoroon (one-eighth black and seven-eighths white) proved too difficult to “measure,” and these categories were used only in 1890. Mulatto appeared in the 1850 census and lasted until 1920. The Mexican government complained about Mexicans being treated as a race, and this category was used only in 1930. I don’t know whose idea it was to make Hindu a race, but it appeared in 1930 and 1940 (Edmonston 2019). In the 2010 census, we were first asked to declare whether we were or were not “Spanish/Hispanic/Latino.” After this, we were asked to check “one or more races” that we “consider ourselves to be.” We could choose from White; Black, African American, or Negro; American Indian or Alaska Native; and Asian Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Native Hawaiian, Guamanian or Chamorro, or Samoan. There were boxes for Other Asian and Other Pacific Islander, with examples that listed Hmong, Pakistani, and Fijian as races. If these didn’t do it, we could check a box called “Some Other Race” and then write whatever we wanted. Perhaps the census should list Cablinasian, after all. We could also have ANGEL for African-Norwegian-German-English-Latino Americans, DEVIL for those of Danish-English-Vietnamese-Italian-Lebanese descent, and STUDENT for Swedish-Turkish-Uruguayan-Danish-English-Norwegian-Thai Americans. As you read farther in this chapter, you will see why these terms make as much sense as the categories we currently use. For Your Consideration Perhaps you can use the materials in this chapter to answer these questions: → Why do we count people by “race”? → Why not eliminate race from the U.S. census? (Race became a factor in 1790 during the first census. To determine the number of representatives from each state, a slave was counted as three-fifths of a person!) → Why is race so important to some people? 266 The Myth of a Fixed Number of Races Although large groupings of people can be classified by blood type and gene frequencies, even these classifications do not uncover “race.” Rather, the term is so arbitrary that biologists and anthropologists cannot even agree on how many “races” there are (Anderson 2019). Ashley Montagu (1964, 1999), a physical anthropologist, pointed out that some scientists have classified humans into only two “races,” while others have found as many as two thousand. Montagu (1960) himself classified humans into forty “racial” groups. “Race” is so fluid that even a plane ride can change someone’s race. If you want to see how, read the following Down-to-Earth Sociology. Down-to-Earth Sociology Can a Plane Ride Change Your Race? At the beginning of this text, I mentioned that common sense and sociology often differ. This is especially so when it comes to race. According to common sense, our racial classifications represent biological differences between people. Sociologists, in contrast, stress that what we call races are social classifications, not biological categories. Sociologists point out that our “race” depends more on the society in which we live than on our biology. For example, the racial categories common in the United States are only one of numerous ways by which people around the world classify physical appearances (Rocha 2019). Although various groups use different categories, each group assumes that its categories are natural, merely a response to visible biology. To better understand this essential sociological point—that race is more social than it is biological—consider this: In the United States, children born to the same parents are all of the same race. “What could be more natural?” Americans assume. But in Brazil, children born to the same parents may be of different races—if their appearances differ. “What could be more natural?” assume Brazilians. What “race” are these two Brazilians? Is the child’s “race” different from her mother’s “race”? The text explains why “race” is such an unreliable concept that it changes even with geography. Credit: GoGo Images Corporation/Alamy Stock Photo Consider how Americans usually classify a child born to a “black” mother and a “white” father. Why do they usually say that the child is “black”? Wouldn’t it be equally as logical to classify the child as “white”? Similarly, if a child has one grandmother who is “black,” but all her other ancestors are “white,” the child is often considered “black.” Yet she has much more “white blood” than “black blood.” Why, then, is she considered “black”? Certainly not because of biology. Such thinking is a legacy of slavery. In an attempt to preserve the “purity” of their “race” in the face of the many children whose fathers were white slave masters and whose mothers were black slaves, whites classified anyone with even a “drop of black blood” as black. They actually called this the “one-drop” rule. Even a plane trip can change a person’s race. In the city of Salvador in Brazil, people classify one another by color of skin and eyes, breadth of nose and lips, and color and curliness of hair. They use at least seven terms for what we call white and black. Consider again a U.S. child who has “white” and “black” parents. If she flies to Brazil, she is no longer “black”; she now belongs to one of their several “whiter” categories (Fish 1995). If the girl makes such a flight, would her “race” actually change? Our common sense revolts at this, I know, but it actually would. We want to argue that because her biological characteristics remain unchanged, her race remains unchanged. This is because we think of race as biological, when race is actually a label we use to describe perceived biological characteristics. Simply put, the race we “are” depends on our social location—on who is doing the classifying. “Racial” classifications are also fluid, not fixed. Even now, you can see change occurring in U.S. classifications. The category “multiracial,” for example, indicates changing thought and perception. For Your Consideration → How would you explain to someone that race is more a social classification than a biological one? Can you come up with any arguments to refute this statement? 267 The Myth of Racial Superiority Regardless of what anthropologists, biologists, and sociologists say, however, people do divide one another into races, and we are stuck with this term. People also tend to see some races (mostly their own) as superior and others as inferior. As with language, however, no race is better than another. All races have their geniuses—and their idiots. Yet the myth of racial superiority abounds, a myth that is particularly dangerous. Adolf Hitler, for example, believed that the Aryans were a superior race, destined to establish an advanced culture and a new world order. This destiny required them to avoid the “racial contamination” that would come from breeding with inferior races. The Aryans, then, had a “cultural duty” to isolate or destroy races that threatened their racial purity and culture. The reason I selected these photos is to illustrate how seriously we must take all preaching of hatred and of racial supremacy, even though it seems to come from harmless or even humorous sources. The strange looking person with his hands on his hips, who is wearing lederhosen, traditional clothing of Bavaria, Germany, is Adolf Hitler. His actions led to the concentration camps. This is just one small pile of bodies found when the U.S. Army liberated Buchenwald. Credit: Time Life Pictures/National Archives/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images; AP Images Hearing from the Author: The Holocaust Listen to the Audio 268 Hitler’s views, put into practice, were appalling. The Nazis slaughtered those they deemed inferior: Jews, Slavs, gypsies, homosexuals, and people with mental and physical disabilities. Horrific images of gas ovens and emaciated bodies stacked like cordwood have haunted the world’s nations. At Nuremberg, the Allies, flush with victory, put the top Nazis on trial, exposing their heinous deeds to a shocked world. Their public executions, everyone assumed, marked the end of such grisly acts. Obviously, they didn’t. Fifty years after the Nazis, a mother in Rwanda was told: “Which one of your seven children are you going to throw into this grave?” the men asked the woman. “If you refuse to tell us, they’ll all be buried alive.” (Isaacs 2014) Over 100 days in 1994, Hutus slaughtered about 900,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus—mostly with machetes (Totten 2018). That same decade, Serbian leaders in Bosnia massacred Muslims, giving the world the term ethnic cleansing. In North Korea today, prisoners deemed genetically inferior—defiling the “sacred Korean race”—are tortured, raped, and starved to death (Eberstadt 2014b). As these events sadly attest, genocide—the attempt to destroy a group of people because of their presumed race or ethnicity—remains alive and well. Although more recent killings are not accompanied by swastikas and gas ovens, the perpetrators’ goal is the same. The Myth Continues The idea of race, of course, is far from a myth. Firmly embedded in our culture, it is a powerful force in our everyday lives. That no race is superior and that even biologists cannot decide how people should be classified into races is not what counts. “I know what I see, and you can’t tell me any different” seems to be the common attitude. As was noted in Chapter 4, sociologists W. I. and D. S. Thomas (1928) observed, “If people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” In other words, people act on perceptions and beliefs, not facts. As a result, we will always have people like Hitler and, as illustrated in our opening vignette, calloused bureaucrats like those in the U.S. Public Health Service who thought that it was fine to experiment with people whom they deemed inferior. Although few hold such extreme views, most people appear to be ethnocentric enough to believe that their own race is—at least just a little—superior to others.