1. Modern Human Diversity:
Race and Racism

3. Variation and Evolution
In humans, most behavioral patterns are culturally learned or acquired
other characteristics are determined by an interaction between genes & environment

4. The Concept of Human Races
While the biological race concept is not applicable to human variation, race exists as a cultural category

5. The confusion of social with biological factors is frequently combined with prejudices that then serve to exclude whole categories of people from certain roles or positions in society.
Anthropologists have abandoned the race concept as being of no particular utility in understanding human biological variation

6. The Meaning of Race
Early anthropologists classified Homo sapiens into races based on geographic location, skin color, body size, head shape, and hair texture

7. The presence of individuals who did not fit the “type” challenged these racial classifications
No examples of pure racial types could be found

8. Race & Human Variation: Limitations
Race is an arbitrary category, making agreement on any classification impossible
Humans are complex genetically and often the genetic basis of traits on which racial studies are based is poorly understood
Race exists as a cultural as well as a biological category

9. Racism
A doctrine of racial superiority by which one group asserts its superiority over another
Racist individuals react on the basis of social stereotypes instead of scientific facts
Behavioral characteristics attributed to race can be explained with culture rather than biology

10. Ethnicity: The Emphasis of Culture Over Biology
Ethnic groups are formed by virtue of community of language, religion, social institutions, etc., which have the power of uniting human beings of one or several species, races, or varieties and are by no means zoological species

11. When one uses the term “ethnic group,” the questions are immediately raised, What does it mean? What does the user have in mind?
This presents an opportunity to discuss the facts and explore the meaning and falsities enshrined in the word “race”

12. Ethnicity is a multifactorial concept including, but not limited to, cultural constructs, genetic background, ecological specialization, and self-identification

13. Race and IQ Sir Cyril Burt Social Class and Intelligence
Intelligence tracks within British social classes
Monozygotic (identical) twins reared apart
Experiments allegedly show very high heritability for IQ scores (up to 80% of variability due to genes)

14. Scientific fraud
Can't tell what parts of his research are true, but he greatly increased his sample size without changing any of his correlations--a statistical impossibility.

16. The Fallacy of Heritability
Heritability is a measure of the degree of genetic determination of a characteristic within a given population

17. Heritability gives no indication of the genetic basis of differences between populations
e.g., Black versus White differences on IQ scores could be due entirely to environment, in spite of studies indicating a high heritability of IQ scores within populations

18. Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: the Fallacy of Race
Montague and Livingstone suggested that we can make our race problem go away by not calling a race a race, but by calling it an ethnic group, a complex distinction

19. A race refers to a group of people who share some biological or anatomical characteristics, whereas an ethnic group is a group of people who share a particular culture

23. The implication was to substitute discrimination on the basis of cultural differences for discrimination on the basis of racial differences
This approach hasn't solved any problems

24. Montague and Livingstone said that biological differences are not restricted to particular geographic regions, but are distributed as clines.
Clines are gradual transitions in frequency of a trait over space as in ABO Blood Types and skin color

25. Americican Anthropological Association
1997 Statement About Race
Whatever the utility of race for examination of adaptive differences in populations, the AAA now considers the harmful nature of a sociological definition of race to have dangers that outweigh the usefulness of any biological definition

26. Their statement notes that all human variations are capable of interbreeding and do so; they note that any human being is capable of learning cultural traits of another group.

27. They conclude by saying:
“...that present-day inequalities between human groups are not consequences of their biological inheritance; rather, these inequalities are products of historical and contemporary social, economic, educational and political circumstances.”

28. Works Consulted
Blow, Charles M. “Constructing a Conversation on Race.” New York Times, 20 Aug Web. 29 May Davis, David Brion. “Some Meanings of Slavery and Emancipation: Dehumanization, Animalization, and Free Soil.” The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation. New York: Vintage Books, Pp Print. Havilland, William A., et. al. “Modern Human Diversity.” Anthropology: The Human Challenge. 11th ed. Belmont, California: Wadsworth, pp Print. Ludwig, David. “Against the New Metaphysics of Race.” Philosophy of Science, 82.2 (April 2015), pp Web. 31 May Nguyen, Mimi Thi. “The Hoodie as a Sign, Screen, Expectation, and Force.” Signs, 40.4 (Summer 2015), pp Web. 1 Jun Schiebinger, Londa. “The Anatomy of Difference.” Nature’s Body. Boston: Beacon Press, pp Print.