While the biological race concept is not applicable to human variation, nevertheless race exists as a significant cultural category. Human groups frequently insert a false notion of biological difference into the cultural category of race to make it appear more factual and objective. In various ways, cultures define religious, linguistic, and ethnic groups as “races,” thereby confusing linguistic and cultural traits with physical traits.
For example, in many Latin American countries, people are commonly classified as Indio (Indian), Mestizo (mixed), or Ladino (of Spanish descent). But despite the biological connotations of these terms, the criteria used for assigning individuals to these categories involve things such as whether they wear shoes, sandals, or go barefoot; speak Spanish or an
Indian language; live in a thatched hut or a European-style house; and so forth. Thus an Indio—by speaking Spanish, wearing Western-style clothes, and living in a house in a non-Indio neighborhood—ceases to be an Indio, no matter how many “Indio genes” he or she may possess.
This sort of confusion of nonbiological characteristics with the biological notion of heredity is by no means limited to Latin American societies. To various extents, such confusion is found in most societies of Europe and North America. Take, for example, the fact that the racial categories used by the U. S. Census Bureau change with every census. Large catch-all categories (white, black, American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian and Pacific Islander or native Hawaiian) include diverse peoples. Asian, for example, includes such different peoples as Chinese and East Indians, whereas native
In colonial Mexico, sixteen different castas (“castes”) were named, giving specific labels to individuals who were various combinations of Spanish, Indian, and African ancestry. These paintings of castas are traditionally arranged from light to dark as a series and reflect an effort to impose hierarchy despite the fluid social system in place.
In the United States the hierarchy was more rigid; the “one drop rule,” also known as hypodescent, would ascribe the “lower” position to individuals if they had even one drop of blood from a grouping within the hierarchy.
Hawaiian and Alaskan are far more restrictive. The Census Bureau also asks people to identify Hispanic ethnicity, a category that includes people who, in their countries of origin, might be classified as Indio, Mestizo, or Ladino. The addition of categories for native Hawaiians, Middle Easterners, and people who consider themselves multiracial does nothing to improve the situation.
To compound the confusion, inclusion in one or another of these categories is usually based on self-identification, which means that these are not biological categories at all. The observation that the purported race of an individual can vary over the course of his or her lifetime speaks to the fact that cultural forces shape the designation of membership in a particular racial category.
Similarly, genetics research in medicine is regularly oversimplified according to the racial types defined in the 18th and 19th centuries. It remains to be seen whether this genetics research will avoid creating false genetic types that do not reflect the true nature of human variation. Recent claims of race-specific drugs and vaccines that are based on limited scientific data indicate that the social category of race may again be interfering with our understanding of the true nature of human genetic diversity.
To make matters worse, 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. For example, in colonial North America, a “racial” worldview, rooted in the unequal power relations between the English or Saxon “race” and the Irish or Celtic “race” in Europe, assigned American Indians and Africans imported as slaves to perpetual low status. A supposed biological inferiority
These skulls, from the genocide war memorial in Rwanda, record some of the horror that took place in this Central African country in 1994. Over the course of only about a hundred days, a militia of the ruling Hutu majority brutally murdered close to 1 million ethnic Tutsis. With clear genocidal intent, systematic organization, and intense speed, Hutu actions, resembling those of the Nazi regime, remind us that genocide is far from a thing of the past. The global effects of the Rwandan genocide have been massive. Millions of Rwandans, both refugees and killers, now live in neighboring regions, disrupting the stability of these states. Through the United Nations and individual governments, the international community has recognized that it failed to act to prevent this genocide and collectively has taken steps toward maintaining peace in the region. The parallels between Rwanda and current conflicts in Congo, Burundi, and Sudan are chilling.
Was used to justify this low status, whereas access to privilege, power, and wealth was reserved for favored groups of European descent.5
Because of the colonial association of lighter skin with greater power and higher social status, people whose history includes domination by lighter-skinned Europeans have sometimes valued this phenotype. In Haiti, for example, the “color question” has been the dominant force in social and political life. Skin texture, facial features, hair color, and socioeconomic class collectively play a role in the ranking. According to Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “a rich black becomes a mulatto, a poor mulatto becomes black.”6
The Nazis in Germany elevated a racialized worldview to state policy, with particularly evil consequences. The Nuremberg race laws of 1935 declared the superiority of the Aryan “race” and the inferiority of the Gypsy and Jewish “races.” The Nazi doctrine justified, on supposed biological grounds, political repression and extermination. In all, 11 million people (Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and other so-called inferior people, as well as political opponents of the Nazi regime) were deliberately put to death.
Tragically, the Nazi Holocaust (from the Greek word for “wholly burnt” or “sacrificed by fire”) is not unique in human history. Such genocides, programs of extermination of one group by another, have a long history that predates World War II and continues today. Recent and ongoing genocide in parts of South America, Africa, Europe, and Asia, like previous genocides, are accompanied by a rhetoric of dehumanization and a depiction of the people being exterminated as a lesser type of human.
World History
