Contrary to what many people (including prominent politicians), race is not a “biological reality.” But how did the scientific consensus on race developed?
In the recent flood of executive orders of Donald TrumpOne warned of “a distorted narrative” about the race “driven by ideology and not the truth.”
The US President pointed to an ongoing exhibition as an example in the Smithsonian American Art Museum titled. The exhibition features over two centuries of sculptures that show how art has produced and reproduced racial attitudes and ideologies.
The executive order condemns the exhibition because it “promotes the point of view that race is not a biological reality, but a social construction, stating that” race is a human invention. “
The executive order is opposed to feelings like this: “Although the genetics of a person influence phenotypic characteristics, and the self-identified race can be influenced by physical appearance, The race itself is a social construction. ” But these words are not from Smithsonian; they are from the American society of human genetics.
Os Scientists reject the idea that race is biologically real.
The statement that race is a “biological reality” Go against modern scientific knowledge.
In an article no, John P. JacksonProfessor of History and Philosophy of Science in Michigan State Universityexplains why the statement that race is a “biological reality” Go against modern scientific knowledge.
The historian, specializing in the scientific study of the race, states that Trump’s executive order puts the “social construction” as opposed to the “biological reality”, explaining that The race was invented by people and not by nature.
What is the race?
At the turn of the twentieth century, scientists believed that humans could be divided into different races based on physical characteristics. According to this idea, a scientist could identify physical differences in groups of people, and if these differences were transmitted to the following generations, the scientist had correctly identified a racial “type”.
The results of this “typological” method were chaotic. One Charles Darwin Frustrated in 1871, he list 13 scientists who identified between two and 63 races, a confusion that persisted for the next six decades. There were almost as many racial classifications as racial classifications, because there were not two scientists who came to agreement on which the best physical characteristics to measure, or how to measure them.
An intractable problem with racial classifications was that differences in human physical traits were tiny, so scientists had difficulty using them to differentiate groups.
The African American academic pioneer Wood web He noted in 1906: “It is impossible to draw a line of color between black and other races… in all physical characteristics The black race cannot be distinguished by itself“.
But scientists tried to do these classifications in it.
In an anthropological study of 1899, William Ripley He classified people using the shape of the head, hair type, pigmentation and height.
In 1926, the Harvard anthropologist Earnest Hootonthe world’s leading racial typologist has listed 24 anatomical characteristics, such as “the presence or absence of a post-gennoid tubercle and a pharyngeal tub or tuber” and “the degree of curvature of radio and the cabo,”, however, that “this list is not, of course, exhaustive.”
All this confusion was the opposite of how science should work: as tools improved and measurements became more accurate, the object of study-the race-became increasingly confusing.
Culture as an explanation for the difference
In 1933, the rise of Nazism made the scientific study of the race more urgent. As the anthropologist wrote Sherwood Washburn In 1944: “If we are going to discuss racial issues with the Nazis, it is good that we are right.”
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, two new scientific ideas were realized. First, scientists began to look at culture, not biology, as the engine of differences between groups of people. Secondly, the rise of population genetics challenged the biological reality of the race.
In 1943, the anthropologists Ruth Benedict e Gene Weltfish They wrote a job titled The Races of Mankind. Writing to a popular audience, they argued that People are much more similar than different And that our differences are due to culture and learning, not to biology. Later, a short animation film gave these ideas a wider circulation.
Benedict and Weltfish argued that although people were, in fact, physically different, these differences had no meaning, since all races could learn and all were capable. “The progress of civilization is not a monopoly of a race or sub-raça,” they wrote.
The turn to culture was consistent with a profound change in biological knowledge.
A tool to understand evolution
Theodosius Dobzhansky He was a prominent biologist of the twentieth century. Like other biologists, he was interested in evolutionary changes. The races, which supposedly did not change over time, were therefore useless to understand the evolution of organisms.
A new tool, which scientists called “Genetic Population”it was much more valuable. The geneticist, according to Dobzhansky, identified a population based on the genes he shared in order to study the changes in organisms.
The important point is that, whatever the population chosen by the geneticist, it was changing over time. No population was a fixed and stable entityas the human races were supposed to be.
Sherwood Washburnwho happened to be a close friend of Dobzhansky, brought these ideas to anthropology. He acknowledged that the goal of genetics was not to classify people in fixed groups. The goal was to understand the process of human evolution. This change reversed everything that was taught by Hoton, his former teacher.
In 1951, Washburn argued: “There is no way to justify the division of a… population in a racial type of racial types” because that would be useless. Assuming that any group is unchanging prevented understanding of evolutionary changes. One genetic population was not “real”; It was an invention of the scientist that used it as a lens to understand organic change.
Geneticists have concluded that genetic populations are crucial tools, but for specific biological uses – not to classify people in “real” groups by race.
Anyone who wants to classify people argued Washburn must present the “important reasons to subdivide the whole of our kind.”
“Smithsonian’s exhibition shows how racialized sculpture was“ both a tool for oppression and domination and liberation and capacity, ”concludes John P. Jackson.
Not the end of contas, Science agrees that race is a human invention and not a biological reality.
