Why Race Isn’t Biological (Part 1): An Introduction

This is a brief and imperfect introduction to a multi-part ongoing series on race, racism, and biological anthropology. Why do a series on this? Well, bioanth, and anthropology at large, has a long history of contributing to bad science that has promoted racism, colonialism, and eugenics. My page motto is “all things biological anthropology” and that includes a critical exploration of the dark past of the discipline, the skeletons in the closet if you will. We as a discipline have contributed to scientific racism in the past, our institutions continue to operate within these systems (that the institution of academia is called the ‘ivory tower’ is not lost on me), and because of this, and because we biological anthropologists know better, it is our discipline’s duty to actively educate and work to correct our past sins.

I would also like to remind, there are so many fantastic resources circulating around social media currently addressing how to confront issues of racial injustice, police brutality, systemic racism, white privilege, bias, etc. We need to engage with these resources. I will share some of these on my social media, but I urge you to begin your own learning/unlearning process by reading books and articles by black authors, watching movies and documentaries by black directors, listening to podcasts by black creators, and following and engaging with black influencers and public figures. Also, pay attention to organizations and institutions who are not engaging in dialogue right now. Silence is loud. While participation in #Blackouttuesday was a good start, continued momentum is desperately needed.

Education and action inform each other and should form an endless cycle of learning and doing. My small contribution towards education will be this series. By understanding race isn’t based in biology, we can correct bad science when we encounter it. There’s a lot of bad science out there in support of racism, and there are racists who twist science to advance their own agendas. The only way to combat this is to understand the real science.

While ‘race’ isn’t a biologically valid concept, racism and its consequences are very real. The flawed idea that there is a biological basis for race has in turn and to a large extent been used to justify racism and white privilege as “only natural.” By learning and understanding how ‘race’ isn’t a meaningful biological concept, paired with continued anti-racism education and activism, we can challenge these racist assumptions and work towards actual change and accountability.

This is the same reasoning why I talk about race in my bioanth class, not because race is biological, but because there are people who still think it is and use this misunderstanding to support racism, and biological anthropology has contributed to this misunderstanding. As a bioanth teacher, it is part of my job to educate on this. When talking about race in my classes, I like to start with a couple of discussion prompts (think about how you might answer these prompts as well):

• What do we mean when we say ‘race’? What are we talking about?

Usually by this late point in the semester, my students are accustomed to my teaching methods (read: ‘quirks’) and feel more open to discussion than earlier in the semester. Almost every lecture is punctuated by discussion questions. Any initial shyness has dissipated by now. This question and the underlying topic of discussion – ‘race’ – is noticeably uncomfortable however. Some students hesitate to answer. There are some tense laughs and some discomfort. Afterwards, I tend to get an almost unanimous response: “skin color”. When we talk about race we are often using skin color as a visual way to classify people into distinct groups. This, as we’ll learn through this ongoing series, is inherently flawed.

• How many ‘races’ are there?

Here again there is usually some shifting and discomfort. “How should I answer? Is this a trick question? What does she want me to say? Should I speak from my own perception and maybe reveal my own bias? Should I default to ‘we are all one race, the human race’? What if I answer wrong?” With this prompt I usually get a mix of responses. One race, three or four races, a yet unknown but large number of races? The response is very telling to the nature of race. We understand that race is subjectively real through our own experiences (or lack of experiences) as well as how we’ve been taught, and we understand that for the most part, racial lines are drawn based primarily on skin color. When we try to think in discreet categories however, the line becomes blurred. What do we do if someone doesn’t exactly fit into one of these discreet racial categories we’ve constructed?

I start with these discussion prompts not to make my students uneasy or to make them feel as though I am trying to trick them. I myself sometimes wonder if some of their uncertainty stems from my being a young white female professor. My own experience of race has been decidedly a lack of experience. Reflections aside, I start with these discussion prompts because, for the most part and often unconsciously, we accept that race is indeed biological, that race is skin color, and that humans divide neatly into some number of discreet categories based on that skin color. We assume this is scientific and objective. We don’t often get a chance to really evaluate and scrutinize these assumptions or where they come from. By asking these questions, and investigating them, we can uncover how ridiculous these assumptions really are.

We can then start to learn about sociocultural constructs and how the concept of ‘race’ fits here. A sociocultural construct is an idea that has been created and is accepted and perpetuated by the people of a society or culture. Race is created by society, not by science (although bad science has been misused to justify it). This is why ‘race’ is not the same thing as human phenotypic (physical) variation and why ‘race’ is not biological. We’ll explore this topic more in-depth in a future installment of this ongoing series.

Thank you for joining me!

Kate Keller (McElvaney)

Image credit: https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race a great resource to continue or start your education.

This ongoing series has been enlightened in part by: The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee, Close Encounters with Humankind: A Paleoanthropologist Investigates Our Evolving Species by Sang-Hee Lee, The Coexistence of Race and Racism: Can They Become Extinct Together? by Janis Hutchinson, and many others.

Want to learn more about biological anthropology? Check out my introduction here: https://bonesandbioanth.com/what-is-biological-anthropology/