Race & Racism | Anthropology Optional for UPSC PDF Download

Concept of Race

Theodosus Dobzhansky, the pioneering researcher on Reproductive isolation has defined race as a "group of population which is reproductively isolated to the extent that the exchange of genes between them is absent or so slow that the genetic differences are not diminished." Implied in this definition are four features of a race.

• Group of Population: All populations have their own gene pool with differing gene frequencies. If race is defined in terms of gene frequencies, all populations would qualify to be called a race. Race is higher in hierarchy than populations, and consists of many populations that have gene frequencies related to one another.
• Genetic Differences: The group of populations forming a race has some genes in very high frequency and some in very low frequency and these genetic differences characterize a race. Such differences in gene-frequency. arise partly because of natural selection and chance.
• Reproductively Isolated: The group of populations forming races is reproductively isolated. This isolation maintains the genetic differences.-This isolation is however, not complete. Whenever races expand their range and come into contact of other races, they potentially hybridize and a new gene frequency is set up.
• Race is a Biological Concept: Race is different from religious, political or cultural groups. Race is purely a biological concept and occurs not due to any cultural superiority but genetic differences.

Race and Racism

• Since the development of the concept of race, it has been subjected to a lot of controversy. For some, it exists as a biological phenomenon and for others as a cultural one. To better understand the controversy, we shall see both the connotations of the term "Race".

Race as a Biological Concept

• To understand why the racial approach to human variation has been so difficult, we must first understand the race concept in strictly biological terms. Briefly, a race may be defined as a population of a species that differs in the frequency of some gene or genes from other population of the same species. Simple and strait forward though such a definition may seem there are three very important things to be noted about it.
• First, it is arbitrary - there is no agreement on how many genetic differences it takes to make a race. For some people, differences in the frequency of one gene are sufficient, while for others, differences in frequencies of several genes are necessary. The number of genes and the ones needed to make a race are still open to debate.
• The second thing to note but the biological definition of race is that it does not mean that any one race has exclusive possession of any particular gene or genes. In human terms, the frequency of the gene for blood group 'O’ may be high in one population and low in another, but it is present in both. Races are genetically "open", meaning that gene flow takes place between them. Thus one can see the fallacy of any . attempt to identify "pure" races; if gene flow cannot take place between two populations, then they are not races, they are separate species.
• The third thing to note about the biological definition of race is that individuals of one race will not necessarily be distinguishable from those of another. In fact, as we have just noted with respect to humans, the differences between individuals within a population may be greater than the differences between populations. This follows from the genetic "openness" of races; no one race has an exclusive monopoly on any particular gene.
• As a device for understanding human variation, the biological race concept has serious drawbacks. One is that the category is arbitrary to begin with, which makes agreement on, any given classification difficult. Perhaps if the human species were divided into a number of relatively discrete breeding populations, this would not be such a problem, but even this is open to debate.
• What has happened though is that human populations have grown in the course of human evolution, and with this growth has gone increased chances for contract and gene flow between populations. Since the development of food production, which began about 10,000 years ago, the process has accelerated so that differences between human populations today maybe less clear-cut than back in the days of Homo erectus, or even the Neanderthals.
• If this is not enough of a problem, things are complicated even more because humans are so complicated genetically. Thus the genetic underpinnings of phenotypic traits that traditionally are the subject of racial studies are often poorly understood. To compound the problem, "race" exists as a cultural, as well as biological, category. In various different ways, cultures define religious, linguistic, and ethnic groups as races, thereby confusing linguistic and behavioral traits with physical traits. They also adopt emotional attitudes toward them.
• A major result of all this has been a lot of debate about what "race" is and is not, as well as the number of human races that can be defined. Often forgotten is the fact that a race, even if it can be defined, is the result of the operation of evolutionary processes. Because it is these processes rather than racial categories themselves in which we are really interested, a growing number of anthropologists have become convinced that the race concept is of no particular utility, instead, they prefer to study the distribution and significance of specific, genetically based characteristics, or else the characteristics of small breeding populations that are, after all, the smallest meaningful units in evolution.

Race as a Cultural Concept

• Why has it been impossible to agree upon a definition of race The answer to this question lies in the fact that the radical racial categories people use are often very revealing indicators of their social values. The way in which we see other people is culturally conditioned. Recognizing the race of another is something we learn in the process of growing up in a particular culture.
• Some cultures recognize many more shades of skin color than do Americans, who tend to dump people into the categories white and black. Brazilians have about 500 different racial labels (Kottak, 1974), each level corresponding to some phenotypical trait. Because the gradations are so subtle, one individual may have several different racial labels during the course of his or her lifetime.
• Concepts of race are so ambiguous and so much a product of cultural bias that race, as the term is traditionally used, has no clear biological meaning. Thus, by using the term, one runs the risk of having it interpreted in ways that were not intended. No anthropologist would deny that race is an important way of organizing human variation in cultural terms. But culturally defined categories cannot be translated into objective, clear, biological categories. For this reason, physical anthropologists are gradually abandoning the use of racial categories in studying human variation.

Relevance of the Concept of Race Today

The biological and scientific reasoning behind the conception of race is today sadistically trashed. The objective and scientific reasoning behind the biological concept of race is increasingly substituted by subjective and unscientific bases of culture. The growth of "Racism" in recent decades on the basis of cultural and intellectual superiority has led to the new concept of "ethnic cleansing" as seen in former Yugoslavia. People are being increasingly differentiated on the basis of unscientific concepts like "purity and superiority of blood", "fine color", "superior mental and physical abilities" and "cultural superiority". In other words, race and concept of race has paved the way for ethnocentrism.
In 1952, the UNESCO has made a declaration regarding the concept of race.

• All human beings belong only to one species  Homo sapiens.
• There is no doubt some differences in the physiological anatomy either because of hereditary trail or environment but generally both affect it.
• The change in heredity is because of mutation or cross marriage.
• Race cannot be grouped on the basis of nationality, religion, geographical, cultural and linguistic factors.
• The present day classification is based on anatomical and morphological differences and not on any ground of inferiority and superiority.
• Intelligence does not play any role in classification of the races.
• Culture differences are not the cause of racial differences.
• The so called "pure races are no where to be found either these days or in the past". There has been intermingling of races going on.
• The human beings are equal and they deserve equal treatment.

Owing to these difficulties in comprehending the scientific objectivity and failure to translate them into objective facts, the concept of race is being abandoned today, of late, the concept of race has only become a myth and not a reality.