Race is the identity category largely based on a person’s appearance or phenotypes. The specific traits used to determine racial categories change through time and across space. In the United States, notions of race are rooted in the slave economy of the colonial period. Nearly 100 years before the English established the Jamestown colony in Virginia, the Spanish brought African slaves to North America. To maximize profits in this agricultural system, the legal system required identity categories that easily marked who was eligible to be held as a slave and who was not. Africans became the preferred source for slaves partly because of their appearance, which is to say, their race allowed them to be easily identified by the legal system of the slave era. Although slavery was outlawed in the US during the 1860s, the Jim Crow legal system that followed continued to govern many aspects of American life for at least another 100 years, reconfiguring and making legal many American concepts of race. The US Census Bureau played an important role in eliminating some of those old categories, but in the process, it reinforced other strategies used by Americans to create race groups.
Today, Americans generally use only three criteria to classify someone by race. The first criterion is skin pigmentation. People with darker skin are distinguished from those with lighter skin, but in the US, skin color by itself is insufficient to classify anyone into a racial category. Therefore, people are further categorized by the texture and color of their hair. People with naturally straight hair or light-colored hair, are generally not considered “black” or “African-American” regardless of their skin tone. Finally, people are categorized by the shape and color of their eyes. People with brown “almond-shaped” eyes, and straight hair, are often placed in the “Asian” category. This “three-factor test” generates three groups: White, Black, and Asian. Americans use this clumsy, old-fashioned test all the time although it works so poorly that millions of Americans, particularly those from Latin America, are left out requiring the creation of additional categories.
Figure 9-2: Fingerprint patterns vary across the globe much like skin color, but because they are difficult to see, they were not chosen as markers of race. Source: FBI
The notion of race is problematic for other reasons. Clearly, the “three-factor test” used by Americans is a social construction. People created both the test and each category. Anthropologists, biologists, and geneticists argue that the concept of race itself is not scientifically valid. While there are genetic markers for physical characteristics, like skin color and hair texture that are evident in the DNA of each person, only a few of the many thousands of DNA markers align with the convenient categories we use to categorize into racial groups. For example, only about 15 of our 45,000 genetic markers control for skin pigmentation If we wanted, we could choose from thousands of alternative genetic characteristics to classify people. If our social constructions were to change, and we suddenly decided to group people by height, fingerprint patterns, or blood type (rather than skin color, hair texture, and eye shape), we would have an entirely different set of races across the globe.
Race is also not logically from a statistical view. This is because the overall amount of genetic variation among people of the same “race” is equal to or greater than the amount of genetic variation among people of different races. Statisticians argue that race fails the simplest definition of what constitutes a “group”. Even though the concept of race has been rejected by statistics and science, it remains a vital reality in the lives of almost all people across most of the world, especially where there are many groups of people who look different living together.
Marxism and Race
So why do we have “races” then? Marxists regularly argue that “race is the cultural clothing of capitalism”. Marxists note that racism and/or ethnic bias is one of the most important tools used by the elite to maintain power. According to Marxist theory, the construction and maintenance of racial and ethnic identities permit political and economic elites to justify their economic, political, and military dominance over less powerful groups. Marxists also argue that ethnic biases and racial conflict distract working-class people from all groups from focusing their energy and anger against the capitalist class and capitalist system.
Physical Geography of Race
Human appearance does vary across the planet and geography played a role. Human phenotypes evolved over thousands of years to help humans thrive in various climates and environments. Skin pigmentation is the most noticeable adaptation. The traditional theory, which explains the process, known as directional selection, holds that dark skin is an evolutionary adaptation that helps protect people from the damaging effects of the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. The theory suggests that darker-skinned people had an evolutionary advantage over lighter-skinned people in sunny locations, so they became more numerous in sunny regions. However, dark skin may be disadvantageous in sunlight-deprived areas, like northern Europe, where darker skin prevents the body from producing adequate amounts of Vitamin D from sunlight. Vitamin D is an essential dietary nutrient, especially for lactating mothers, so pale skin provides an advantage in places where it is frequently cloudy or where winters are long and days are short for much of the year. Some evidence suggests that the variations in skin pigmentation may have taken as few as 100 generations to appear in humans. There is evidence that the process is reversible as well. There is also some emerging theory to suggest this old theory may not be valid.
Figure 9-3: Tamil Nadu, India – People from Southern India tend to have darker skin, but also share many phenotypes with Europeans and are generally lactose tolerant. Source: Wikimedia
The ability to absorb vitamin D into the human body may also have influenced the development of lactose tolerance, and the evolution of dairy agriculture culture in Europe. Most adult mammals cannot drink milk because of an inability to produce lactase, an enzyme that metabolizes lactose. Most Europeans can drink milk. Traditional thinking suggests this is because thousands of years ago, Europeans who had a genetic mutation that made them lactose tolerant had an evolutionary advantage over those who were lactose intolerant. In any case, where was, and continues to be, a foundational, causal variable in the construction and maintenance of our ideas about who we are, what we do and why we do it.
BABY’S GOT BACK – GEOGRAPHY AND STANDARDS OF BEAUTY
Cultural factors also play a role in the evolution of our physical appearance. Some of our physical characteristics, like skin tone, height, or body morphology have been influenced by long-standing regional standards for physical attractiveness. This process is known as sexual selection. For thousands of years, standards of “beauty”, that are sometimes very local, even random fascinations, have lent themselves to regional evolutionary changes in body morphology that have contributed to human phenotypes.
Across the globe, differences emerged in what men and women consider attractive in the opposite sex. For example, for many generations, many Chinese men were attracted to women with tiny feet. The feet of some young Chinese women were bound. Presumably, tall women with naturally big feet were considered less desirable than short women with small feet. Did the presence of this sexual preference help make the Chinese much shorter on average, than, say, the Dutch where that particular sexual preference was uncommon?
Figure 9-4: Chillicothe, Ohio – Tiny shoes, a relic of pre-industrial China hint at the role of sexual selection in evolution of phenotypes.
In West Africa, where maternal societies and a cult of fertility characterized the religion of many cultures for untold generations, a preference for large buttocks, especially on females, emerged. In places where food insecurity threatened the lives of infants, a large derrière may have been interpreted as a sign of good health and some insurance to men seeking mates that their mate would produce many healthy children. In Japan, a place with a vastly different agricultural and religious history from West Africa, this taste preference for large buttocks is muted or even reversed.
In the United States, especially during the 1970s and 1980s, many white people worked to darken or “tan” their skin to meet an evolving standard of beauty. Generations earlier, pale women sought instead to remain as pale as possible to ensure beauty. A geographer might explain this shift in cultural practice by arguing that in agricultural societies, darkly tanned skin was a sign of poverty because agricultural field laborers worked long hours in the sun. Starting with the Industrial Revolution, poor white people were more likely to live in cities and work in factories, and as a result, were kept pale by spending long hours indoors. The wealthier classes finding themselves now indistinguishable from the impoverished classes began to tan to signify their status via their ability to engage in outdoor leisure activities, like going to the beach. A good tan became a marker of wealth and exclusivity – which are desirable characteristics. In recent years, however, the threat of skin cancer and shifting demographics have confounded this American beauty standard once again.
Figure 9-5: Chinatown, Los Angeles, CA: Chinese women, especially the elderly, are careful to avoid exposure to the sun as they cling to standards of beauty more common in agricultural China.
African-American and Blackness
In the US, the two main ethnic categories are black and white, though these categories have evolved. Early on, and in some regions of the US, there were multiple ideas about what made a person black or white. For example, racial categories such as octoroon, mulatto, and high yellow, once commonly used in the 19th century to describe Americans of mixed ethnic or racial backgrounds, are unused today. During the late 19th and early 20thcentury, at the height of the Jim Crow era, new “blood laws” were enacted that redefined “blackness”. Some states declared specific percentages (one-fourth, one-eighth) of ancestry as a legal limit to be considered legally white or black. In some places, there was an official policy that ruled that any person with any ancestry from Africa was considered African-American, regardless of their physical appearance. These were known as “one drop” rules. It is interesting to note that before the great period of European migration in the late 1800s and early 1900s, a large percentage of Americans were of mixed African, European, and Native ancestry. In 1930, the US Census Bureau even stopped using the designation “mulatto” to indicate people of mixed ancestry. Subsequent censuses (1940-1960), black (“negro” back then) and white were the only options, officially eliminating the mixed-race options from earlier eras.
Figure 9-6: Cumberland Posey, a famous baseball and basketball player from Homestead, Pennsylvania was considered "black" because local people knew of his family’s African ancestry. He played baseball in the "Negro Leagues" and basketball in the Black Fives league. His first cousins, (right) moved to Ohio in the 1920s, and passed for “white” in another town where their family history was less well known. The younger men in the photo fought in World War II in all-white units and attended white schools. They moved and became white. Mr. Posey did not move and stayed black.
Many Jim Crow laws remained intact until the late 1960s when the Supreme Court struck them down. These laws were necessary back then because other laws and regulations required people to be categorized as either black or white. For example, the US military was segregated by race until 1948. Blood rules forced the military to render a judgment on each soldier or sailor so the military could assign each individual into a race-based unit. Similar laws, known as blood quantum rules may still be applied to determine membership in various American Indian tribes. It wasn’t until the 2000 census that the government again allowed people of mixed heritage to identify by more than a single category.
The effect of these laws remains strong in the United States. Persons of mixed ancestry generally are pressured by society to identify themselves with a single heritage, especially if they have even an identifiable percentage of African ancestry. This is probably because black people were the group most often targeted by the old blood laws. Those definitions linger. According to DNA tests, African-Americans are on average about 20% “white”. About 10 percent of African-Americans are more than half white in terms of ancestry, yet they still identify (or are identified) as “black”. Even very well-known people of mixed ancestry, like President Barack Obama and golfer Tiger Woods, are forced to identify as a single ethnic category, sometimes over their very public objections. Woods is considered black in America, but he calls himself Cablinasian, a word he made-up to characterize his ancestry that includes Caucasians, Black, American Indian, and Asian. In Thailand, Tiger Woods is embraced as “Thai”, the home country of his mother. The unfortunate lesson here is that it frequently doesn’t matter what you think you are if everyone else insists that you are something different.
Figure 9-7: Born of a European mother and an African father, Barack Obama is widely considered simply "black". It shows that even the "most powerful man on the planet" is unable to overcome the cultural notions of race in the US. Source: Wikimedia
In South Africa, where race-based apartheid government policies lasted until the mid-1990s, officials devised a variety of tests to determine an individual’s inclusion as a white, coloured or black. Consider, for example, the so-called pencil test in which a pencil was stuck in an individual’s hair. If the pencil did not fall out easily, the individual might be classified as black. In one famous case, a girl, whose parents were both legally recognized as white, was reclassified as coloured, and subsequently removed from her all-white school, though her parents remained white.
Light-skinned black people could move from the United States or South Africa and suddenly find themselves white. For example, in many places in Latin America or the Caribbean, light-skinned persons of African ancestry who would be black in the US are considered white in the Caribbean or South America. Brazilians who were considered white in their home country often find themselves black once they move to the United States. Such migrants must navigate a potential minefield of bigotry. Americans may simply consider these immigrants “black” without reflecting much about the way the person from Brazil might self-identify. Discrimination could ensue. If the immigrants deny their African heritage by claiming that they are white, then American blacks may be off-put or upset because the metrics for determining who is “black” is different here.
