{"id":775,"date":"2019-05-03T15:40:21","date_gmt":"2019-05-03T15:40:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-geneseo-culturalanthropology\/?post_type=chapter&#038;p=775"},"modified":"2019-09-13T16:22:09","modified_gmt":"2019-09-13T16:22:09","slug":"the-construction-of-race-and-racialization","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-geneseo-culturalanthropology\/chapter\/the-construction-of-race-and-racialization\/","title":{"raw":"The Construction of Race and Racialization","rendered":"The Construction of Race and Racialization"},"content":{"raw":"<div id=\"_idContainer305\" class=\"Basic-Text-Frame\">\r\n<div class=\"textbox learning-objectives\">\r\n<h3>Learning Objectives<\/h3>\r\n<ul>\r\n \t<li class=\"Learning-Objectives\">Define the term reification and explain how the concept of race has been reified throughout history.<\/li>\r\n \t<li class=\"Learning-Objectives\">Explain why a biological basis for human race categories does not exist.<\/li>\r\n \t<li class=\"Learning-Objectives\">Discuss what anthropologists mean when they say that race is a socially constructed concept and explain how race has been socially constructed in the United States and Brazil.<\/li>\r\n \t<li class=\"Learning-Objectives\">Identify what is meant by racial formation, hypodescent, and the one-drop rule.<\/li>\r\n \t<li class=\"Learning-Objectives\">Summarize the history of immigration to the United States, explaining how different waves of immigrant groups have been perceived as racially different and have shifted popular understandings of \u201crace.\u201d<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<div id=\"_idContainer350\" class=\"_idGenObjectStyleOverride-1\">\r\n<h2 class=\"H1\">IS ANTHROPOLOGY THE \u201cSCIENCE OF RACE?\u201d\u00a0<em>By\u00a0Justin D. Garcia<\/em><\/h2>\r\n<p class=\"Normal\">Anthropology was sometimes referred to as the \u201cscience of race\u201d during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when physical anthropologists sought a biological basis for categorizing humans into racial types.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference _idGenCharOverride-1\">[footnote]For more information about efforts to establish a \u201cscientific\u201d basis for race in the 18th and 19th centuries, see the \u201cHistory\u201d section of the<em> Race: Are We So Different<\/em> website: http:\/\/www.understandingrace.org. Stephen Jay Gould\u2019s book, <em>The Mismeasure of Man<\/em> (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), has a detailed discussion of the \u201cscientific\u201d methods used by Morton and others.[\/footnote]<\/span> Since World War II, important research by anthropologists has revealed that racial categories are socially and culturally defined concepts and that racial labels and their definitions vary widely around the world. In other words, different countries have different racial categories, and different ways of classifying their citizens into these categories.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference _idGenCharOverride-1\">[footnote]More information about the social construction of racial categories in the United States can be found in Audrey Smedley, <em>Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview<\/em> (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2007) and Nell Irvin Painter, <em>The History of White People<\/em> (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010).[\/footnote]<\/span> At the same time, significant genetic studies conducted by physical anthropologists since the 1970s have revealed that biologically distinct human races do not exist. Certainly, humans vary in terms of physical and genetic characteristics such as skin color, hair texture, and eye shape, but those variations cannot be used as criteria to biologically classify racial groups with scientific accuracy. Let us turn our attention to understanding why humans cannot be scientifically divided into biologically distinct races.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<h3 class=\"H2\">Race: A Discredited Concept in Human Biology<\/h3>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">At some point in your life, you have probably been asked to identify your race on a college form, job application, government or military form, or some other official document. And most likely, you were required to select from a list of choices rather than given the ability to respond freely. The frequency with which we are exposed to four or five common racial labels\u2014\u201cwhite,\u201d \u201cblack,\u201d \u201cCaucasian,\u201d and \u201cAsian,\u201d for example\u2014tends to promote the illusion that racial categories are natural, objective, and evident divisions. After all, if Justin Timberlake, Jay-Z, and Jackie Chan stood side by side, those common racial labels might seem to make sense. What could be more objective, more conclusive, than this evidence before our very eyes? By this point, you might be thinking that anthropologists have gone completely insane in denying biological human races!<\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal\">Physical anthropologists have identified several important concepts regarding the true nature of humans\u2019 physical, genetic, and biological variation that have discredited race as a biological concept. Many of the issues presented in this section are discussed in further detail in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.understandingrace.org\/home.html\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">Race: Are We So Different<\/span><\/a>, a website created by the American Anthropological Association. The American Anthropological Association (AAA) launched the website to educate the public about the true nature of human biological and cultural variation and challenge common misperceptions about race. This is an important endeavor because race is a complicated, often emotionally charged topic, leading many people to rely on their personal opinions and hearsay when drawing conclusions about people who are different from them. The website is highly interactive, featuring multimedia illustrations and online quizzes designed to increase visitors\u2019 knowledge of human variation. I encourage you to explore the website as you will likely find answers to several of the questions you may still be asking after reading this chapter.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference _idGenCharOverride-1\">[footnote]More discussion of the material in this section can be found in Carol Mukhopadhyay, Rosemary Henze, and Yolanda Moses,<em> How Real Is Race? A Sourcebook on Race, Culture, and Biology<\/em> (Lanham, MD: Rowman &amp; Littlefield, 2013). Chapters 5 and 6 discuss the cultural construction of racial categories as a form of classification. The Race: Are We So Different website and its companion resources for teachers and researchers also explore the ideas described here.[\/footnote]\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Before explaining why distinct biological races do not exist among humans, I\u00a0must point out that one of the biggest reasons so many people continue to believe in the existence of biological human races is that the idea has been intensively <strong><span class=\"CharOverride-2\">reified<\/span> <\/strong>in literature, the media, and culture for more than three hundred years. Reification refers to the process in which an inaccurate concept or idea is so heavily promoted and circulated among people that it begins to take on a life of its own. Over centuries, the notion of biological human races became engrained\u2014unquestioned, accepted, and regarded as a concrete \u201ctruth.\u201d Studies of human physical and cultural variation from a scientific and anthropological perspective have allowed us to move beyond reified thinking and toward an improved understanding of the true complexity of human diversity.<\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">The reification of race has a long history. Especially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, philosophers and scholars attempted to identify various human races. They perceived \u201craces\u201d as specific divisions of humans who shared certain physical and biological features that distinguished them from other groups of humans. This historic notion of race may seem clear-cut and innocent enough, but it quickly led to problems as social theorists attempted to classify people by race. One of the most basic difficulties was the actual number of human races: how many were there, who were they, and what grounds distinguished them? Despite more than three centuries of such effort, no clear-cut scientific consensus was established for a precise number of human races.<\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">One of the earliest and most influential attempts at producing a racial classification system came from Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus, who argued in <em>Systema Naturae<\/em> (1735) for the existence of four human races: <em>Americanus<\/em> (Native American\u00a0\/ American Indian), <em>Europaeus<\/em> (European), <em>Asiaticus<\/em> (East Asian), and <em>Africanus<\/em> (African). These categories correspond with common racial labels used in the United States for census and demographic purposes today. However, in 1795, German physician and anthropologist Johann Blumenbach suggested that there were five races, which he labeled as <em>Caucasian <\/em>(white), <em>Mongolian <\/em>(yellow or East Asian),<em> Ethiopian <\/em>(black or African), <em>American <\/em>(red or American Indian), <em>Malayan <\/em>(brown or Pacific Islander). Importantly, Blumenbach listed the races in this exact order, which he believed reflected their natural historical descent from the \u201cprimeval\u201d Caucasian original to \u201cextreme varieties.\u201d<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\">4[footnote]Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, <em>On the Natural Varieties of Mankind: De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa<\/em> (New York: Bergman Publishers, 1775).[\/footnote]<\/span> Although he was a committed abolitionist, Blumenbach nevertheless felt that his \u201cCaucasian\u201d race (named after the Caucasus Mountains of Central Asia, where he believed humans had originated) represented the original variety of humankind from which the other races had degenerated.<\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal\">By the early twentieth century, many social philosophers and scholars had accepted the idea of three human races: the so-called <em>Caucasoid<\/em>, <em>Negroid<\/em>, and <em>Mongoloid<\/em> groups that corresponded with regions of Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and East Asia, respectively. However, the three-race theory faced serious criticism given that numerous peoples from several geographic regions were omitted from the classification, including Australian Aborigines, Asian Indians, American Indians, and inhabitants of the South Pacific Islands. Those groups could not be easily pigeonholed into racial categories regardless of how loosely the categories were defined. Australian Aborigines, for example, often have dark complexions (a trait they appeared to share with Africans) but reddish or blondish hair (a trait shared with northern Europeans). Likewise, many Indians living on the Asian subcontinent have complexions that are as dark or darker than those of many Africans and African Americans. Because of these seeming contradictions, some academics began to argue in favor of larger numbers of human races\u2014five, nine, twenty, sixty, and more.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference _idGenCharOverride-1\">[footnote]For details about how these categories were established, see Stephen Jay Gould, <em>The Mismeasure of Man<\/em>.[\/footnote]<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal\">During the 1920s and 1930s, some scholars asserted that Europeans were comprised of more than one \u201cwhite\u201d or \u201cCaucasian\u201d race: <em>Nordic, Alpine, <\/em>and<em> Mediterranean<\/em> (named for the geographic regions of Europe from which they descended). These European races, they alleged, exhibited obvious physical traits that distinguished them from one another and thus served as racial boundaries. For example, \u201cNordics\u201d were said to consist of peoples of Northern Europe\u2014Scandinavia, the British Isles, and Northern Germany\u2014while \u201cAlpines\u201d came from the Alps Mountains of Central Europe and included French, Swiss, Northern Italians, and Southern Germans. People from southern Europe\u2014including Portuguese, Spanish, Southern Italians, Sicilians, Greeks, and Albanians\u2014comprised the \u201cMediterranean\u201d race. Most Americans today would find this racial classification system bizarre, but its proponents argued for it on the basis that one would observe striking physical differences between a Swede or Norwegian and a Sicilian. Similar efforts were made to \u201ccarve up\u201d the populations of Africa and Asia into geographically local, specific races.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference _idGenCharOverride-1\">[footnote]For a discussion of the efforts to subdivide racial groups in the nineteenth century and its connection to eugenics, see Carol Mukhopadhyay, Rosemary Henze, and Yolanda Moses, <em>How Real Is Race? A Sourcebook on Race, Culture, and Biology<\/em>.[\/footnote]\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">The fundamental point here is that any effort to classify human populations into racial categories is inherently arbitrary and subjective rather than scientific and objective. These racial classification schemes simply reflected their proponents\u2019 desires to \u201cslice the pie\u201d of human physical variation according to the particular trait(s) they preferred to establish as the major, defining criteria of their classification system.<\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Racial labels attempt to identify and describe <em>something<\/em>. So why do these racial labels not accurately describe human physical and biological variation? To understand why, we must keep in mind that racial labels are distinct, discrete categories while human physical and biological variations (such as skin color, hair color and texture, eye color, height, nose shape, and distribution of blood types) are <em>continuous<\/em> rather than discrete.<\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal\">Physical anthropologists use the term <strong><span class=\"CharOverride-2\">cline<\/span><\/strong> to refer to differences in the traits that occur in populations across a geographical area. In a cline, a trait may be more common in one geographical area than another, but the variation is gradual and continuous with no sharp breaks. A prominent example of clinal variation among humans is skin color. Think of it this way: Do all \u201cwhite\u201d persons who you know actually share the same skin complexion? Likewise, do all \u201cblack\u201d persons who you know share an identical skin complexion? The answer, obviously, is no, since human skin color does not occur in just 3, 5, or even 50 shades. The reality is that human skin color, as a continuous trait, exists as a spectrum from very light to very dark with every possible hue, shade, and tone in between.<\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Imagine two people\u2014one from Sweden and one from Nigeria\u2014standing side by side. If we looked only at those two individuals and ignored people who inhabit the regions between Sweden and Nigeria, it would be easy to reach the faulty conclusion that they represented two distinct human racial groups, one light (\u201cwhite\u201d) and one dark (\u201cblack\u201d).<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\">[footnote]For more information about the genetic variation between human groups that puts this example in context see Sheldon Krimsky and Kathleen Sloan, <em>Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture<\/em> (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 174-180.[\/footnote]<\/span> However, if we walked from Nigeria to Sweden, we would gain a fuller understanding of human skin color because we would see that skin color generally became gradually lighter the further north we traveled from the equator. At no point during this imaginary walk would we reach a point at which the people abruptly changed skin color. As physical anthropologists such as John Relethford (2004) and C. Loring Brace (2005) have noted, the average range of skin color gradually changes over geographic space. North Africans are generally lighter-skinned than Central Africans, and southern Europeans are generally lighter-skinned than North Africans. In turn, northern Italians are generally lighter-skinned than Sicilians, and the Irish, Danes, and Swedes are generally lighter-skinned than northern Italians and Hungarians. Thus, human skin color cannot be used as a definitive marker of racial boundaries.<\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">There are a few notable exceptions to this general rule of lighter-complexioned people inhabiting northern latitudes. The Chukchi of Eastern Siberia and Inuits of Alaska, Canada, and Greenland have darker skin than other Eurasian people living at similar latitudes, such as Scandinavians. Physical anthropologists have explained this exception in terms of the distinct dietary customs of indigenous Arctic groups, which have traditionally been based on certain native meats and fish that are rich in Vitamin D (polar bears, whales, seals, and trout).<\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">What does Vitamin D have to do with skin color? The answer is intriguing! Dark skin blocks most of the sun\u2019s dangerous ultraviolet rays, which is advantageous in tropical environments where sunlight is most intense. Exposure to high levels of ultraviolent radiation can damage skin cells, causing cancer, and also destroy the body\u2019s supply of folate, a nutrient essential for reproduction. Folate deficiency in women can cause severe birth defects in their babies. Melanin, the pigment produced in skin cells, acts as a natural sunblock, protecting skin cells from damage, and preventing the breakdown of folate. However, exposure to sunlight has an important positive health effect: stimulating the production of vitamin D. Vitamin D is essential for the health of bones and the immune system. In areas where ultraviolent radiation is strong, there is no problem producing enough Vitamin D, even as darker skin filters ultraviolet radiation.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\">[footnote]Carol Mukhopadhyay et. al <em>How Real Is Race? A Sourcebook on Race, Culture, and Biology<\/em>, 43-48.[\/footnote]\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">In environments where the sun\u2019s rays are much less intense, a different problem occurs: not enough sunlight penetrates the skin to enable the production of Vitamin D. Over the course of human evolution, natural selection favored the evolution of lighter skin as humans migrated and settled farther from the equator to ensure that weaker rays of sunlight could adequately penetrate our skin. The diet of indigenous populations of the Arctic region provided sufficient amounts of Vitamin D to ensure their health. This reduced the selective pressure toward the evolution of lighter skin among the Inuit and the Chukchi. Physical anthropologist Nina Jablonski (2012) has also noted that natural selection could have favored darker skin in Arctic regions because high levels of ultraviolet radiation from the sun are reflected from snow and ice during the summer months.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<div class=\"textbox examples\">\r\n<h3>WaTCH: ted talk<\/h3>\r\nhttps:\/\/www.ted.com\/talks\/nina_jablonski_breaks_the_illusion_of_skin_color\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Still, many people in the United States remain convinced that biologically distinct human races exist and are easy to identify, declaring that they can walk down any street in the United States and easily determine who is \u201cwhite\u201d and who is \u201cblack.\u201d The United States was populated historically by immigrants from a small number of world regions who did not reflect the full spectrum of human physical variation. The earliest settlers in the North American colonies overwhelmingly came from Northern Europe (particularly, Britain, France, Germany, and Ireland), regions where skin colors tend to be among the lightest in the world. Slaves brought to the United States during the colonial period came largely from the western coast of Central Africa, a region where skin color tends to be among the darkest in the world. Consequently, when we look at today\u2019s descendants of these groups, we are not looking at accurate, proportional representations of the total range of human skin color; instead, we are looking, in effect, at opposite ends of a spectrum, where striking differences are inevitable. More recent waves of immigrants who have come to the United States from other world regions have brought a wider range of skin colors, shaping a continuum of skin color that defies classification into a few simple categories.<\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Physical anthropologists have also found that there are no specific genetic traits that are exclusive to a \u201cracial\u201d group. For the concept of human races to have biological significance, an analysis of multiple genetic traits would have to consistently produce the same racial classifications. In other words, a racial classification scheme for skin color would also have to reflect classifications by blood type, hair texture, eye shape, lactose intolerance, and other traits often mistakenly assumed to be \u201cracial\u201d characteristics. An analysis based on any one of those characteristics individually would produce a unique set of racial categories because variations in human physical and genetic are <strong><span class=\"CharOverride-2\">nonconcordant<\/span><\/strong>. Each trait is inherited independently, not \u201cbundled together\u201d with other traits and inherited as a package. There is no correlation between skin color and other characteristics such as blood type and lactose intolerance.<\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal\">A prominent example of nonconcordance is sickle-cell anemia, which people often mistakenly think of as a disease that only affects Africans, African Americans, and \u201cblack\u201d persons. In fact, the sickle-cell allele (the version of the gene that causes sickle-cell anemia when a person inherits two copies) is relatively common among people whose ancestors are from regions where a certain strain of malaria, <em>Plasmodium falciparum<\/em>, is prevalent, namely Central and Western Africa and parts of Mediterranean Europe, the Arabian peninsula, and India. The sickle-cell trait thus is not exclusively African or \u201cblack.\u201d The erroneous perceptions are relatedly primarily to the fact that the ancestors of U.S. African Americans came predominantly from Western Africa, where the sickle-cell gene is prevalent, and are therefore more recognizable than populations of other ancestries and regions where the sickle-cell gene is common, such as southern Europe and Arabia.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference _idGenCharOverride-1\">9[footnote]Ibid., 50-52.[\/footnote]\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">The idea of biological human races emphasizes differences, both real and perceived, <em>between<\/em> groups and ignores or overlooks differences <em>within<\/em> groups. The biological differences between \u201cwhites\u201d and \u201cblacks\u201d and between \u201cblacks\u201d and \u201cAsians\u201d are assumed to be greater than the biological differences among \u201cwhites\u201d and among \u201cblacks.\u201d The opposite is actually true; the overwhelming majority of genetic diversity in humans (88\u201392 percent) is found within people who live on the same continent.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\">[footnote]Ibid., 62.[\/footnote]<\/span> Also, keep in mind that human beings are one of the most genetically similar of all species. There is nearly six times more genetic variation among white-tailed deer in the southern United States than in all humans! Consider our closest living relative, the chimpanzee. Chimpanzees\u2019 natural habitat is confined to central Africa and parts of western Africa, yet four genetically distinct groups occupy those regions and they are far more genetically distinct than humans who live on different continents. That humans exhibit such a low level of genetic variation compared to other species reflects the fact that we are a relatively recent species; modern humans (<em>Homo sapiens<\/em>) first appeared in East Africa just under 200,000 years ago.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\">[footnote]Alan R. Templeton, \u201cHuman Races: A Genetic and Evolutionary Perspective\u201d <em>American Anthropologist<\/em> 100 no. 3 (1998): 632-650.[\/footnote]\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Physical anthropologists today analyze human biological variation by examining specific genetic traits to understand how those traits originated and evolved over time and why some genetic traits are more common in certain populations. Since much of our biological diversity occurs mostly within (rather than between) continental regions once believed to be the homelands of distinct races, the concept of race is meaningless in any study of human biology. Franz Boas, considered the father of modern U.S. anthropology, was the first prominent anthropologist to challenge racial thinking directly during the early twentieth century. A professor of anthropology at Columbia University in New York City and a Jewish immigrant from Germany, Boas established anthropology in the United States as a four-field academic discipline consisting of archaeology, physical\/biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, and linguistics. His approach challenged conventional thinking at the time that humans could be separated into biological races endowed with unique intellectual, moral, and physical abilities.<\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">In one of his most famous studies, Boas challenged craniometrics, in which the size and shape of skulls of various groups were measured as a way of assigning relative intelligence and moral behavior. Boas noted that the size and shape of the skull were not fixed characteristics within groups and were instead influenced by the environment. Children born in the United States to parents of various immigrant groups, for example, had slightly different average skull shapes than children born and raised in the homelands of those immigrant groups. The differences reflected relative access to nutrition and other socio-economic dimensions. In his famous 1909 essay \u201cRace Problems in America,\u201d Boas challenged the commonly held idea that immigrants to the United States from Italy, Poland, Russia, Greece, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and other southern and eastern European nations were a threat to America\u2019s \u201cracial purity.\u201d He pointed out that the British, Germans, and Scandinavians (popularly believed at the time to be the \u201ctrue white\u201d heritages that gave the United States its superior qualities) were not themselves \u201cracially pure.\u201d Instead, many different tribal and cultural groups had intermixed over the centuries.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\">[footnote]For more information about the efforts of Franz Boas to refute the race concept in science, see Franz Boas, \u201cChanges in the Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants\u201d <em>American Anthropologist<\/em> 14 (1912): 530-562.[\/footnote]<\/span> In fact, Boas asserted, the notion of \u201cracial purity\u201d was utter nonsense. As present-day anthropologist Jonathan Marks (1994) noted, \u201cYou may group humans into a small number of races if you want to, but you are denied biology as a support for it.\u201d<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\">[footnote]Jonathan Marks, \u201cBlack, White, Other,\u201d 35.[\/footnote]\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<h2 class=\"H2\">RACE AS A SOCIAL &amp; CULTURAL CONSTRUCT\u00a0<em>By\u00a0Justin D. Garcia<\/em><\/h2>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Just because the idea of distinct biological human races is not a valid scientific concept does not mean, and should not be interpreted as implying, that \u201cthere is no such thing as race\u201d or that \u201crace isn\u2019t real.\u201d Race is indeed real but it is a concept based on arbitrary social and cultural definitions rather than biology or science. <span style=\"color: #993300\">In other words, society made race \"real\" when it claimed it was a biological category, but it is the social ramifications of that scientific error and the discrimination it was used to justify that make race real today.<\/span> Thus, racial categories such as \u201cwhite\u201d and \u201cblack\u201d are as real as categories of \u201cAmerican\u201d and \u201cAfrican.\u201d Many things in the world are real but are not biological. So, while race does not reflect biological characteristics, it reflects socially constructed concepts defined subjectively by societies to reflect notions of division that are perceived to be significant. Racial categories as an aspect of culture are typically learned, internalized, and accepted without question or critical thought in a process not so different from children learning their native language as they grow up.<\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Race is most accurately thought of as a socio-historical concept. Michael Omi and Howard Winant noted that \u201cRacial categories and the meaning of race are given concrete expression by the specific social relations and historical context in which they are embedded.\u201d<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\">[footnote]Michael Omi and Howard Winant, <em>Racial Formation in the United States<\/em>, 64.[\/footnote]\u00a0<\/span>In other words, racial labels ultimately reflect a society\u2019s social attitudes and cultural beliefs regarding notions of group differences. And since racial categories are culturally defined, they can vary from one society to another as well as change over time within a society. Omi and Winant referred to this as <em><strong>racial formation<\/strong>\u2014<\/em>\u201cthe process by which social, economic, and political forces determine the content and importance of racial categories.\u201d<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\">[footnote]Ibid., 61[\/footnote]\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<h3>Racialization &amp; Whiteness <em>By Melanie A. Medeiros and\u00a0Justin D. Garcia<\/em><\/h3>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\"><span style=\"color: #993300\">One aspect of racial formation is the <strong>racialization<\/strong> of groups of people, and in the United States the racialization of immigrants is very common. Racialization is the process of categorizing, differentiating, and attributing a particular racial character to a person or group of people. The process of racialization is visible in the classification of immigrants throughout American history.<\/span> In the mid 1800s, for example, Irish Catholic immigrants faced intense hostility from America\u2019s Anglo-Protestant mainstream society, and anti-Irish politicians and journalists depicted the Irish as racially different and inferior. Newspaper cartoons frequently portrayed Irish Catholics in apelike fashion: overweight, knuckle dragging, and brutish. In the early twentieth century, Italian and Jewish immigrants were typically perceived as racially distinct from America\u2019s Anglo-Protestant \u201cwhite\u201d majority as well. They were said to belong to the inferior \u201cMediterranean\u201d and \u201cJewish\u201d races. Today, Irish, Italian, and Jewish Americans are fully considered \u201cwhite,\u201d and many people find it hard to believe that they once were perceived otherwise.\u00a0<span style=\"color: #993300\">Another contemporary example of the racialization of an immigrant group in the United States today, is the political rhetoric and public discourse that classifies immigrants from Mexico and Central America as \"non-White,\" which is a result of recent debates surrounding immigration from those regions. Although the United States Census does not categorize Hispanic\/Latinx people as a separate race (they refer to them as ethnic categories rather than racial, which you will read about soon), the American public has racialized these immigrants and lumped them together into one group, even though they are actually physically and culturally very diverse.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n<span style=\"color: #993300\">Another example of racialization, is the racialization of Muslims in the United States since the\u00a0terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.\u00a0 Prior to the 9\/11 attacks, the American public perceived Islam as a religion, and did not associate it with any particular racial group. Since Islam is practiced all over the world, Muslims come from very different geographic and cultural backgrounds, as well as have different physical characteristics. For example, up until 9\/11 a Muslim person from the Middle East would be classified in the United States as \"white,\" but a Muslim from sub-Saharan Africa would be classified classified as \"black.\" This illustrates the disassociation between religious practices and the classification of race. However, s<\/span><span style=\"color: #993300\">ince 9\/11, U.S public perceptions have racialized Muslims, contributing to hate crimes against American Muslims and people mistaken to be Muslims because they share some physical traits with people in the Middle East (many Americans wrongly assume everyone in the Middle East is Muslim and\/or that all Muslims come from the Middle East). In his 2017 article <em>The Racialization of Islam in the United States<\/em>, Craigs Considine argues that the racialization of Muslims is excerbated by the \"media and entertainment [industry's] representations of Islam and Muslims...which exacerbates anti-Islam and anti-Muslim sentiments\" (166).[footnote]Considine, Craig. 2017. \"The Racialization of Islam in the United States: Islamophobia, Hate Crimes and 'Flying while Brown.\" <em>Religions<\/em> 8: 165-184.[\/footnote]\u00a0In a National Public Radio (NPR) interview, Erin Kearns, coauthor of the article <em>Why Do Some Terrorist Attacks Receive More Media Attention Than Others<\/em>, stated \"that when the perpetrator of a terrorist attack is Muslim, 'you can expect that attack to receive about four and a half times more media coverage than if the perpterator was not Muslim.' Put another way, as Kearns notes, 'a perpetrator who is not Muslim would have to kill on average about seven more people to receive the same amount of coverage as a perpetrator who is Muslim'\" (Considine 2017, 166). American action films also disproportionately portray Muslims and Arabs as villains.[footnote] For more on this issue, read Jack Shaheen's <em>Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies People<\/em> and <em>A is for Arab: Archiving Stereotypes in U.S. Popular Culture<\/em>.[\/footnote] \"By reinforcing stereotypes of the Middle East as a place of extremism and Muslims as terrorists, these representations produce policies that have dire consequences for Arabs, Muslims, and people who are believed to be Arab and Muslim (Alsultany 2015). These caricatures of Arabs and Muslims also provide a popular 'permission to hate,' which often unfolds through a synthesis of racial and religious discrimination (Poynting and Mason 2006, 367)\"\u00a0(Considine 2017, 167). <strong>Islamaphobia<\/strong> is the term used to describe racial and religious discrimination against Muslims.<\/span>\r\n\r\nThe processes of racial formation <span style=\"color: #993300\">and racialization<\/span> is vividly illustrated by the idea of \u201cwhiteness\u201d in the United States. Over the course of U.S. history, the concept of \u201cwhiteness\u201d expanded to include various immigrant groups that once were targets of racist beliefs and discrimination. A primary contributor to expansion of the definition of \u201cwhiteness\u201d in the United States was the rise of many members of those immigrant groups in social status after World War II.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\">[footnote]For more information about the social construction of whiteness in U.S. History see Nell Irvin Painter, <em>The History of White People<\/em>; Noel Ignatiev, <em>How the Irish Became White<\/em> (New York: Routledge, 1995). For more information about the economic aspects of the construction of whiteness both before and after World War II, see David Roediger, <em>The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class<\/em> (Chicago, IL: Haymarket, 2007) and George Lipsitz, <em>The Possessive Investment in Whiteness<\/em> (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998).[\/footnote]<\/span> Hundreds of suburban housing developments were constructed on the edge of the nation\u2019s major cities during the 1940s and 1950s to accommodate returning soldiers, the Serviceman\u2019s Readjustment Act of 1944 offered a series of benefits for military veterans, including free college education or technical training and cost-of-living stipends funded by the federal government for veterans pursuing higher education. In addition, veterans could obtain guaranteed low-interest loans for homes and for starting their own farms or businesses. The act was in effect from 1944 through 1956 and was <em>theoretically<\/em> available to all military veterans who served at least four months in uniform and were honorably discharged, but the legislation did not contain anti-discrimination provisions and most African American veterans were denied benefits because private banks refused to provide the loans and restrictive language by homeowners\u2019 associations prohibited sales of homes to nonwhites. The male children and grandchildren of European immigrant groups benefited tremendously from the act. They were able to obtain college educations, formerly available only to the affluent, at no cost, leading to professional white-collar careers, and to purchase low-cost suburban homes that increased substantially in value over time. The act has been credited, more than anything else, with creating the modern middle class of U.S. society and transforming the majority of \u201cwhite\u201d Americans from renters into homeowners.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\">[footnote]For a detailed discussion of this process see Douglas S. Massey and Nancy Denton, <em>American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass<\/em> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993) and Ira Katznelson, <em>When Affirmative Action was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth Century America<\/em> (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2005).[\/footnote]<\/span> As the children of Irish, Jewish, Italian, Greek, Anglo-Saxon, and Eastern European parents grew up together in the suburbs, formed friendships, and dated and married one another, the old social boundaries that defined \u201cwhiteness\u201d were redefined.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\">[footnote]For more information on these historical developments and their social ramifications, see Karen Brodkin, <em>How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America<\/em> (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998) or David Roediger, <em>Working Toward Whiteness: How America\u2019s Immigrants Became White\u2014The Strange Journey From Ellis Island to the Suburbs<\/em> (New York: Basic Books, 2005).[\/footnote]\u00a0<\/span>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Race is a socially constructed concept but it is not a trivial matter. On the contrary, one\u2019s race often has a dramatic impact on everyday life. In the United States, for example, people often use race\u2014their personal understanding of race\u2014to predict \u201cwho\u201d a person is and \u201cwhat\u201d a person is like in terms of personality, behavior, and other qualities. Because of this tendency to characterize others and make assumptions about them, people can be uncomfortable or defensive when they mistake someone\u2019s background or cannot easily determine \u201cwhat\u201d someone is, as revealed in statements such as \u201cYou don\u2019t <em>look<\/em> black!\u201d or \u201cYou <em>talk<\/em> like a white person. Such statements reveal fixed notions about \u201cblackness\u201d and \u201cwhiteness\u201d and what members of each race will be like, reflecting their socially constructed and seemingly \u201ccommon sense\u201d understanding of the world.<\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Since the 1990s, scholars and anti-racism activists have discussed \u201c<strong>white privilege<\/strong>\u201d as a basic feature of race as a lived experience in the United States. Peggy McIntosh coined the term in a famous 1988 essay, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/nationalseedproject.org\/white-privilege-unpacking-the-invisible-knapsack\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack<\/span><\/a>,\u201d in which she identified more than two dozen accumulated unearned benefits and advantages associated with being a \u201cwhite\u201d person in the United States. The benefits ranged from relatively minor things, such as knowing that \u201cflesh color\u201d Band-Aids would match her skin, to major determinants of life experiences and opportunities, such as being assured that she would never be asked to speak on behalf of her entire race, being able to curse and get angry in public without others assuming she was acting that way because of her race, and not having to teach her children that police officers and the general public would view them as suspicious or criminal because of their race. In 2015, MTV aired a documentary on white privilege, simply titled<em> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=_zjj1PmJcRM\"><span class=\"Hyperlink CharOverride-1\">White People<\/span><\/a><\/em>, to raise awareness of this issue among Millennials. In the documentary, young \u201cwhite\u201d Americans from various geographic, social, and class backgrounds discussed their experiences with race.<\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">White privilege has gained significant attention and is an important tool for understanding how race is often connected to everyday experiences and opportunities, but we must remember that no group is homogenous or monolithic. \u201cWhite\u201d persons receive varying degrees of privilege and social advantage, and other important characteristics, such as social class, gender, sexual orientation, and (dis)ability, shape individuals\u2019 overall lives and how they experience society. John Hartigan, an urban anthropologist, has written extensively about these characteristics. <em>His <\/em><em>Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit <\/em>(1999) discusses the lives of \u201cwhite\u201d residents in three neighborhoods in Detroit, Michigan, that vary significantly socio-economically\u2014one impoverished, one working class, and one upper middle class. Hartigan reveals that social class has played a major role in shaping strikingly different identities among these \u201cwhite\u201d residents and how, accordingly, social relations between \u201cwhites\u201d and \u201cblacks\u201d in the neighborhoods vary from camaraderie and companionship to conflict.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<h2 class=\"H1\">RACE IN TWO NATIONS: THE UNITED STATES &amp; BRAZIL\u00a0\u00a0<em>By\u00a0Justin D. Garcia<\/em><\/h2>\r\n<p class=\"Normal\">To better understand how race is constructed around the world, consider how the United States, Brazil, and Japan define racial categories. In the United States, race has traditionally been rigidly constructed, and Americans have long perceived racial categories as discrete and mutually exclusive: a person who had one \u201cblack\u201d parent and one \u201cwhite\u201d parent was seen simply as \u201cblack.\u201d The institution of slavery played a major role in defining how the United States has classified people by race through the<em> one-drop rule<\/em>, which required that any trace of known or recorded non-European (\u201cnon-white\u201d) ancestry was used to automatically exclude a person from being classified as \u201cwhite.\u201d Someone with one \u201cblack\u201d grandparent and three \u201cwhite\u201d grandparents or one \u201cblack\u201d great-grandparent and seven \u201cwhite\u201d great-grandparents was classified under the one-drop rule simply as \u201cblack.\u201d The original purpose of the one-drop rule was to ensure that children born from sexual unions (some consensual but many forced) between slave-owner fathers and enslaved women would be born into slave status.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference _idGenCharOverride-1\">[footnote]While the one-drop rule was intended to protect the institution of slavery, a more nuanced view of racial identity has existed throughout U.S. History. For a history of the racial categories used historically in the United States census, including several mixed-race categories, see the Pew Research Center\u2019s \u201cWhat Census Calls Us: Historical Timeline.\u201d http:\/\/www.pewsocialtrends.org\/interactives\/multiracial-timeline\/[\/footnote]\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Consider President Barack Obama. Obama is of biracial heritage; his mother was \u201cwhite\u201d of Euro-American descent and his father was a \u201cblack\u201d man from Kenya. The media often refer to Obama simply as \u201cblack\u201d or \u201cAfrican American,\u201d such as when he is referred to as the nation\u2019s \u201cfirst black President,\u201d and never refer to him as \u201cwhite.\u201d<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\">[footnote]It is important to note that President Obama has also stated that he self-identifies as black. See for instance, Sam Roberts and Peter Baker. 2010. \u201cAsked to Declare His Race, Obama Checks \u2018Black.\u2019\u201d The New York Times, April 2. http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/04\/03\/us\/politics\/03census.html[\/footnote]<\/span> Whiteness in the United States has long been understood and legally defined as implying \u201cracial purity\u201d despite the biological absurdity of the notion, and to be considered \u201cwhite,\u201d one could have no known ancestors of black, American Indian, Asian, or other \u201cnon-white\u201d backgrounds. Cultural anthropologists also refer to the one-drop rule as <strong><span class=\"CharOverride-2\">hypodescent<\/span><\/strong>, a term coined by anthropologist Marvin Harris in the 1960s to refer to a socially constructed racial classification system in which a person of mixed racial heritage is automatically categorized as a member of the less (or least) privileged group.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\">[footnote]This concept is discussed in more detail in chapter 9 of Carol Mukhopadhyay et. al <em>How Real Is Race: A Sourebook on Race, Culture, and Biology<\/em>.[\/footnote]\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Another example is birth certificates issued by U.S. hospitals, which, until relatively recently, used a precise formula to determine the appropriate racial classification for a newborn. If one parent was \u201cwhite\u201d and the other was \u201cnon-white,\u201d the child was classified as the race of the \u201cnon-white\u201d parent; if neither parent was \u201cwhite,\u201d the child was classified as the race of the father.<\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Not until very recently have the United States government, the media, and pop culture begun to officially acknowledge and embrace biracial and multiracial individuals. The 2000 census was the first to allow respondents to identify as more than one race. Currently, a grassroots movement that is expanding across the United States, led by organizations such as Project RACE (Reclassify All Children Equally) and Swirl, seeks to raise public awareness of biracial and multiracial people who sometimes still experience social prejudice for being of mixed race and\/or resentment from peers who disapprove of their decision to identify with all of their backgrounds instead of just one. Prominent biracial and multiracial celebrities such as Tiger Woods, Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey, Beyonc\u00e9 Knowles, Bruno Mars, and Dwayne \u201cThe Rock\u201d Johnson and the election of Barack Obama have also prompted people in the United States to reconsider the problematic nature of rigid, discrete racial categories.<\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">In 1977, the U.S. government established five official racial categories under Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Directive 15 that provided a basis for recordkeeping and compiling of statistical information to facilitate collection of demographic information by the Census Bureau and to ensure compliance with federal civil rights legislation and work-place anti-discrimination policies. Those categories and their definitions, which are still used today, are (a) \u201c<em>White<\/em>: a person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, North Africa, or the Middle East;\u201d (b) \u201c<em>Black or African American<\/em>: a person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa;\u201d (c) \u201c<em>American Indian or Alaskan Native<\/em>: a person having origins in any of the original peoples of North and South America (including Central America), and who maintains tribal affiliation or community attachment;\u201d (d) \u201c<em>Asian<\/em>: a person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent;\u201d and (e) <em>\u201cNative Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander:<\/em> a person having origins in any of the original peoples of Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, or the Pacific Islands.\u201d In addition, OMB Directive 15 established <em>Hispanic or Latino<\/em> as a separate <em>ethnic<\/em> (not racial) category; on official documents, individuals are asked to identify their racial background and whether they are of Hispanic\/Latino ethnic heritage. The official definition of Hispanic or Latino is \u201ca person of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race.\u201d<\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">OMB Directive 15\u2019s terminology and definitions have generated considerable criticism and controversy. The complex fundamental question is whether such categories are practical and actually reflect how individuals choose to self-identify. Terms such as \u201cnon-Hispanic white\u201d and \u201cBlack Hispanic,\u201d both a result of the directive, are baffling to many people in the United States who perceive Hispanics\/Latinos as a separate group from whites and blacks. Others oppose any governmental attempt to classify people by race, on both liberal and conservative political grounds. In 1997, the American Anthropological Association unsuccessfully advocated for a cessation of federal efforts to coercively classify Americans by race, arguing instead that individuals should be given the opportunity to identify their ethnic and\/or national heritages (such as their country or countries of ancestry).<\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Brazil\u2019s concept of race is much more fluid, flexible, and multifaceted. The differences between Brazil and the United States are particularly striking because the countries have similar histories. Both nations were born of European colonialism in the New World, established major plantation economies that relied on large numbers of African slaves, and subsequently experienced large waves of immigration from around the world (particularly Europe) following the abolition of slavery. Despite those similarities, significant contrasts in how race is perceived in these two societies persist, which is sometimes summarized in the expression \u201cThe United States has a color line, while Brazil has a color continuum.\u201d<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\">[footnote]Edward Telles originated this expression in his book <em>Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil<\/em> (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).[\/footnote]<\/span> In Brazil, races are typically viewed as points on a continuum in which one gradually blends into another; \u201cwhite\u201d and \u201cblack\u201d are opposite ends of a continuum that incorporates many intermediate color-based racial labels that have no equivalent in the United States.<\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">The Brazilian term for these categories, which correspond to the concept of race in the United States, is <em>tipos<\/em>, which directly translates into Portuguese as \u201ctypes.\u201d<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\">[footnote]More information about the Brazilian concepts of race described in this section is available in Jefferson M. Fish, \u201cMixed Blood: An Analytical Method of Classifying Race.\u201d <em>Psychology Today<\/em>, November 1, 1995. https:\/\/www.psychologytoday.com\/articles\/199511\/mixed-blood[\/footnote]<\/span> Rather than describing what is believed to be a person\u2019s biological or genetic ancestry, <em>tipos<\/em> describe slight but noticeable differences in physical appearance. Examples include <em>loura<\/em>, a person with a very fair complexion, straight blonde hair, and blue or green eyes; <em>sarar\u00e1<\/em>, a light-complexioned person with tightly curled blondish or reddish hair, blue or green eyes, a wide nose, and thick lips; and <em>cabo verde<\/em>, an individual with dark skin, brown eyes, straight black hair, a narrow nose, and thin lips. Sociologists and anthropologists have identified more than 125 <em>tipos<\/em> in Brazil, and small villages of only 500 people may feature 40 or more depending on how residents describe one another. Some of the labels vary from region to region, reflecting local cultural differences.<\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Since Brazilians perceive race based on phenotypes or outward physical appearance rather than as an extension of geographically based biological and genetic descent, individual members of a family can be seen as different <em>tipos<\/em>. This may seem bewildering to those who think of race as a fixed identity inherited from one\u2019s parents even though it is generally acknowledged that family members often have different physical features, such as sisters who have strikingly different eye colors, hair colors, and\/or complexions. In Brazil, those differences are frequently viewed as significant enough to assign different <em>tipos<\/em>. Cultural anthropologist Conrad Phillip Kottak, who conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Brazil, noted that something as minor as a suntan or sunburn could lead to a person temporarily being described as a different <em>tipo<\/em> until the effects of the tanning or burning wore off.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\">[footnote]Conrad Kottak, <em>Anthropology: Appreciating Cultural Diversity<\/em> (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013).[\/footnote]\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Another major difference in the construction of race in the United States and Brazil is the more fluid and flexible nature of race in Brazil, which is reflected in a popular Brazilian saying: \u201cMoney whitens.\u201d As darker-complexioned individuals increase their social class status (by, for example, graduating from college and obtaining high-salaried, professional positions), they generally come to be seen as a somewhat lighter <em>tipo<\/em> and light-complexioned individuals who become poorer may be viewed as a slightly darker <em>tipo<\/em>. In the United States, social class has no bearing on one\u2019s racial designation; a non-white person who achieves upward social mobility and accrues greater education and wealth may be seen by some as more \u201csocially desirable\u201d because of social class but does not change racial classification.<\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Brazil\u2019s Institute of Geography and Statistics established five official racial categories in 1940 to facilitate collection of demographic information that are still in use today: <em>branco<\/em> (white), <em>pr\u00eato<\/em> (black), <em>pardo<\/em> (brown), <em>amarelo<\/em> (yellow), and <em>ind\u00edgena<\/em> (indigenous). These racial categories are similar to the ones established in the United States under OMB Directive 15 and to Linnaeus\u2019 proposed <strong><span class=\"CharOverride-2\">taxonomy<\/span><\/strong> in the 18<span class=\"CharOverride-4\">th<\/span> century. <em>Pardo <\/em>is unique to Brazil and denotes a person of both <em>branco<\/em> and <em>pr\u00eato<\/em> heritage. Many Brazilians object to these government categories and prefer <em>tipos<\/em>.<\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">The more fluid construction of race in Brazil is accompanied by generally less hostile, more benign social interactions between people of different colors and complexions, which has contributed to Brazil being seen as a \u201cracial paradise\u201d and a \u201cracial democracy\u201d rainbow nation free of the harsh prejudices and societal discrimination that has characterized other multiracial nations such as the United States and South Africa.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\">[footnote]See for instance the PBS documentary <em>Brazil: A Racial Paradise<\/em>, written and presented by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.. For a detailed critique of the idea of Brazil as a \u201cracial democracy,\u201d see Michael Hanchard (ed), Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).[\/footnote]<\/span> The \u201cracial democracy\u201d image has long been embraced by the government and elites in Brazil as a way to provide the country with a distinct identity in the international community. However, scholars in Brazil and the United States have questioned the extent to which racial equality exists in Brazil despite the appearance of interracial congeniality on the surface. Many light-complexioned Brazilians reject the idea that racial discrimination and inequalities persist and regard such claims as divisive while Afro-Brazilians have drawn attention to these inequalities in recent years.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_213\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"640\"]<img class=\"wp-image-213 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\/courses-images\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2795\/2017\/12\/06163735\/race_figure_5-e1512755814657.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"425\" \/> Figure 5: A scene from the Black Women\u2019s March against Racism and Violence in Brasilia, Brazil, 2015.[\/caption]\r\n<p class=\"Normal\">Though Afro-Brazilians comprise approximately half of the country\u2019s population, they have historically accounted for less than 2 percent of all university students, and severe economic disparities between <em>tipos<\/em> remain prominent in Brazil to this day.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference _idGenCharOverride-1\">[footnote]Robert J. Cottrol, <em>The Long Lingering Shadow: Slavery, Race, and Law in the American Hemisphere<\/em> (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2013), 246.[\/footnote]<\/span> The majority of the country\u2019s Afro-Brazilians lives in the less-affluent northern region, site of the original sugar cane plantations while the majority of Brazilians of European descent live in the industrial and considerably wealthier southern region.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference _idGenCharOverride-1\">[footnote]Ibid., 145[\/footnote]<\/span> The <em>favelas<\/em> (slums) located on the edge of major cities such as Rio de Janeiro and S\u00e3o Paolo, which often lack electricity or running water, are inhabited largely by Afro-Brazilians, who are half as likely to have a working toilet in their homes as the overall Brazilian population.<\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">There are significant economic differences between Brazilians according to their official racial designation. According to government statistics, <em>pr\u00eatos <\/em>have higher unemployment and poverty rates than other groups in Brazil and <em>brancos<\/em> earn 57 percent more than <em>pr\u00eatos<\/em> for the same occupation. Furthermore, the vast majority of Brazilians in leadership positions in politics, the military, the media, and education are <em>branco<\/em> or <em>pardo<\/em>. Inter-racial marriage occurs more frequently in Brazil than in the United States, but most of the marriages are between <em>pr\u00eatos<\/em> and <em>pardos<\/em> and not between <em>brancos<\/em> and either <em>pr\u00eatos<\/em> or <em>pardos<\/em>. Another significant area of concern centers on brutality and mistreatment of darker-complexioned Brazilians. As a result, some scholars of race and racism describe Brazil as a prominent example of a <strong><span class=\"CharOverride-2\">pigmentocracy<\/span><\/strong>: a society characterized by a strong correlation between a person\u2019s skin color and their social class.<\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Afro-Brazilian activism has grown substantially since the 1980s, inspired in part by the successes of the Civil Rights movement in the United States and by actions taken by the Brazilian government since the early 2000s. One of the Brazilian government\u2019s strategies has been to implement U.S.-style affirmative action policies in education and employment to increase the number of Afro-Brazilians in the nation\u2019s professional ranks and decrease the degree of economic disparity. Those efforts sparked an intense backlash among lighter-complexioned Brazilians and created a complex social and political dilemma: who, exactly, should be considered \u201cdark\/black enough\u201d for inclusion in affirmative action, who makes that decision, and on what grounds will the decision be based? Many Brazilian families include relatives whose complexions are quite different and the country has clear racial categories only in terms of its demographic statistics. Nevertheless, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Brazil\u2019s president from 2003 through 2011, made promotion of greater racial equality a prominent objective of his administration. In addition to supporting affirmative action policies, Lula appointed four Afro-Brazilians to his cabinet, appointed the first Afro-Brazilian justice to the nation\u2019s supreme court, and established a government office for promotion of racial equality. These recent developments have led many in Brazil and elsewhere to reconsider the accuracy of Brazil\u2019s designation as a racial democracy, which has been as a central component of its national identity for decades.<\/p>\r\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Scholars mostly agree that race relations are more relaxed and genteel in Brazil than in the United States. They tend to disagree about why that is the case. Some have suggested that the differences in racial constructions stem from important colonial-era distinctions that set the tone for years to come. A common expression describing the situation is: \u201cthe United States had two British parents while Brazil had a Portuguese father and an African mother.\u201d British settlers who colonized North America thoroughly subjugated their slaves, intermarriage was rare, and African cultural influences on mainstream U.S. society were marginalized compared to British cultural traditions and customs. In Brazil, on the other hand, sexual and marital unions between the Portuguese settlers, who were overwhelmingly male, and female Africans were common, creating individuals who exhibit a wide range of physical appearances. Sexual unions certainly occurred in the United States between male European slave masters and female African slaves, but the one-drop rule ensured that any children born of such unions would be classified as \u201cblack\u201d and as slaves. In Brazil in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the government and the Roman Catholic Church strongly encouraged European descended men to marry the African and indigenous women they impregnated in order to \u201cwhiten\u201d the nation.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\">[footnote]For more information about Brazil\u2019s official policy toward mixed-race children during this era see Thomas E. Skidmore, <em>Black Into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought<\/em> (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992).[\/footnote]<\/span> The United States government did not advocate for interracial families and most states had anti-miscegenation laws. The United States also implemented an official, government-sanctioned system of <strong><span class=\"CharOverride-2\">Jim Crow<\/span><\/strong> racial segregation laws in that had no equivalent in Brazil.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<div class=\"textbox exercises\">\r\n<h3>discussion questions<\/h3>\r\n<ol>\r\n \t<li class=\"Discussion-Questions-numbered\">Garc\u00eda describes the reasons that race is considered a \u201cdiscredited concept in human biology.\u201d Despite this scientific fact, most people continue to believe that race is \u201creal.\u201d Why do you think race has continued to be an important social reality even after it has been discredited scientifically?<\/li>\r\n \t<li class=\"Discussion-Questions-numbered\">The process of racial formation is different in every society. In the United States, the \u201cone-drop rule\u201d and hypodescent have historically affected the way people with multiracial backgrounds have been racialized. How have ideas about multiracial identity been changing in the past few decades? As the number of people who identify as \u201cmultiracial\u201d increases, do you think there will be changes in the way we think about other racial categories?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>","rendered":"<div id=\"_idContainer305\" class=\"Basic-Text-Frame\">\n<div class=\"textbox learning-objectives\">\n<h3>Learning Objectives<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li class=\"Learning-Objectives\">Define the term reification and explain how the concept of race has been reified throughout history.<\/li>\n<li class=\"Learning-Objectives\">Explain why a biological basis for human race categories does not exist.<\/li>\n<li class=\"Learning-Objectives\">Discuss what anthropologists mean when they say that race is a socially constructed concept and explain how race has been socially constructed in the United States and Brazil.<\/li>\n<li class=\"Learning-Objectives\">Identify what is meant by racial formation, hypodescent, and the one-drop rule.<\/li>\n<li class=\"Learning-Objectives\">Summarize the history of immigration to the United States, explaining how different waves of immigrant groups have been perceived as racially different and have shifted popular understandings of \u201crace.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div id=\"_idContainer350\" class=\"_idGenObjectStyleOverride-1\">\n<h2 class=\"H1\">IS ANTHROPOLOGY THE \u201cSCIENCE OF RACE?\u201d\u00a0<em>By\u00a0Justin D. Garcia<\/em><\/h2>\n<p class=\"Normal\">Anthropology was sometimes referred to as the \u201cscience of race\u201d during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when physical anthropologists sought a biological basis for categorizing humans into racial types.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference _idGenCharOverride-1\"><a class=\"footnote\" title=\"For more information about efforts to establish a \u201cscientific\u201d basis for race in the 18th and 19th centuries, see the \u201cHistory\u201d section of the Race: Are We So Different website: http:\/\/www.understandingrace.org. Stephen Jay Gould\u2019s book, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), has a detailed discussion of the \u201cscientific\u201d methods used by Morton and others.\" id=\"return-footnote-775-1\" href=\"#footnote-775-1\" aria-label=\"Footnote 1\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[1]<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Since World War II, important research by anthropologists has revealed that racial categories are socially and culturally defined concepts and that racial labels and their definitions vary widely around the world. In other words, different countries have different racial categories, and different ways of classifying their citizens into these categories.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference _idGenCharOverride-1\"><a class=\"footnote\" title=\"More information about the social construction of racial categories in the United States can be found in Audrey Smedley, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2007) and Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010).\" id=\"return-footnote-775-2\" href=\"#footnote-775-2\" aria-label=\"Footnote 2\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[2]<\/sup><\/a><\/span> At the same time, significant genetic studies conducted by physical anthropologists since the 1970s have revealed that biologically distinct human races do not exist. Certainly, humans vary in terms of physical and genetic characteristics such as skin color, hair texture, and eye shape, but those variations cannot be used as criteria to biologically classify racial groups with scientific accuracy. Let us turn our attention to understanding why humans cannot be scientifically divided into biologically distinct races.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"H2\">Race: A Discredited Concept in Human Biology<\/h3>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">At some point in your life, you have probably been asked to identify your race on a college form, job application, government or military form, or some other official document. And most likely, you were required to select from a list of choices rather than given the ability to respond freely. The frequency with which we are exposed to four or five common racial labels\u2014\u201cwhite,\u201d \u201cblack,\u201d \u201cCaucasian,\u201d and \u201cAsian,\u201d for example\u2014tends to promote the illusion that racial categories are natural, objective, and evident divisions. After all, if Justin Timberlake, Jay-Z, and Jackie Chan stood side by side, those common racial labels might seem to make sense. What could be more objective, more conclusive, than this evidence before our very eyes? By this point, you might be thinking that anthropologists have gone completely insane in denying biological human races!<\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal\">Physical anthropologists have identified several important concepts regarding the true nature of humans\u2019 physical, genetic, and biological variation that have discredited race as a biological concept. Many of the issues presented in this section are discussed in further detail in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.understandingrace.org\/home.html\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">Race: Are We So Different<\/span><\/a>, a website created by the American Anthropological Association. The American Anthropological Association (AAA) launched the website to educate the public about the true nature of human biological and cultural variation and challenge common misperceptions about race. This is an important endeavor because race is a complicated, often emotionally charged topic, leading many people to rely on their personal opinions and hearsay when drawing conclusions about people who are different from them. The website is highly interactive, featuring multimedia illustrations and online quizzes designed to increase visitors\u2019 knowledge of human variation. I encourage you to explore the website as you will likely find answers to several of the questions you may still be asking after reading this chapter.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference _idGenCharOverride-1\"><a class=\"footnote\" title=\"More discussion of the material in this section can be found in Carol Mukhopadhyay, Rosemary Henze, and Yolanda Moses, How Real Is Race? A Sourcebook on Race, Culture, and Biology (Lanham, MD: Rowman &amp; Littlefield, 2013). Chapters 5 and 6 discuss the cultural construction of racial categories as a form of classification. The Race: Are We So Different website and its companion resources for teachers and researchers also explore the ideas described here.\" id=\"return-footnote-775-3\" href=\"#footnote-775-3\" aria-label=\"Footnote 3\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[3]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Before explaining why distinct biological races do not exist among humans, I\u00a0must point out that one of the biggest reasons so many people continue to believe in the existence of biological human races is that the idea has been intensively <strong><span class=\"CharOverride-2\">reified<\/span> <\/strong>in literature, the media, and culture for more than three hundred years. Reification refers to the process in which an inaccurate concept or idea is so heavily promoted and circulated among people that it begins to take on a life of its own. Over centuries, the notion of biological human races became engrained\u2014unquestioned, accepted, and regarded as a concrete \u201ctruth.\u201d Studies of human physical and cultural variation from a scientific and anthropological perspective have allowed us to move beyond reified thinking and toward an improved understanding of the true complexity of human diversity.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">The reification of race has a long history. Especially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, philosophers and scholars attempted to identify various human races. They perceived \u201craces\u201d as specific divisions of humans who shared certain physical and biological features that distinguished them from other groups of humans. This historic notion of race may seem clear-cut and innocent enough, but it quickly led to problems as social theorists attempted to classify people by race. One of the most basic difficulties was the actual number of human races: how many were there, who were they, and what grounds distinguished them? Despite more than three centuries of such effort, no clear-cut scientific consensus was established for a precise number of human races.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">One of the earliest and most influential attempts at producing a racial classification system came from Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus, who argued in <em>Systema Naturae<\/em> (1735) for the existence of four human races: <em>Americanus<\/em> (Native American\u00a0\/ American Indian), <em>Europaeus<\/em> (European), <em>Asiaticus<\/em> (East Asian), and <em>Africanus<\/em> (African). These categories correspond with common racial labels used in the United States for census and demographic purposes today. However, in 1795, German physician and anthropologist Johann Blumenbach suggested that there were five races, which he labeled as <em>Caucasian <\/em>(white), <em>Mongolian <\/em>(yellow or East Asian),<em> Ethiopian <\/em>(black or African), <em>American <\/em>(red or American Indian), <em>Malayan <\/em>(brown or Pacific Islander). Importantly, Blumenbach listed the races in this exact order, which he believed reflected their natural historical descent from the \u201cprimeval\u201d Caucasian original to \u201cextreme varieties.\u201d<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\">4<a class=\"footnote\" title=\"Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, On the Natural Varieties of Mankind: De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa (New York: Bergman Publishers, 1775).\" id=\"return-footnote-775-4\" href=\"#footnote-775-4\" aria-label=\"Footnote 4\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[4]<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Although he was a committed abolitionist, Blumenbach nevertheless felt that his \u201cCaucasian\u201d race (named after the Caucasus Mountains of Central Asia, where he believed humans had originated) represented the original variety of humankind from which the other races had degenerated.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal\">By the early twentieth century, many social philosophers and scholars had accepted the idea of three human races: the so-called <em>Caucasoid<\/em>, <em>Negroid<\/em>, and <em>Mongoloid<\/em> groups that corresponded with regions of Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and East Asia, respectively. However, the three-race theory faced serious criticism given that numerous peoples from several geographic regions were omitted from the classification, including Australian Aborigines, Asian Indians, American Indians, and inhabitants of the South Pacific Islands. Those groups could not be easily pigeonholed into racial categories regardless of how loosely the categories were defined. Australian Aborigines, for example, often have dark complexions (a trait they appeared to share with Africans) but reddish or blondish hair (a trait shared with northern Europeans). Likewise, many Indians living on the Asian subcontinent have complexions that are as dark or darker than those of many Africans and African Americans. Because of these seeming contradictions, some academics began to argue in favor of larger numbers of human races\u2014five, nine, twenty, sixty, and more.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference _idGenCharOverride-1\"><a class=\"footnote\" title=\"For details about how these categories were established, see Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man.\" id=\"return-footnote-775-5\" href=\"#footnote-775-5\" aria-label=\"Footnote 5\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[5]<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal\">During the 1920s and 1930s, some scholars asserted that Europeans were comprised of more than one \u201cwhite\u201d or \u201cCaucasian\u201d race: <em>Nordic, Alpine, <\/em>and<em> Mediterranean<\/em> (named for the geographic regions of Europe from which they descended). These European races, they alleged, exhibited obvious physical traits that distinguished them from one another and thus served as racial boundaries. For example, \u201cNordics\u201d were said to consist of peoples of Northern Europe\u2014Scandinavia, the British Isles, and Northern Germany\u2014while \u201cAlpines\u201d came from the Alps Mountains of Central Europe and included French, Swiss, Northern Italians, and Southern Germans. People from southern Europe\u2014including Portuguese, Spanish, Southern Italians, Sicilians, Greeks, and Albanians\u2014comprised the \u201cMediterranean\u201d race. Most Americans today would find this racial classification system bizarre, but its proponents argued for it on the basis that one would observe striking physical differences between a Swede or Norwegian and a Sicilian. Similar efforts were made to \u201ccarve up\u201d the populations of Africa and Asia into geographically local, specific races.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference _idGenCharOverride-1\"><a class=\"footnote\" title=\"For a discussion of the efforts to subdivide racial groups in the nineteenth century and its connection to eugenics, see Carol Mukhopadhyay, Rosemary Henze, and Yolanda Moses, How Real Is Race? A Sourcebook on Race, Culture, and Biology.\" id=\"return-footnote-775-6\" href=\"#footnote-775-6\" aria-label=\"Footnote 6\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[6]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">The fundamental point here is that any effort to classify human populations into racial categories is inherently arbitrary and subjective rather than scientific and objective. These racial classification schemes simply reflected their proponents\u2019 desires to \u201cslice the pie\u201d of human physical variation according to the particular trait(s) they preferred to establish as the major, defining criteria of their classification system.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Racial labels attempt to identify and describe <em>something<\/em>. So why do these racial labels not accurately describe human physical and biological variation? To understand why, we must keep in mind that racial labels are distinct, discrete categories while human physical and biological variations (such as skin color, hair color and texture, eye color, height, nose shape, and distribution of blood types) are <em>continuous<\/em> rather than discrete.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal\">Physical anthropologists use the term <strong><span class=\"CharOverride-2\">cline<\/span><\/strong> to refer to differences in the traits that occur in populations across a geographical area. In a cline, a trait may be more common in one geographical area than another, but the variation is gradual and continuous with no sharp breaks. A prominent example of clinal variation among humans is skin color. Think of it this way: Do all \u201cwhite\u201d persons who you know actually share the same skin complexion? Likewise, do all \u201cblack\u201d persons who you know share an identical skin complexion? The answer, obviously, is no, since human skin color does not occur in just 3, 5, or even 50 shades. The reality is that human skin color, as a continuous trait, exists as a spectrum from very light to very dark with every possible hue, shade, and tone in between.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Imagine two people\u2014one from Sweden and one from Nigeria\u2014standing side by side. If we looked only at those two individuals and ignored people who inhabit the regions between Sweden and Nigeria, it would be easy to reach the faulty conclusion that they represented two distinct human racial groups, one light (\u201cwhite\u201d) and one dark (\u201cblack\u201d).<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\"><a class=\"footnote\" title=\"For more information about the genetic variation between human groups that puts this example in context see Sheldon Krimsky and Kathleen Sloan, Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 174-180.\" id=\"return-footnote-775-7\" href=\"#footnote-775-7\" aria-label=\"Footnote 7\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[7]<\/sup><\/a><\/span> However, if we walked from Nigeria to Sweden, we would gain a fuller understanding of human skin color because we would see that skin color generally became gradually lighter the further north we traveled from the equator. At no point during this imaginary walk would we reach a point at which the people abruptly changed skin color. As physical anthropologists such as John Relethford (2004) and C. Loring Brace (2005) have noted, the average range of skin color gradually changes over geographic space. North Africans are generally lighter-skinned than Central Africans, and southern Europeans are generally lighter-skinned than North Africans. In turn, northern Italians are generally lighter-skinned than Sicilians, and the Irish, Danes, and Swedes are generally lighter-skinned than northern Italians and Hungarians. Thus, human skin color cannot be used as a definitive marker of racial boundaries.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">There are a few notable exceptions to this general rule of lighter-complexioned people inhabiting northern latitudes. The Chukchi of Eastern Siberia and Inuits of Alaska, Canada, and Greenland have darker skin than other Eurasian people living at similar latitudes, such as Scandinavians. Physical anthropologists have explained this exception in terms of the distinct dietary customs of indigenous Arctic groups, which have traditionally been based on certain native meats and fish that are rich in Vitamin D (polar bears, whales, seals, and trout).<\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">What does Vitamin D have to do with skin color? The answer is intriguing! Dark skin blocks most of the sun\u2019s dangerous ultraviolet rays, which is advantageous in tropical environments where sunlight is most intense. Exposure to high levels of ultraviolent radiation can damage skin cells, causing cancer, and also destroy the body\u2019s supply of folate, a nutrient essential for reproduction. Folate deficiency in women can cause severe birth defects in their babies. Melanin, the pigment produced in skin cells, acts as a natural sunblock, protecting skin cells from damage, and preventing the breakdown of folate. However, exposure to sunlight has an important positive health effect: stimulating the production of vitamin D. Vitamin D is essential for the health of bones and the immune system. In areas where ultraviolent radiation is strong, there is no problem producing enough Vitamin D, even as darker skin filters ultraviolet radiation.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\"><a class=\"footnote\" title=\"Carol Mukhopadhyay et. al How Real Is Race? A Sourcebook on Race, Culture, and Biology, 43-48.\" id=\"return-footnote-775-8\" href=\"#footnote-775-8\" aria-label=\"Footnote 8\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[8]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">In environments where the sun\u2019s rays are much less intense, a different problem occurs: not enough sunlight penetrates the skin to enable the production of Vitamin D. Over the course of human evolution, natural selection favored the evolution of lighter skin as humans migrated and settled farther from the equator to ensure that weaker rays of sunlight could adequately penetrate our skin. The diet of indigenous populations of the Arctic region provided sufficient amounts of Vitamin D to ensure their health. This reduced the selective pressure toward the evolution of lighter skin among the Inuit and the Chukchi. Physical anthropologist Nina Jablonski (2012) has also noted that natural selection could have favored darker skin in Arctic regions because high levels of ultraviolet radiation from the sun are reflected from snow and ice during the summer months.<\/p>\n<div class=\"textbox examples\">\n<h3>WaTCH: ted talk<\/h3>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" id=\"oembed-1\" title=\"Nina Jablonski: Skin color is an illusion\" src=\"https:\/\/embed.ted.com\/talks\/nina_jablonski_skin_color_is_an_illusion\" width=\"500\" height=\"282\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Still, many people in the United States remain convinced that biologically distinct human races exist and are easy to identify, declaring that they can walk down any street in the United States and easily determine who is \u201cwhite\u201d and who is \u201cblack.\u201d The United States was populated historically by immigrants from a small number of world regions who did not reflect the full spectrum of human physical variation. The earliest settlers in the North American colonies overwhelmingly came from Northern Europe (particularly, Britain, France, Germany, and Ireland), regions where skin colors tend to be among the lightest in the world. Slaves brought to the United States during the colonial period came largely from the western coast of Central Africa, a region where skin color tends to be among the darkest in the world. Consequently, when we look at today\u2019s descendants of these groups, we are not looking at accurate, proportional representations of the total range of human skin color; instead, we are looking, in effect, at opposite ends of a spectrum, where striking differences are inevitable. More recent waves of immigrants who have come to the United States from other world regions have brought a wider range of skin colors, shaping a continuum of skin color that defies classification into a few simple categories.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Physical anthropologists have also found that there are no specific genetic traits that are exclusive to a \u201cracial\u201d group. For the concept of human races to have biological significance, an analysis of multiple genetic traits would have to consistently produce the same racial classifications. In other words, a racial classification scheme for skin color would also have to reflect classifications by blood type, hair texture, eye shape, lactose intolerance, and other traits often mistakenly assumed to be \u201cracial\u201d characteristics. An analysis based on any one of those characteristics individually would produce a unique set of racial categories because variations in human physical and genetic are <strong><span class=\"CharOverride-2\">nonconcordant<\/span><\/strong>. Each trait is inherited independently, not \u201cbundled together\u201d with other traits and inherited as a package. There is no correlation between skin color and other characteristics such as blood type and lactose intolerance.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal\">A prominent example of nonconcordance is sickle-cell anemia, which people often mistakenly think of as a disease that only affects Africans, African Americans, and \u201cblack\u201d persons. In fact, the sickle-cell allele (the version of the gene that causes sickle-cell anemia when a person inherits two copies) is relatively common among people whose ancestors are from regions where a certain strain of malaria, <em>Plasmodium falciparum<\/em>, is prevalent, namely Central and Western Africa and parts of Mediterranean Europe, the Arabian peninsula, and India. The sickle-cell trait thus is not exclusively African or \u201cblack.\u201d The erroneous perceptions are relatedly primarily to the fact that the ancestors of U.S. African Americans came predominantly from Western Africa, where the sickle-cell gene is prevalent, and are therefore more recognizable than populations of other ancestries and regions where the sickle-cell gene is common, such as southern Europe and Arabia.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference _idGenCharOverride-1\">9<a class=\"footnote\" title=\"Ibid., 50-52.\" id=\"return-footnote-775-9\" href=\"#footnote-775-9\" aria-label=\"Footnote 9\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[9]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">The idea of biological human races emphasizes differences, both real and perceived, <em>between<\/em> groups and ignores or overlooks differences <em>within<\/em> groups. The biological differences between \u201cwhites\u201d and \u201cblacks\u201d and between \u201cblacks\u201d and \u201cAsians\u201d are assumed to be greater than the biological differences among \u201cwhites\u201d and among \u201cblacks.\u201d The opposite is actually true; the overwhelming majority of genetic diversity in humans (88\u201392 percent) is found within people who live on the same continent.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\"><a class=\"footnote\" title=\"Ibid., 62.\" id=\"return-footnote-775-10\" href=\"#footnote-775-10\" aria-label=\"Footnote 10\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[10]<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Also, keep in mind that human beings are one of the most genetically similar of all species. There is nearly six times more genetic variation among white-tailed deer in the southern United States than in all humans! Consider our closest living relative, the chimpanzee. Chimpanzees\u2019 natural habitat is confined to central Africa and parts of western Africa, yet four genetically distinct groups occupy those regions and they are far more genetically distinct than humans who live on different continents. That humans exhibit such a low level of genetic variation compared to other species reflects the fact that we are a relatively recent species; modern humans (<em>Homo sapiens<\/em>) first appeared in East Africa just under 200,000 years ago.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\"><a class=\"footnote\" title=\"Alan R. Templeton, \u201cHuman Races: A Genetic and Evolutionary Perspective\u201d American Anthropologist 100 no. 3 (1998): 632-650.\" id=\"return-footnote-775-11\" href=\"#footnote-775-11\" aria-label=\"Footnote 11\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[11]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Physical anthropologists today analyze human biological variation by examining specific genetic traits to understand how those traits originated and evolved over time and why some genetic traits are more common in certain populations. Since much of our biological diversity occurs mostly within (rather than between) continental regions once believed to be the homelands of distinct races, the concept of race is meaningless in any study of human biology. Franz Boas, considered the father of modern U.S. anthropology, was the first prominent anthropologist to challenge racial thinking directly during the early twentieth century. A professor of anthropology at Columbia University in New York City and a Jewish immigrant from Germany, Boas established anthropology in the United States as a four-field academic discipline consisting of archaeology, physical\/biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, and linguistics. His approach challenged conventional thinking at the time that humans could be separated into biological races endowed with unique intellectual, moral, and physical abilities.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">In one of his most famous studies, Boas challenged craniometrics, in which the size and shape of skulls of various groups were measured as a way of assigning relative intelligence and moral behavior. Boas noted that the size and shape of the skull were not fixed characteristics within groups and were instead influenced by the environment. Children born in the United States to parents of various immigrant groups, for example, had slightly different average skull shapes than children born and raised in the homelands of those immigrant groups. The differences reflected relative access to nutrition and other socio-economic dimensions. In his famous 1909 essay \u201cRace Problems in America,\u201d Boas challenged the commonly held idea that immigrants to the United States from Italy, Poland, Russia, Greece, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and other southern and eastern European nations were a threat to America\u2019s \u201cracial purity.\u201d He pointed out that the British, Germans, and Scandinavians (popularly believed at the time to be the \u201ctrue white\u201d heritages that gave the United States its superior qualities) were not themselves \u201cracially pure.\u201d Instead, many different tribal and cultural groups had intermixed over the centuries.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\"><a class=\"footnote\" title=\"For more information about the efforts of Franz Boas to refute the race concept in science, see Franz Boas, \u201cChanges in the Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants\u201d American Anthropologist 14 (1912): 530-562.\" id=\"return-footnote-775-12\" href=\"#footnote-775-12\" aria-label=\"Footnote 12\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[12]<\/sup><\/a><\/span> In fact, Boas asserted, the notion of \u201cracial purity\u201d was utter nonsense. As present-day anthropologist Jonathan Marks (1994) noted, \u201cYou may group humans into a small number of races if you want to, but you are denied biology as a support for it.\u201d<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\"><a class=\"footnote\" title=\"Jonathan Marks, \u201cBlack, White, Other,\u201d 35.\" id=\"return-footnote-775-13\" href=\"#footnote-775-13\" aria-label=\"Footnote 13\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[13]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<h2 class=\"H2\">RACE AS A SOCIAL &amp; CULTURAL CONSTRUCT\u00a0<em>By\u00a0Justin D. Garcia<\/em><\/h2>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Just because the idea of distinct biological human races is not a valid scientific concept does not mean, and should not be interpreted as implying, that \u201cthere is no such thing as race\u201d or that \u201crace isn\u2019t real.\u201d Race is indeed real but it is a concept based on arbitrary social and cultural definitions rather than biology or science. <span style=\"color: #993300\">In other words, society made race &#8220;real&#8221; when it claimed it was a biological category, but it is the social ramifications of that scientific error and the discrimination it was used to justify that make race real today.<\/span> Thus, racial categories such as \u201cwhite\u201d and \u201cblack\u201d are as real as categories of \u201cAmerican\u201d and \u201cAfrican.\u201d Many things in the world are real but are not biological. So, while race does not reflect biological characteristics, it reflects socially constructed concepts defined subjectively by societies to reflect notions of division that are perceived to be significant. Racial categories as an aspect of culture are typically learned, internalized, and accepted without question or critical thought in a process not so different from children learning their native language as they grow up.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Race is most accurately thought of as a socio-historical concept. Michael Omi and Howard Winant noted that \u201cRacial categories and the meaning of race are given concrete expression by the specific social relations and historical context in which they are embedded.\u201d<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\"><a class=\"footnote\" title=\"Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 64.\" id=\"return-footnote-775-14\" href=\"#footnote-775-14\" aria-label=\"Footnote 14\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[14]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0<\/span>In other words, racial labels ultimately reflect a society\u2019s social attitudes and cultural beliefs regarding notions of group differences. And since racial categories are culturally defined, they can vary from one society to another as well as change over time within a society. Omi and Winant referred to this as <em><strong>racial formation<\/strong>\u2014<\/em>\u201cthe process by which social, economic, and political forces determine the content and importance of racial categories.\u201d<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\"><a class=\"footnote\" title=\"Ibid., 61\" id=\"return-footnote-775-15\" href=\"#footnote-775-15\" aria-label=\"Footnote 15\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[15]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<h3>Racialization &amp; Whiteness <em>By Melanie A. Medeiros and\u00a0Justin D. Garcia<\/em><\/h3>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\"><span style=\"color: #993300\">One aspect of racial formation is the <strong>racialization<\/strong> of groups of people, and in the United States the racialization of immigrants is very common. Racialization is the process of categorizing, differentiating, and attributing a particular racial character to a person or group of people. The process of racialization is visible in the classification of immigrants throughout American history.<\/span> In the mid 1800s, for example, Irish Catholic immigrants faced intense hostility from America\u2019s Anglo-Protestant mainstream society, and anti-Irish politicians and journalists depicted the Irish as racially different and inferior. Newspaper cartoons frequently portrayed Irish Catholics in apelike fashion: overweight, knuckle dragging, and brutish. In the early twentieth century, Italian and Jewish immigrants were typically perceived as racially distinct from America\u2019s Anglo-Protestant \u201cwhite\u201d majority as well. They were said to belong to the inferior \u201cMediterranean\u201d and \u201cJewish\u201d races. Today, Irish, Italian, and Jewish Americans are fully considered \u201cwhite,\u201d and many people find it hard to believe that they once were perceived otherwise.\u00a0<span style=\"color: #993300\">Another contemporary example of the racialization of an immigrant group in the United States today, is the political rhetoric and public discourse that classifies immigrants from Mexico and Central America as &#8220;non-White,&#8221; which is a result of recent debates surrounding immigration from those regions. Although the United States Census does not categorize Hispanic\/Latinx people as a separate race (they refer to them as ethnic categories rather than racial, which you will read about soon), the American public has racialized these immigrants and lumped them together into one group, even though they are actually physically and culturally very diverse.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #993300\">Another example of racialization, is the racialization of Muslims in the United States since the\u00a0terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.\u00a0 Prior to the 9\/11 attacks, the American public perceived Islam as a religion, and did not associate it with any particular racial group. Since Islam is practiced all over the world, Muslims come from very different geographic and cultural backgrounds, as well as have different physical characteristics. For example, up until 9\/11 a Muslim person from the Middle East would be classified in the United States as &#8220;white,&#8221; but a Muslim from sub-Saharan Africa would be classified classified as &#8220;black.&#8221; This illustrates the disassociation between religious practices and the classification of race. However, s<\/span><span style=\"color: #993300\">ince 9\/11, U.S public perceptions have racialized Muslims, contributing to hate crimes against American Muslims and people mistaken to be Muslims because they share some physical traits with people in the Middle East (many Americans wrongly assume everyone in the Middle East is Muslim and\/or that all Muslims come from the Middle East). In his 2017 article <em>The Racialization of Islam in the United States<\/em>, Craigs Considine argues that the racialization of Muslims is excerbated by the &#8220;media and entertainment [industry&#8217;s] representations of Islam and Muslims&#8230;which exacerbates anti-Islam and anti-Muslim sentiments&#8221; (166).<a class=\"footnote\" title=\"Considine, Craig. 2017. &quot;The Racialization of Islam in the United States: Islamophobia, Hate Crimes and 'Flying while Brown.&quot; Religions 8: 165-184.\" id=\"return-footnote-775-16\" href=\"#footnote-775-16\" aria-label=\"Footnote 16\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[16]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0In a National Public Radio (NPR) interview, Erin Kearns, coauthor of the article <em>Why Do Some Terrorist Attacks Receive More Media Attention Than Others<\/em>, stated &#8220;that when the perpetrator of a terrorist attack is Muslim, &#8216;you can expect that attack to receive about four and a half times more media coverage than if the perpterator was not Muslim.&#8217; Put another way, as Kearns notes, &#8216;a perpetrator who is not Muslim would have to kill on average about seven more people to receive the same amount of coverage as a perpetrator who is Muslim'&#8221; (Considine 2017, 166). American action films also disproportionately portray Muslims and Arabs as villains.<a class=\"footnote\" title=\"For more on this issue, read Jack Shaheen's Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies People and A is for Arab: Archiving Stereotypes in U.S. Popular Culture.\" id=\"return-footnote-775-17\" href=\"#footnote-775-17\" aria-label=\"Footnote 17\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[17]<\/sup><\/a> &#8220;By reinforcing stereotypes of the Middle East as a place of extremism and Muslims as terrorists, these representations produce policies that have dire consequences for Arabs, Muslims, and people who are believed to be Arab and Muslim (Alsultany 2015). These caricatures of Arabs and Muslims also provide a popular &#8216;permission to hate,&#8217; which often unfolds through a synthesis of racial and religious discrimination (Poynting and Mason 2006, 367)&#8221;\u00a0(Considine 2017, 167). <strong>Islamaphobia<\/strong> is the term used to describe racial and religious discrimination against Muslims.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>The processes of racial formation <span style=\"color: #993300\">and racialization<\/span> is vividly illustrated by the idea of \u201cwhiteness\u201d in the United States. Over the course of U.S. history, the concept of \u201cwhiteness\u201d expanded to include various immigrant groups that once were targets of racist beliefs and discrimination. A primary contributor to expansion of the definition of \u201cwhiteness\u201d in the United States was the rise of many members of those immigrant groups in social status after World War II.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\"><a class=\"footnote\" title=\"For more information about the social construction of whiteness in U.S. History see Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People; Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995). For more information about the economic aspects of the construction of whiteness both before and after World War II, see David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (Chicago, IL: Haymarket, 2007) and George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998).\" id=\"return-footnote-775-18\" href=\"#footnote-775-18\" aria-label=\"Footnote 18\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[18]<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Hundreds of suburban housing developments were constructed on the edge of the nation\u2019s major cities during the 1940s and 1950s to accommodate returning soldiers, the Serviceman\u2019s Readjustment Act of 1944 offered a series of benefits for military veterans, including free college education or technical training and cost-of-living stipends funded by the federal government for veterans pursuing higher education. In addition, veterans could obtain guaranteed low-interest loans for homes and for starting their own farms or businesses. The act was in effect from 1944 through 1956 and was <em>theoretically<\/em> available to all military veterans who served at least four months in uniform and were honorably discharged, but the legislation did not contain anti-discrimination provisions and most African American veterans were denied benefits because private banks refused to provide the loans and restrictive language by homeowners\u2019 associations prohibited sales of homes to nonwhites. The male children and grandchildren of European immigrant groups benefited tremendously from the act. They were able to obtain college educations, formerly available only to the affluent, at no cost, leading to professional white-collar careers, and to purchase low-cost suburban homes that increased substantially in value over time. The act has been credited, more than anything else, with creating the modern middle class of U.S. society and transforming the majority of \u201cwhite\u201d Americans from renters into homeowners.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\"><a class=\"footnote\" title=\"For a detailed discussion of this process see Douglas S. Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993) and Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth Century America (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2005).\" id=\"return-footnote-775-19\" href=\"#footnote-775-19\" aria-label=\"Footnote 19\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[19]<\/sup><\/a><\/span> As the children of Irish, Jewish, Italian, Greek, Anglo-Saxon, and Eastern European parents grew up together in the suburbs, formed friendships, and dated and married one another, the old social boundaries that defined \u201cwhiteness\u201d were redefined.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\"><a class=\"footnote\" title=\"For more information on these historical developments and their social ramifications, see Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998) or David Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America\u2019s Immigrants Became White\u2014The Strange Journey From Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2005).\" id=\"return-footnote-775-20\" href=\"#footnote-775-20\" aria-label=\"Footnote 20\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[20]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Race is a socially constructed concept but it is not a trivial matter. On the contrary, one\u2019s race often has a dramatic impact on everyday life. In the United States, for example, people often use race\u2014their personal understanding of race\u2014to predict \u201cwho\u201d a person is and \u201cwhat\u201d a person is like in terms of personality, behavior, and other qualities. Because of this tendency to characterize others and make assumptions about them, people can be uncomfortable or defensive when they mistake someone\u2019s background or cannot easily determine \u201cwhat\u201d someone is, as revealed in statements such as \u201cYou don\u2019t <em>look<\/em> black!\u201d or \u201cYou <em>talk<\/em> like a white person. Such statements reveal fixed notions about \u201cblackness\u201d and \u201cwhiteness\u201d and what members of each race will be like, reflecting their socially constructed and seemingly \u201ccommon sense\u201d understanding of the world.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Since the 1990s, scholars and anti-racism activists have discussed \u201c<strong>white privilege<\/strong>\u201d as a basic feature of race as a lived experience in the United States. Peggy McIntosh coined the term in a famous 1988 essay, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/nationalseedproject.org\/white-privilege-unpacking-the-invisible-knapsack\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack<\/span><\/a>,\u201d in which she identified more than two dozen accumulated unearned benefits and advantages associated with being a \u201cwhite\u201d person in the United States. The benefits ranged from relatively minor things, such as knowing that \u201cflesh color\u201d Band-Aids would match her skin, to major determinants of life experiences and opportunities, such as being assured that she would never be asked to speak on behalf of her entire race, being able to curse and get angry in public without others assuming she was acting that way because of her race, and not having to teach her children that police officers and the general public would view them as suspicious or criminal because of their race. In 2015, MTV aired a documentary on white privilege, simply titled<em> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=_zjj1PmJcRM\"><span class=\"Hyperlink CharOverride-1\">White People<\/span><\/a><\/em>, to raise awareness of this issue among Millennials. In the documentary, young \u201cwhite\u201d Americans from various geographic, social, and class backgrounds discussed their experiences with race.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">White privilege has gained significant attention and is an important tool for understanding how race is often connected to everyday experiences and opportunities, but we must remember that no group is homogenous or monolithic. \u201cWhite\u201d persons receive varying degrees of privilege and social advantage, and other important characteristics, such as social class, gender, sexual orientation, and (dis)ability, shape individuals\u2019 overall lives and how they experience society. John Hartigan, an urban anthropologist, has written extensively about these characteristics. <em>His <\/em><em>Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit <\/em>(1999) discusses the lives of \u201cwhite\u201d residents in three neighborhoods in Detroit, Michigan, that vary significantly socio-economically\u2014one impoverished, one working class, and one upper middle class. Hartigan reveals that social class has played a major role in shaping strikingly different identities among these \u201cwhite\u201d residents and how, accordingly, social relations between \u201cwhites\u201d and \u201cblacks\u201d in the neighborhoods vary from camaraderie and companionship to conflict.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"H1\">RACE IN TWO NATIONS: THE UNITED STATES &amp; BRAZIL\u00a0\u00a0<em>By\u00a0Justin D. Garcia<\/em><\/h2>\n<p class=\"Normal\">To better understand how race is constructed around the world, consider how the United States, Brazil, and Japan define racial categories. In the United States, race has traditionally been rigidly constructed, and Americans have long perceived racial categories as discrete and mutually exclusive: a person who had one \u201cblack\u201d parent and one \u201cwhite\u201d parent was seen simply as \u201cblack.\u201d The institution of slavery played a major role in defining how the United States has classified people by race through the<em> one-drop rule<\/em>, which required that any trace of known or recorded non-European (\u201cnon-white\u201d) ancestry was used to automatically exclude a person from being classified as \u201cwhite.\u201d Someone with one \u201cblack\u201d grandparent and three \u201cwhite\u201d grandparents or one \u201cblack\u201d great-grandparent and seven \u201cwhite\u201d great-grandparents was classified under the one-drop rule simply as \u201cblack.\u201d The original purpose of the one-drop rule was to ensure that children born from sexual unions (some consensual but many forced) between slave-owner fathers and enslaved women would be born into slave status.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference _idGenCharOverride-1\"><a class=\"footnote\" title=\"While the one-drop rule was intended to protect the institution of slavery, a more nuanced view of racial identity has existed throughout U.S. History. For a history of the racial categories used historically in the United States census, including several mixed-race categories, see the Pew Research Center\u2019s \u201cWhat Census Calls Us: Historical Timeline.\u201d http:\/\/www.pewsocialtrends.org\/interactives\/multiracial-timeline\/\" id=\"return-footnote-775-21\" href=\"#footnote-775-21\" aria-label=\"Footnote 21\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[21]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Consider President Barack Obama. Obama is of biracial heritage; his mother was \u201cwhite\u201d of Euro-American descent and his father was a \u201cblack\u201d man from Kenya. The media often refer to Obama simply as \u201cblack\u201d or \u201cAfrican American,\u201d such as when he is referred to as the nation\u2019s \u201cfirst black President,\u201d and never refer to him as \u201cwhite.\u201d<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\"><a class=\"footnote\" title=\"It is important to note that President Obama has also stated that he self-identifies as black. See for instance, Sam Roberts and Peter Baker. 2010. \u201cAsked to Declare His Race, Obama Checks \u2018Black.\u2019\u201d The New York Times, April 2. http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/04\/03\/us\/politics\/03census.html\" id=\"return-footnote-775-22\" href=\"#footnote-775-22\" aria-label=\"Footnote 22\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[22]<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Whiteness in the United States has long been understood and legally defined as implying \u201cracial purity\u201d despite the biological absurdity of the notion, and to be considered \u201cwhite,\u201d one could have no known ancestors of black, American Indian, Asian, or other \u201cnon-white\u201d backgrounds. Cultural anthropologists also refer to the one-drop rule as <strong><span class=\"CharOverride-2\">hypodescent<\/span><\/strong>, a term coined by anthropologist Marvin Harris in the 1960s to refer to a socially constructed racial classification system in which a person of mixed racial heritage is automatically categorized as a member of the less (or least) privileged group.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\"><a class=\"footnote\" title=\"This concept is discussed in more detail in chapter 9 of Carol Mukhopadhyay et. al How Real Is Race: A Sourebook on Race, Culture, and Biology.\" id=\"return-footnote-775-23\" href=\"#footnote-775-23\" aria-label=\"Footnote 23\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[23]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Another example is birth certificates issued by U.S. hospitals, which, until relatively recently, used a precise formula to determine the appropriate racial classification for a newborn. If one parent was \u201cwhite\u201d and the other was \u201cnon-white,\u201d the child was classified as the race of the \u201cnon-white\u201d parent; if neither parent was \u201cwhite,\u201d the child was classified as the race of the father.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Not until very recently have the United States government, the media, and pop culture begun to officially acknowledge and embrace biracial and multiracial individuals. The 2000 census was the first to allow respondents to identify as more than one race. Currently, a grassroots movement that is expanding across the United States, led by organizations such as Project RACE (Reclassify All Children Equally) and Swirl, seeks to raise public awareness of biracial and multiracial people who sometimes still experience social prejudice for being of mixed race and\/or resentment from peers who disapprove of their decision to identify with all of their backgrounds instead of just one. Prominent biracial and multiracial celebrities such as Tiger Woods, Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey, Beyonc\u00e9 Knowles, Bruno Mars, and Dwayne \u201cThe Rock\u201d Johnson and the election of Barack Obama have also prompted people in the United States to reconsider the problematic nature of rigid, discrete racial categories.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">In 1977, the U.S. government established five official racial categories under Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Directive 15 that provided a basis for recordkeeping and compiling of statistical information to facilitate collection of demographic information by the Census Bureau and to ensure compliance with federal civil rights legislation and work-place anti-discrimination policies. Those categories and their definitions, which are still used today, are (a) \u201c<em>White<\/em>: a person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, North Africa, or the Middle East;\u201d (b) \u201c<em>Black or African American<\/em>: a person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa;\u201d (c) \u201c<em>American Indian or Alaskan Native<\/em>: a person having origins in any of the original peoples of North and South America (including Central America), and who maintains tribal affiliation or community attachment;\u201d (d) \u201c<em>Asian<\/em>: a person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent;\u201d and (e) <em>\u201cNative Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander:<\/em> a person having origins in any of the original peoples of Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, or the Pacific Islands.\u201d In addition, OMB Directive 15 established <em>Hispanic or Latino<\/em> as a separate <em>ethnic<\/em> (not racial) category; on official documents, individuals are asked to identify their racial background and whether they are of Hispanic\/Latino ethnic heritage. The official definition of Hispanic or Latino is \u201ca person of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">OMB Directive 15\u2019s terminology and definitions have generated considerable criticism and controversy. The complex fundamental question is whether such categories are practical and actually reflect how individuals choose to self-identify. Terms such as \u201cnon-Hispanic white\u201d and \u201cBlack Hispanic,\u201d both a result of the directive, are baffling to many people in the United States who perceive Hispanics\/Latinos as a separate group from whites and blacks. Others oppose any governmental attempt to classify people by race, on both liberal and conservative political grounds. In 1997, the American Anthropological Association unsuccessfully advocated for a cessation of federal efforts to coercively classify Americans by race, arguing instead that individuals should be given the opportunity to identify their ethnic and\/or national heritages (such as their country or countries of ancestry).<\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Brazil\u2019s concept of race is much more fluid, flexible, and multifaceted. The differences between Brazil and the United States are particularly striking because the countries have similar histories. Both nations were born of European colonialism in the New World, established major plantation economies that relied on large numbers of African slaves, and subsequently experienced large waves of immigration from around the world (particularly Europe) following the abolition of slavery. Despite those similarities, significant contrasts in how race is perceived in these two societies persist, which is sometimes summarized in the expression \u201cThe United States has a color line, while Brazil has a color continuum.\u201d<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\"><a class=\"footnote\" title=\"Edward Telles originated this expression in his book Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).\" id=\"return-footnote-775-24\" href=\"#footnote-775-24\" aria-label=\"Footnote 24\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[24]<\/sup><\/a><\/span> In Brazil, races are typically viewed as points on a continuum in which one gradually blends into another; \u201cwhite\u201d and \u201cblack\u201d are opposite ends of a continuum that incorporates many intermediate color-based racial labels that have no equivalent in the United States.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">The Brazilian term for these categories, which correspond to the concept of race in the United States, is <em>tipos<\/em>, which directly translates into Portuguese as \u201ctypes.\u201d<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\"><a class=\"footnote\" title=\"More information about the Brazilian concepts of race described in this section is available in Jefferson M. Fish, \u201cMixed Blood: An Analytical Method of Classifying Race.\u201d Psychology Today, November 1, 1995. https:\/\/www.psychologytoday.com\/articles\/199511\/mixed-blood\" id=\"return-footnote-775-25\" href=\"#footnote-775-25\" aria-label=\"Footnote 25\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[25]<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Rather than describing what is believed to be a person\u2019s biological or genetic ancestry, <em>tipos<\/em> describe slight but noticeable differences in physical appearance. Examples include <em>loura<\/em>, a person with a very fair complexion, straight blonde hair, and blue or green eyes; <em>sarar\u00e1<\/em>, a light-complexioned person with tightly curled blondish or reddish hair, blue or green eyes, a wide nose, and thick lips; and <em>cabo verde<\/em>, an individual with dark skin, brown eyes, straight black hair, a narrow nose, and thin lips. Sociologists and anthropologists have identified more than 125 <em>tipos<\/em> in Brazil, and small villages of only 500 people may feature 40 or more depending on how residents describe one another. Some of the labels vary from region to region, reflecting local cultural differences.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Since Brazilians perceive race based on phenotypes or outward physical appearance rather than as an extension of geographically based biological and genetic descent, individual members of a family can be seen as different <em>tipos<\/em>. This may seem bewildering to those who think of race as a fixed identity inherited from one\u2019s parents even though it is generally acknowledged that family members often have different physical features, such as sisters who have strikingly different eye colors, hair colors, and\/or complexions. In Brazil, those differences are frequently viewed as significant enough to assign different <em>tipos<\/em>. Cultural anthropologist Conrad Phillip Kottak, who conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Brazil, noted that something as minor as a suntan or sunburn could lead to a person temporarily being described as a different <em>tipo<\/em> until the effects of the tanning or burning wore off.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\"><a class=\"footnote\" title=\"Conrad Kottak, Anthropology: Appreciating Cultural Diversity (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013).\" id=\"return-footnote-775-26\" href=\"#footnote-775-26\" aria-label=\"Footnote 26\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[26]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Another major difference in the construction of race in the United States and Brazil is the more fluid and flexible nature of race in Brazil, which is reflected in a popular Brazilian saying: \u201cMoney whitens.\u201d As darker-complexioned individuals increase their social class status (by, for example, graduating from college and obtaining high-salaried, professional positions), they generally come to be seen as a somewhat lighter <em>tipo<\/em> and light-complexioned individuals who become poorer may be viewed as a slightly darker <em>tipo<\/em>. In the United States, social class has no bearing on one\u2019s racial designation; a non-white person who achieves upward social mobility and accrues greater education and wealth may be seen by some as more \u201csocially desirable\u201d because of social class but does not change racial classification.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Brazil\u2019s Institute of Geography and Statistics established five official racial categories in 1940 to facilitate collection of demographic information that are still in use today: <em>branco<\/em> (white), <em>pr\u00eato<\/em> (black), <em>pardo<\/em> (brown), <em>amarelo<\/em> (yellow), and <em>ind\u00edgena<\/em> (indigenous). These racial categories are similar to the ones established in the United States under OMB Directive 15 and to Linnaeus\u2019 proposed <strong><span class=\"CharOverride-2\">taxonomy<\/span><\/strong> in the 18<span class=\"CharOverride-4\">th<\/span> century. <em>Pardo <\/em>is unique to Brazil and denotes a person of both <em>branco<\/em> and <em>pr\u00eato<\/em> heritage. Many Brazilians object to these government categories and prefer <em>tipos<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">The more fluid construction of race in Brazil is accompanied by generally less hostile, more benign social interactions between people of different colors and complexions, which has contributed to Brazil being seen as a \u201cracial paradise\u201d and a \u201cracial democracy\u201d rainbow nation free of the harsh prejudices and societal discrimination that has characterized other multiracial nations such as the United States and South Africa.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\"><a class=\"footnote\" title=\"See for instance the PBS documentary Brazil: A Racial Paradise, written and presented by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.. For a detailed critique of the idea of Brazil as a \u201cracial democracy,\u201d see Michael Hanchard (ed), Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).\" id=\"return-footnote-775-27\" href=\"#footnote-775-27\" aria-label=\"Footnote 27\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[27]<\/sup><\/a><\/span> The \u201cracial democracy\u201d image has long been embraced by the government and elites in Brazil as a way to provide the country with a distinct identity in the international community. However, scholars in Brazil and the United States have questioned the extent to which racial equality exists in Brazil despite the appearance of interracial congeniality on the surface. Many light-complexioned Brazilians reject the idea that racial discrimination and inequalities persist and regard such claims as divisive while Afro-Brazilians have drawn attention to these inequalities in recent years.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_213\" style=\"width: 650px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-213\" class=\"wp-image-213 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\/courses-images\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2795\/2017\/12\/06163735\/race_figure_5-e1512755814657.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"425\" \/><\/p>\n<p id=\"caption-attachment-213\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Figure 5: A scene from the Black Women\u2019s March against Racism and Violence in Brasilia, Brazil, 2015.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p class=\"Normal\">Though Afro-Brazilians comprise approximately half of the country\u2019s population, they have historically accounted for less than 2 percent of all university students, and severe economic disparities between <em>tipos<\/em> remain prominent in Brazil to this day.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference _idGenCharOverride-1\"><a class=\"footnote\" title=\"Robert J. Cottrol, The Long Lingering Shadow: Slavery, Race, and Law in the American Hemisphere (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2013), 246.\" id=\"return-footnote-775-28\" href=\"#footnote-775-28\" aria-label=\"Footnote 28\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[28]<\/sup><\/a><\/span> The majority of the country\u2019s Afro-Brazilians lives in the less-affluent northern region, site of the original sugar cane plantations while the majority of Brazilians of European descent live in the industrial and considerably wealthier southern region.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference _idGenCharOverride-1\"><a class=\"footnote\" title=\"Ibid., 145\" id=\"return-footnote-775-29\" href=\"#footnote-775-29\" aria-label=\"Footnote 29\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[29]<\/sup><\/a><\/span> The <em>favelas<\/em> (slums) located on the edge of major cities such as Rio de Janeiro and S\u00e3o Paolo, which often lack electricity or running water, are inhabited largely by Afro-Brazilians, who are half as likely to have a working toilet in their homes as the overall Brazilian population.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">There are significant economic differences between Brazilians according to their official racial designation. According to government statistics, <em>pr\u00eatos <\/em>have higher unemployment and poverty rates than other groups in Brazil and <em>brancos<\/em> earn 57 percent more than <em>pr\u00eatos<\/em> for the same occupation. Furthermore, the vast majority of Brazilians in leadership positions in politics, the military, the media, and education are <em>branco<\/em> or <em>pardo<\/em>. Inter-racial marriage occurs more frequently in Brazil than in the United States, but most of the marriages are between <em>pr\u00eatos<\/em> and <em>pardos<\/em> and not between <em>brancos<\/em> and either <em>pr\u00eatos<\/em> or <em>pardos<\/em>. Another significant area of concern centers on brutality and mistreatment of darker-complexioned Brazilians. As a result, some scholars of race and racism describe Brazil as a prominent example of a <strong><span class=\"CharOverride-2\">pigmentocracy<\/span><\/strong>: a society characterized by a strong correlation between a person\u2019s skin color and their social class.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Afro-Brazilian activism has grown substantially since the 1980s, inspired in part by the successes of the Civil Rights movement in the United States and by actions taken by the Brazilian government since the early 2000s. One of the Brazilian government\u2019s strategies has been to implement U.S.-style affirmative action policies in education and employment to increase the number of Afro-Brazilians in the nation\u2019s professional ranks and decrease the degree of economic disparity. Those efforts sparked an intense backlash among lighter-complexioned Brazilians and created a complex social and political dilemma: who, exactly, should be considered \u201cdark\/black enough\u201d for inclusion in affirmative action, who makes that decision, and on what grounds will the decision be based? Many Brazilian families include relatives whose complexions are quite different and the country has clear racial categories only in terms of its demographic statistics. Nevertheless, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Brazil\u2019s president from 2003 through 2011, made promotion of greater racial equality a prominent objective of his administration. In addition to supporting affirmative action policies, Lula appointed four Afro-Brazilians to his cabinet, appointed the first Afro-Brazilian justice to the nation\u2019s supreme court, and established a government office for promotion of racial equality. These recent developments have led many in Brazil and elsewhere to reconsider the accuracy of Brazil\u2019s designation as a racial democracy, which has been as a central component of its national identity for decades.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Normal ParaOverride-1\">Scholars mostly agree that race relations are more relaxed and genteel in Brazil than in the United States. They tend to disagree about why that is the case. Some have suggested that the differences in racial constructions stem from important colonial-era distinctions that set the tone for years to come. A common expression describing the situation is: \u201cthe United States had two British parents while Brazil had a Portuguese father and an African mother.\u201d British settlers who colonized North America thoroughly subjugated their slaves, intermarriage was rare, and African cultural influences on mainstream U.S. society were marginalized compared to British cultural traditions and customs. In Brazil, on the other hand, sexual and marital unions between the Portuguese settlers, who were overwhelmingly male, and female Africans were common, creating individuals who exhibit a wide range of physical appearances. Sexual unions certainly occurred in the United States between male European slave masters and female African slaves, but the one-drop rule ensured that any children born of such unions would be classified as \u201cblack\u201d and as slaves. In Brazil in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the government and the Roman Catholic Church strongly encouraged European descended men to marry the African and indigenous women they impregnated in order to \u201cwhiten\u201d the nation.<span class=\"Endnote-Reference CharOverride-3\"><a class=\"footnote\" title=\"For more information about Brazil\u2019s official policy toward mixed-race children during this era see Thomas E. Skidmore, Black Into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992).\" id=\"return-footnote-775-30\" href=\"#footnote-775-30\" aria-label=\"Footnote 30\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[30]<\/sup><\/a><\/span> The United States government did not advocate for interracial families and most states had anti-miscegenation laws. The United States also implemented an official, government-sanctioned system of <strong><span class=\"CharOverride-2\">Jim Crow<\/span><\/strong> racial segregation laws in that had no equivalent in Brazil.<\/p>\n<div class=\"textbox exercises\">\n<h3>discussion questions<\/h3>\n<ol>\n<li class=\"Discussion-Questions-numbered\">Garc\u00eda describes the reasons that race is considered a \u201cdiscredited concept in human biology.\u201d Despite this scientific fact, most people continue to believe that race is \u201creal.\u201d Why do you think race has continued to be an important social reality even after it has been discredited scientifically?<\/li>\n<li class=\"Discussion-Questions-numbered\">The process of racial formation is different in every society. In the United States, the \u201cone-drop rule\u201d and hypodescent have historically affected the way people with multiracial backgrounds have been racialized. How have ideas about multiracial identity been changing in the past few decades? As the number of people who identify as \u201cmultiracial\u201d increases, do you think there will be changes in the way we think about other racial categories?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\t\t\t <section class=\"citations-section\" role=\"contentinfo\">\n\t\t\t <h3>Candela Citations<\/h3>\n\t\t\t\t\t <div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t <div id=\"citation-list-775\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t <div class=\"licensing\"><div class=\"license-attribution-dropdown-subheading\">CC licensed content, Shared previously<\/div><ul class=\"citation-list\"><li>Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology. <strong>Authored by<\/strong>: Edited by Nina Brown, Laura Tubelle de Gonzalez, and Thomas McIlwraith. <strong>Provided by<\/strong>: American Anthropological Association. <strong>Located at<\/strong>: <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/perspectives.americananthro.org\/\">http:\/\/perspectives.americananthro.org\/<\/a>. <strong>License<\/strong>: <em><a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"license\" href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc\/4.0\/\">CC BY-NC: Attribution-NonCommercial<\/a><\/em><\/li><li>Race and Ethnicity . <strong>Authored by<\/strong>: Justin D. Garcia. <strong>Provided by<\/strong>: Millersville university of Pennsylvania. <strong>Located at<\/strong>: <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/perspectives.americananthro.org\/Chapters\/Race_and_Ethnicity.pdf\">http:\/\/perspectives.americananthro.org\/Chapters\/Race_and_Ethnicity.pdf<\/a>. <strong>License<\/strong>: <em><a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"license\" href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc\/4.0\/\">CC BY-NC: Attribution-NonCommercial<\/a><\/em><\/li><li>Skin color is an illusion. <strong>Authored by<\/strong>: Nina Jablonski. <strong>Provided by<\/strong>: TED talk. <strong>Located at<\/strong>: <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ted.com\/talks\/nina_jablonski_breaks_the_illusion_of_skin_color\">https:\/\/www.ted.com\/talks\/nina_jablonski_breaks_the_illusion_of_skin_color<\/a>. <strong>License<\/strong>: <em><a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"license\" href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-nd\/4.0\/\">CC BY-NC-ND: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives <\/a><\/em><\/li><li>A tale of two Americas. And the mini-mart where they collided. <strong>Authored by<\/strong>: Anand Giridharadas. <strong>Provided by<\/strong>: TED talk. <strong>Located at<\/strong>: <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ted.com\/talks\/anand_giridharadas_a_tale_of_two_americas_and_the_mini_mart_where_they_collided?referrer=playlist-check_your_assumptions\">https:\/\/www.ted.com\/talks\/anand_giridharadas_a_tale_of_two_americas_and_the_mini_mart_where_they_collided?referrer=playlist-check_your_assumptions<\/a>. <strong>License<\/strong>: <em><a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"license\" href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-nd\/4.0\/\">CC BY-NC-ND: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives <\/a><\/em><\/li><\/ul><\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t <\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t <\/div>\n\t\t\t <\/section><hr class=\"before-footnotes clear\" \/><div class=\"footnotes\"><ol><li id=\"footnote-775-1\">For more information about efforts to establish a \u201cscientific\u201d basis for race in the 18th and 19th centuries, see the \u201cHistory\u201d section of the<em> Race: Are We So Different<\/em> website: http:\/\/www.understandingrace.org. Stephen Jay Gould\u2019s book, <em>The Mismeasure of Man<\/em> (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), has a detailed discussion of the \u201cscientific\u201d methods used by Morton and others. <a href=\"#return-footnote-775-1\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 1\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-775-2\">More information about the social construction of racial categories in the United States can be found in Audrey Smedley, <em>Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview<\/em> (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2007) and Nell Irvin Painter, <em>The History of White People<\/em> (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010). <a href=\"#return-footnote-775-2\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 2\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-775-3\">More discussion of the material in this section can be found in Carol Mukhopadhyay, Rosemary Henze, and Yolanda Moses,<em> How Real Is Race? A Sourcebook on Race, Culture, and Biology<\/em> (Lanham, MD: Rowman &amp; Littlefield, 2013). Chapters 5 and 6 discuss the cultural construction of racial categories as a form of classification. The Race: Are We So Different website and its companion resources for teachers and researchers also explore the ideas described here. <a href=\"#return-footnote-775-3\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 3\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-775-4\">Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, <em>On the Natural Varieties of Mankind: De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa<\/em> (New York: Bergman Publishers, 1775). <a href=\"#return-footnote-775-4\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 4\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-775-5\">For details about how these categories were established, see Stephen Jay Gould, <em>The Mismeasure of Man<\/em>. <a href=\"#return-footnote-775-5\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 5\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-775-6\">For a discussion of the efforts to subdivide racial groups in the nineteenth century and its connection to eugenics, see Carol Mukhopadhyay, Rosemary Henze, and Yolanda Moses, <em>How Real Is Race? A Sourcebook on Race, Culture, and Biology<\/em>. <a href=\"#return-footnote-775-6\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 6\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-775-7\">For more information about the genetic variation between human groups that puts this example in context see Sheldon Krimsky and Kathleen Sloan, <em>Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture<\/em> (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 174-180. <a href=\"#return-footnote-775-7\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 7\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-775-8\">Carol Mukhopadhyay et. al <em>How Real Is Race? A Sourcebook on Race, Culture, and Biology<\/em>, 43-48. <a href=\"#return-footnote-775-8\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 8\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-775-9\">Ibid., 50-52. <a href=\"#return-footnote-775-9\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 9\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-775-10\">Ibid., 62. <a href=\"#return-footnote-775-10\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 10\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-775-11\">Alan R. Templeton, \u201cHuman Races: A Genetic and Evolutionary Perspective\u201d <em>American Anthropologist<\/em> 100 no. 3 (1998): 632-650. <a href=\"#return-footnote-775-11\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 11\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-775-12\">For more information about the efforts of Franz Boas to refute the race concept in science, see Franz Boas, \u201cChanges in the Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants\u201d <em>American Anthropologist<\/em> 14 (1912): 530-562. <a href=\"#return-footnote-775-12\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 12\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-775-13\">Jonathan Marks, \u201cBlack, White, Other,\u201d 35. <a href=\"#return-footnote-775-13\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 13\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-775-14\">Michael Omi and Howard Winant, <em>Racial Formation in the United States<\/em>, 64. <a href=\"#return-footnote-775-14\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 14\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-775-15\">Ibid., 61 <a href=\"#return-footnote-775-15\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 15\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-775-16\">Considine, Craig. 2017. \"The Racialization of Islam in the United States: Islamophobia, Hate Crimes and 'Flying while Brown.\" <em>Religions<\/em> 8: 165-184. <a href=\"#return-footnote-775-16\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 16\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-775-17\"> For more on this issue, read Jack Shaheen's <em>Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies People<\/em> and <em>A is for Arab: Archiving Stereotypes in U.S. Popular Culture<\/em>. <a href=\"#return-footnote-775-17\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 17\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-775-18\">For more information about the social construction of whiteness in U.S. History see Nell Irvin Painter, <em>The History of White People<\/em>; Noel Ignatiev, <em>How the Irish Became White<\/em> (New York: Routledge, 1995). For more information about the economic aspects of the construction of whiteness both before and after World War II, see David Roediger, <em>The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class<\/em> (Chicago, IL: Haymarket, 2007) and George Lipsitz, <em>The Possessive Investment in Whiteness<\/em> (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998). <a href=\"#return-footnote-775-18\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 18\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-775-19\">For a detailed discussion of this process see Douglas S. Massey and Nancy Denton, <em>American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass<\/em> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993) and Ira Katznelson, <em>When Affirmative Action was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth Century America<\/em> (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2005). <a href=\"#return-footnote-775-19\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 19\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-775-20\">For more information on these historical developments and their social ramifications, see Karen Brodkin, <em>How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America<\/em> (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998) or David Roediger, <em>Working Toward Whiteness: How America\u2019s Immigrants Became White\u2014The Strange Journey From Ellis Island to the Suburbs<\/em> (New York: Basic Books, 2005). <a href=\"#return-footnote-775-20\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 20\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-775-21\">While the one-drop rule was intended to protect the institution of slavery, a more nuanced view of racial identity has existed throughout U.S. History. For a history of the racial categories used historically in the United States census, including several mixed-race categories, see the Pew Research Center\u2019s \u201cWhat Census Calls Us: Historical Timeline.\u201d http:\/\/www.pewsocialtrends.org\/interactives\/multiracial-timeline\/ <a href=\"#return-footnote-775-21\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 21\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-775-22\">It is important to note that President Obama has also stated that he self-identifies as black. See for instance, Sam Roberts and Peter Baker. 2010. \u201cAsked to Declare His Race, Obama Checks \u2018Black.\u2019\u201d The New York Times, April 2. http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/04\/03\/us\/politics\/03census.html <a href=\"#return-footnote-775-22\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 22\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-775-23\">This concept is discussed in more detail in chapter 9 of Carol Mukhopadhyay et. al <em>How Real Is Race: A Sourebook on Race, Culture, and Biology<\/em>. <a href=\"#return-footnote-775-23\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 23\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-775-24\">Edward Telles originated this expression in his book <em>Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil<\/em> (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). <a href=\"#return-footnote-775-24\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 24\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-775-25\">More information about the Brazilian concepts of race described in this section is available in Jefferson M. Fish, \u201cMixed Blood: An Analytical Method of Classifying Race.\u201d <em>Psychology Today<\/em>, November 1, 1995. https:\/\/www.psychologytoday.com\/articles\/199511\/mixed-blood <a href=\"#return-footnote-775-25\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 25\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-775-26\">Conrad Kottak, <em>Anthropology: Appreciating Cultural Diversity<\/em> (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013). <a href=\"#return-footnote-775-26\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 26\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-775-27\">See for instance the PBS documentary <em>Brazil: A Racial Paradise<\/em>, written and presented by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.. For a detailed critique of the idea of Brazil as a \u201cracial democracy,\u201d see Michael Hanchard (ed), Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). <a href=\"#return-footnote-775-27\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 27\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-775-28\">Robert J. Cottrol, <em>The Long Lingering Shadow: Slavery, Race, and Law in the American Hemisphere<\/em> (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2013), 246. <a href=\"#return-footnote-775-28\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 28\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-775-29\">Ibid., 145 <a href=\"#return-footnote-775-29\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 29\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-775-30\">For more information about Brazil\u2019s official policy toward mixed-race children during this era see Thomas E. Skidmore, <em>Black Into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought<\/em> (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992). <a href=\"#return-footnote-775-30\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 30\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"author":53384,"menu_order":5,"template":"","meta":{"_candela_citation":"[{\"type\":\"cc\",\"description\":\"Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology\",\"author\":\"Edited by Nina Brown, Laura Tubelle de Gonzalez, and Thomas McIlwraith\",\"organization\":\"American Anthropological Association\",\"url\":\"http:\/\/perspectives.americananthro.org\/\",\"project\":\"\",\"license\":\"cc-by-nc\",\"license_terms\":\"\"},{\"type\":\"cc\",\"description\":\"Race and Ethnicity \",\"author\":\"Justin D. Garcia\",\"organization\":\"Millersville university of Pennsylvania\",\"url\":\"http:\/\/perspectives.americananthro.org\/Chapters\/Race_and_Ethnicity.pdf\",\"project\":\"\",\"license\":\"cc-by-nc\",\"license_terms\":\"\"},{\"type\":\"cc\",\"description\":\"Skin color is an illusion\",\"author\":\"Nina Jablonski\",\"organization\":\"TED talk\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.ted.com\/talks\/nina_jablonski_breaks_the_illusion_of_skin_color\",\"project\":\"\",\"license\":\"cc-by-nc-nd\",\"license_terms\":\"\"},{\"type\":\"cc\",\"description\":\"A tale of two Americas. 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