9.9 Conclusion

Issues of race, racism, and ethnic relations remain among the most contentious social and political  topics in the United States and throughout the world. Anthropology offers valuable information to the  public regarding these issues, as anthropological knowledge encourages individuals to “think outside  the box” about race and ethnicity. This “thinking outside the box” includes understanding that racial  and ethnic categories are socially constructed rather than natural, biological divisions of humankind and realizing that the current racial and ethnic categories that exist in the United States today do not  necessarily reflect categories used in other countries. Physical anthropologists, who study human evolution, epidemiology, and genetics, are uniquely qualified to explain why distinct biological human  races do not exist. Nevertheless, race and ethnicity – as social constructs – continue to be used as criteria for prejudice, discrimination, exclusion, and stereotypes well into the twenty-first century. Cultural anthropologists play a crucial role in informing the public how the concept of race originated, how  racial categories have shifted over time, how race and ethnicity are constructed differently within various nations across the world, and how the current racial and ethnic categories utilized in the United  States were arbitrarily labeled and defined by the federal government under OMB Directive 15 in 1977. Understanding the complex nature of clines and continuous biological human variation, along with an  awareness of the distinct ways in which race and ethnicity have been constructed in different nations,  enables us to recognize racial and ethnic labels not as self-evident biological divisions of humans, but  instead as socially created categories that vary cross-culturally.