Anthropology was sometimes referred to as the “science of race” during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when physical anthropologists sought a biological basis for categorizing humans into racial types.^[1] 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.^[2] 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.

9.3.1 Race: A Discredited Concept in Human Biology

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—“white,” “Black,” “Caucasian,”  and “Asian,” for example—tends 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!  But the reality is that “race” is much more complicated than what we think we know about it.  An average person’s understanding of race is so incomplete and inaccurate because of the ever-changing and random social rules about race.

Physical anthropologists have identified several important concepts regarding the true nature of  humans’ 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 Understanding Race: Are We So Different?, 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 concluding people are different from them.  The website is highly interactive, featuring multimedia illustrations and online quizzes designed to  increase visitors’ knowledge of human variation. This website has been recently updated by an advisory board, which included me (Vanessa), to ensure that it could be used as an educational website for middle school to college.  We 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.^[3]

Before explaining why distinct biological races do not exist among humans, I must 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 reified 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.  Reification makes it very difficult to unlearn the false narrative and create a more accurate one.  Over centuries, the  notion of biological human races became ingrained—unquestioned, accepted, and regarded as a concrete “truth.” Studies of human physical and cultural variation from a scientific and anthropological perspective have allowed scholars to move beyond reified thinking and toward an improved understanding of the true complexity of human diversity.  That said, we continue to struggle to share this knowledge about race with the general public.

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 “races” 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. Instead, science eventually proved that biological races were not a “real” thing.

One of the earliest and most influential attempts at producing a racial  classification system came from Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus,  who argued in Systema Naturae (1735) for the existence of four human  races: Americanus (Native American / American Indian), Europaeus  (European), Asiaticus (East Asian), and Africanus (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 Caucasian (white), Mongolian (yellow  or East Asian), Ethiopian (Black or African), American (red or American  Indian), Malayan (brown or Pacific Islander). Importantly, Blumenbach  listed the races in this exact order, which he believed reflected their natural historical descent from the “primeval”

Caucasian original to  “extreme varieties.”^[4]

Although he was a committed abolitionist, Blumenbach nevertheless felt that his “Caucasian” 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.  By the early twentieth century, many social philosophers and scholars  had accepted the idea of three human races: the so-called Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid 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 and some observable differences between people categorized within a possible racial group, some academics began to  argue in favor of larger numbers of human races—five, nine, twenty, sixty, and more.^[5]

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’ desires to “slice the pie” of human physical variation according to the particular trait(s) they preferred to establish as the major, defining criteria of their classification system. Two major types of “race classifiers” have emerged over the past 300 years: lumpers and splitters. Lumpers have classified races by large geographic tracts (often continents) and produced a small number of broad, general racial categories, as reflected in Linnaeus’s original classification scheme and later three-race theories. Splitters have subdivided continent-wide racial categories into specific, more localized regional races and attempted to devise more “precise” racial labels for these specific groups, such as the three European races described earlier. Consequently, splitters have tried to identify many more human races than lumpers.

Racial labels, whether from a lumper or a splitter model, clearly attempt to identify and describe something. 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 continuous rather than discrete.  But what exactly does it mean to say that physical variation is continuous and not discrete?

Physical anthropologists use the term cline 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 “white” persons that you know actually

share the same skin complexion? Likewise, do all “Black” persons that 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.

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 because it is not a discrete static trait. There are a few notable exceptions to this general rule of lighter-complexioned people inhabiting northern latitudes.

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 “white” and who is “Black.” United States history gives us a hint as to why.  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’s 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.  Even with more human variation, the reification of race has made it challenging to ensure the public has an accurate understanding of race.

Physical anthropologists have also found that there are no specific genetic traits that are exclusive to  a “racial” 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 “racial” 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 traits are nonconcordant. Each trait is inherited  independently, not “bundled together” 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.

Another trait commonly mistaken as defining race is the epicanthic eye fold typically associated with  people of East Asian ancestry. The epicanthic eye fold at the outer corner of the eyelid produces the eye  shape that people in the United States typically associate with people from China and Japan but is also  common in people from Central Asia, parts of Eastern Europe, and Scandinavia, some American Indian  groups, and the KhoiSan of southern Africa.

In college, Justin took a course titled “Nutrition” because I thought it would be an easy way to boost my grade point average. The professor of the class, an authoritarian man in his late 60s or early 70s, routinely declared that “Asians can’t drink milk!” When this assertion was challenged by various students, including a woman who claimed that her best friend was Korean and drank milk and ate ice cream all the time, the professor only became more strident, doubling down on his dairy diatribe and defiantly vowing that he would not “ignore the facts” for “purposes of political correctness.  There is a larger percentage of Asian people that are lactose intolerant but that does not mean that “Asians can’t drink milk”.  In this story, students showed knowledge and advocacy in speaking up to the professor about an incorrect racist assumption about Asian people.  Instead of taking a step back and reassessing their knowledge, this professor continued using his authority to present inaccurate and racist information.

Lactose tolerance is a complex topic. Lactose is a sugar that is naturally present in milk and dairy products, and an enzyme, lactase, breaks it down into two simpler sugars that can be digested by the body. Ordinarily,  humans (and other mammals) stop producing lactase after infancy, and approximately 75 percent of  humans are thus lactose intolerant and cannot naturally digest milk. Lactose intolerance is a natural,  normal condition. However, some people continue to produce lactase into adulthood and can naturally  digest milk and dairy products. This lactose persistence developed through natural selection, primarily  among people in regions that had long histories of dairy farming (including the Middle East, Northern  Europe, Eastern Europe, East Africa, and Northern India). In other areas and for some groups of people,  dairy products were introduced relatively recently (such as East Asia, Southern Europe, and Western  and Southern Africa and among Australian Aborigines and American Indians) and lactose persistence has not developed yet.^[9]

That humans exhibit such a low level of genetic variation compared to other species reflects the fact that we are a relatively recent species that originated from one location; modern humans (Homo sapiens) first appeared in East Africa just under 200,000 years ago.^[11]

What does it mean to say that genetic variation is greater within so-called “races” than when we look at two different “races”? Question of  Brendan Kavanah, HCC student in Fall 2023 Cultural Anthropology course.

If I were to try to explain it to someone else who has an understanding of biology similar to my own, I’d use the following example: “Imagine you have Liam and Emma. They’re both what you’d call white, if you were placing them using a spectrum of paint swatches. Let’s even say they’re both 3rd generation Italians from South Orange, NJ. Imagine we run 500 tests about their genetic makeup: To what diseases are their immune systems most resistant, to what chemicals are they most likely to have extra-sensitive olfactory or taste sensitivity, what has been the average height of the last 10 generations of each’s paternal family tree? We compare the values from Liam and Emma against each other for each question, and assign values to the differences to get a numeric representation of the relative genetic variety between the two people. They might have had very different answers for each question, meaning that relatively there’s a lot of differences between their genes, but overall the answers will likely be inside of the average range for human beings thus far in our evolution. Then you have Ahmed, for comparison. He is from Alexandria, Egypt, and his skin is far darker than Liam’s or Emma’s. If you were to run that same 500-test routine on him, but also all the other people in his neighborhood, you’d find that Ahmed’s values fall right into the middle of the spectrum of each test when comparing him and all of his neighbors together. He’s the most average guy around, genetically speaking. If you were to then compare the values for Ahmed in these tests against those of Liam and Emma, you’d be likely to find that the values representing Ahmed’s (statistically average, but geographically foreign) genetic makeup fall consistently within the spectrums established by comparing Liam and Emma’s genetic variety. In this way, it could be seen that there is more genetic variety between the two white sample individuals than any averaged representative of a different race or ethnic group.”

9.3.2 A Challenge to Racial Thinking: Anthropologist Franz Boas 

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 the conventional thinking at the time that humans could be separated into biological races endowed with unique intellectual, moral, and physical abilities.  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 “Race Problems in America,” 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’s “racial purity.” He pointed out that the British, Germans, and Scandinavians (popularly  believed at the time to be the “true white” heritages that gave the United States its superior qualities)  were not themselves “racially pure.” Instead, many different tribal and cultural groups had intermixed  over the centuries. In fact, Boas asserted, the notion of “racial purity” was utter nonsense. As present-day anthropologist Jonathan Marks (1994) noted, “You may group humans into a small number of races if you want to, but you are denied biology as a support for it.”^[12]

Extra Information on The Problem with Race as Biology: For my science students in the class and others who might be interested, please review Nina Jablonski’s work here – https://www.biointeractive.org/classroom-resources/biology-skin-color – the site includes an 18 min video along with other content you might be interested in regarding human skin color.