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Race: Biological vs. Social · Acedra
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Race: Biological vs. Social
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0:03
[Music]
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so far in this course we've seen some of the remarkable ways anthropologists explore the origins and diversity of humankind and if there's one thing we've learned is that our genetics our biology and even the archaeological record they all converge on one anthropological truth despite our physical and cultural differences we are one human race but wait just a minute if that's true why did the last US census form that I filled out asked me to identify my race and they gave you and me multiple
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choices right there's there's colors like white and black geographic regions like Asian and Pacific Islander and heck if you look at the ways the US Census Bureau has categorized races over time there used to be religion races like Hindu linguistic ones too like spanish-speaking they list just about everything under the Sun well except for one thing the human race so what is it are there multiple races or are our biological anthropology friends correct when they say there's only one race the
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human race today is our capstone discussion for part 1 of our course we're going to use anthropology to unpack enduring ambiguities between race skin color and biology first we'll see how anthropology itself has been rather confused about the race concept and then we'll see how anthropologist eventually came to understand that biologically speaking races nothing but a social construct I mean we literally made it up it has nothing to do with skin color and geography but the story's a little more
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complicated than that so let's get right to it from the very beginning anthropologists have been thinking about this thing we call race and we struggled with it from day one through biological anthropology we've come a long way from the days when we thought race biology and skin color we're all one in the same but that said this project is far from complete anthropologists have been working on the question of race for well over a century and we've still got a lot to learn
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archaeologist Charles Orser for example look back at how archaeologists have understood race over the decades and he found that many of them tend to confuse race with ethnicity and socioeconomic status and his groundbreaking research no pun intended helps us separate biological versus cultural constructions of race and we'll return to that question at the end of our lecture but first let's look back to the roots of this issue let's see how and why anthropologists archaeologists
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included have had so much trouble coming to terms with this concept of race let's start at the beginning anthropology's earliest version of this thing called race as we discussed in previous lectures Darwin's theory of natural selection was a seductive idea and it formalized a testable and correctable answer to the question of our human origins and his scientific approach it can't tell us why there's life on this planet but it did provide a compelling answer to the question of how once there
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was life on this planet we became human actually his book On the Origin of Species it didn't exclusively focus on human origins his theory explained how all species emerged anyway in the early days of anthropology Darwin's ideas about the biology of evolution proved so convincing that a lot of leading thinkers of the time they started to apply this idea far beyond the scope of biology folks like Herbert Spencer they argued that just as biological organisms evolved from simple single-cell
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organisms to more complex ones like you and me that human cultures they also evolved from simple societies to highly complex ones and there certian was clear humans evolve culturally from savage to civilized and this idea of social evolution or social Darwinism as Spencer described it it became a popular explanation for the diversity of humankind across the globe think about this Darwin's book comes out in the mid-1800s just as the world he's living in grows smaller and smaller I
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mean as the close of the transatlantic slave trade transitioned into the dawn of European empires people in Darwin's age were exposed to new and diverse world cultures and inspired by Darwin's ideas on biological evolution social Darwinist used evolution as a way to explain human diversity and to classify people and cultures across the globe humans who lived in small simple societies like a single-cell organism they were deemed less evolved than those who lived in complex ones with white
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houses supreme courts and microbreweries but this was the dominant idea of scientists of the era they literally split the world into culture grades from savage to barbarian and civilized and when you compare living in a mud hut right to life in a two-story suburban home with satellite internet this idea it almost feels intuitive so as a scientific community assured in this idea of social Darwinism the idea spread widely because it helped make sense of the seemingly limitless human diversity
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on our planet I mean suddenly it became easy to explain why some people were entering the so-called modern world with industrial factories powerful trains and upper-class values while others were stuck in the past those who were further along on that evolutionary path not only had superior biology but that advanced biology those were the foundations for advanced civilization essentially biology and culture were an interconnected and inseparable entity and the idea of race emerged as an
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all-encompassing term to describe these vast human differences so from our physical appearance our geography and our religious traditions they were all functions of our biology and to track and make sense of all this human diversity we use the idea of multiple races so the differences that European saw in humans from Africa or Asia were attributed to the fact that we all come from distinct lineages which we called races now upon reflection many thinkers further developed this idea of human
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races and they did so to the extreme that proponents of this way of thinking coined and used the term white man's burden to describe the idea that white men had the moral obligation to use their advanced state to uplift non-whites the world over I mean essentially the concept of the white man's burden was used to justify the colonization of the non-white world consider this it's an excerpt from Rudyard Kipling's 1899 poem white man's burden it clearly embraces the idea of moral
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uplift through imperialism take up the white man's burden send forth the best you breed go bind your sons to exile to serve your captives need to wait in heavy harness on fluttered folk and wild your new cot sullen people's half devil half child take up the white man's burden and it continues these so-called half devil half child people of the world they were seen as slightly less human and the concept of race helped early anthropologists classify people and their unique biological heritage
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some races were ahead of others and you know what even the US Supreme Court agreed in 1896 the court heard the case Plessy versus Ferguson in which the justices considered whether or not the Constitution allowed for discrimination based on white versus non-white races and what did the justices determine well and a seven to one ruling the court held that if nature created people and races that were not equal the Constitution could do nothing to change that and as a result Plessy
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Furguson cemented race-based segregation as fully legal in a country where all men are created equal they didn't question that idea that there are multiple unequal and biological races they accepted inequality as a biological outcome and no piece of paper not even the US Constitution could change that this idea a gained favor as a neat and clean explanation for human diversity and the world order with whites on top and seemed to confirm this ideas fact I mean the idea was so compelling that the
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US government and corporate sectors joined forces to make use of this idea in hopes of purifying the human race I mean after all if humans could breed hogs and horses to new levels of fitness and strength why wouldn't we apply these same methodologies to improve human stocks believe it or not they tried with millions of dollars of support from the wealthiest families and foundations like Rockefeller Carnegie and the Harriman's and more special research centers were
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built to find solutions to this white man's burden and in 1904 for example the station for experimental evolution it was established at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island and researchers at this Institute were charged with identifying ways to prevent defective germ plasm the biological and primitive remnants of our savage past from spreading any further and it's it's the eugenics creed that helps clarify this mission and I'll quote I believe that I am the trustee of
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the germ plasm that I carry that this has passed on to me through thousands of generations before me and that I betrayed the trust if that germ plasm being good I so apt as to jeopardize it with its excellent possibilities or from motives of personal convenience to unduly limit offspring the researchers at the SAE not only developed a series of recommendations on how to proceed with this project they also started to identify family lines in the New York New Jersey and New England area that
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were tainted by criminality mental disorder and physical deformities and the idea was simple to find a way to limit the reproduction of what they deemed to be defective human germ plasm shockingly their official recommendations included lethal chambers and that's their words not mine as the most effective solution but they advise policy makers and others that the u.s. population was not really ready to accept this approach so instead less revolting strategies were unleashed namely marriage and
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sterilization laws in 1907 for example the state of Indiana enacted sterilization laws to make sure criminals and other undesirables could not pass on their defective humanity to other generations and in 1927 the Supreme Court actually upheld a Virginia statute that promoted compulsory sterilization of the so called unfit and in the majority opinion for that case Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared quote three generations of imbeciles is enough actually early on
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this social Darwinist movement was championed by Darwin's cousin Francis Galton who labeled this race improvement project eugenics and with eugenics research centers at major US universities all the way from Yale to Stanford it was actually California that most wholeheartedly embraced the sterilization idea as the best bet for improving the human stock and believe it or not in first ten years of sterilization laws California alone sterilized nearly 10,000 people nearly
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half of whom were women deemed passionate or bad girls the idea of applying eugenics to improve humankind spread far beyond US borders and was embraced by many including well Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party in fact when Nazi war criminals were tried in Nuremberg they actually cited the words of US eugenics leaders and chief justice Oliver Wendell Holmes to defend their genocide elections because in their eyes they were simply applying science to eliminate what they saw is defective
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human germ plasm let me return to Chief Justice Holmes majority opinion from the 1927 case I mentioned a moment ago because I think his words demonstrate just how pervasive in public these ideas were Holmes wrote it is better for all the world if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind fortunately Holmes perspective and the
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eugenics project in the in general it began to lose ground in the u.s. in the 1930s and 40s but of course this was precisely the time when Nazi Germany was slaughtering millions of Jews homosexuals and anyone else with the potential for polluting humanity's biological future so how did we get past this obscene application of biology and human difference well it took decades to unmask the pseudo scientific foundations of this movement but all along there were researchers and others searching
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for more valid explanations for human diversity and their work it culminated in ideas that now allow us to see the difference between so-called race or ethnicity with things like criminality and poverty and what saved anthropology as a knowledge production system that's there to explain human diversity it's the fact that it was and remains to this day a science its ultimate aim right it's to produce contingent truths explanations that are testable and correctable explanations that are tested
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and improved as we increase our understanding of our origins our biology and our behavior so while eugenics scholars were hard at work at Cold Spring Harbor Yale Harvard Stanford and elsewhere there were other science minded scholars who took another approach towards exploring human diversity the father of American anthropology a Polish immigrant named Franz Boas he's a great example of these scholars who look beyond biology and eugenics to understand why some folks
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live in igloos while others enjoy indoor plumbing and we'll come back to Boaz later in our course but for now we can get a brief preview of the idea he offers as an alternative to the biological determinism of eugenics advocates while social Darwinists would argue that one's biology determines whether or not they live as primitive or civilized people Boaz didn't succumb to two foundational ideas of strict biological determinism first he did not see culture as the
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product of biology instead he looked to see how one's environment shapes unique cultural traditions and second because he looked beyond biology to explain human diversity he argued that there really wasn't a specific scientific basis for ranking people and cultures on the spectrum of primitive to civilized people who live in igloos and huts art less human or civilized than cosmopolitan New Yorkers they're just different equally modern just different not rang Keable just different I mean in short
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rather than ethnocentrically judging the arctic igloo dwellers is primitive hunter-gatherers bow and saw them as uniquely adapted to a very challenging environment and just as an ice-fishing inuit man might have trouble figuring out how to get by in New York City and urbanite like by Oh a like Boaz if left to his own devices well he would have similar problems figuring out how to feed and shelter himself in the Arctic Circle I mean think about it when he did
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his field research I'm going to Inuit on Baffin Island his questionable hunting skills and vulnerability they weren't a function of Boaz's biology he wasn't primitive or biologically less evolved than his Arctic hosts he was just far from home far far away ultimately boas learned and taught that cultures are neither rank able nor biologically based their relative and as such people from different cultural traditions they're equally and fully human and this idea it's basically what
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we call cultural relativity some cultures aren't better or worse than others they're just different so when biological determinants soft people who look different live differently from themselves they ascribe the difference to biology and as such they divided humanity into biological races for example 18th and early 19th century anthropologist who advocated this position commonly described our human origins and races in one of two ways some argued that Africans Asians and Europeans for
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example each had distinct origins multiple eden so to speak and they resulted in multiple distinct and biologically defined races kind of like you and your next-door neighbors right you're both human families but you come from two distinct family lines others however they theorize that despite the fact that humanity shares common origins humankind split into multiple biological races like the ones we still see listed in the US census the human genome and our knowledge of our hominid ancestors
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well they definitively refute both of these theories different skin colors yes but there's only one race the human race so if all of our anthropological evidence tells us that different skin colors and cultures are manifestations of one biological race why does the myth of multiple human races persist my first response is that it still surprises me to see how clumsily we all use this term race I mean the myth of multiple races endures everywhere I look even universities institutions of higher
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education including the one that I work for they still use multiple racial categories on financial aid and admissions applications I mean think about this if the first document my students complete on their path to graduation is that document that reinforces the idea of multiple races well if that's the case anthropologists like me we're going to have our work cut out for us so toward the end of the 20th century for example the members of the American Anthropological Association gasped at
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the argument put forth by Richard Herrnstein a psychologist and his co-author Charles Murray scientist and their book the bell curve the author's explored the very question we've been discussing today they looked at both genetic and environmental influences on human diversity and when they analyzed the connection between intelligence and what they conceived as race the controversial authors ultimately argued that compared with black Americans both East Asians and
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white Americans historically perform better on IQ tests because of their biology their distinct genetic heritage critics and supporters of this argument fiercely debated these findings and it wasn't just anthropologist who sharply challenged terms gene and Murray's methodology and conclusions my former colleague mel connor from emory university who's a harvard trained m.d. as well as an anthropology PhD he effectively described why anthropologist and others like Noam Chomsky and Stephen
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Jay Gould fervently refuted the bell curves conclusions specifically he said that Murray and Herrnstein presented strong evidence that genes do play a role in intelligence but their L dents in no way supported their theory that genetics explains the difference between IQs of black and white Americans similarly in 1994 the members of the American Anthropological Association put forth an official statement on race to clear up the pervasive myth of multiple biological races simply put they said
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that one all humans are members of a single species Homo sapiens and two and I'll use their words here quote differentiating species and two biologically defined races has proven meaningless and unscientific as a way of explaining human variation and in this case intelligence put another way the experts all agree that genetics and heredity play an important roles in determining human variation that's a given but they differ on the question of whether genetic variation correlates
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with conventional racialized constructions like white versus black and anthropology clearly tells us there is no such correlation we're genetically one race the human race and its traits like skin color and intelligence they fail to actually map onto the racialized categories most people use to classify human diversity today but hold on just a minute before we can fully embrace the idea that race as we've known it is indeed a social construct one urgent question remains if racial categories
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like Hispanic and Asian are social constructs not natural divisions in the human species if they're not truly biological categories then how in the world do anthropologists explain the existence of pervasive health inequalities that affect some groups more than others why to around 40% or more of African Americans have hypertension when only 30% of non-hispanic whites are afflicted with this condition and why are Native American populations more than twice as likely to be diagnosed with diabetes
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compared with non-hispanic whites well anthropologist clarence gravely has our own answer and his wealth cited article titled how race becomes biology embodiment of social inequality gravelly shows us that race despite being a social construction it's very real in terms of socio economic and health outcomes and those health outcomes good or bad they're passed on through the generations so first gravely shows us that an individual's exposure to racism over a lifetime it actually increases one's
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risk of infant mortality diabetes stroke and high blood pressure not to mention lower life expectancy and all of these health outcomes they can definitely impact future generations mainly because any one of them can adversely impact both prenatal and postnatal development and health for example in the six months following the events of September 11 2001 the likelihood that a mother would deliver a low wait baby rows by 34 percent actually let me clarify a 2006 study by Diane
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Lauderdale of the University of Chicago reviewed arab-american birth records and found that the incidence of low birth weight deliveries rose 34% for only women with Arabic names and what gravely in Lauderdale I want us to think about here is the cyclical nature of social inequality and racism if you're an expecting mother it's clear that from the womb on your child will feel the biological impact of racism not race and apply this generational cycle over and over and we can begin to under we can
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begin to explain high rates of diabetes and hypertension among black and Native American populations I mean this is the biology of racism not the biology of race gravity's big idea here it's a game changer and it has implications for how scientists and health workers classify human diversity and here's the take home message racism racial inequality and xenophobia they become embodied in biological well-beings of racialized groups not races groups that have been
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racialized remember biologically were one race homo sapien so in retrospect we now see how conventional racial categories are indeed social constructions and biologically speaking they're inconsistent with actual patterns of human genetic diversity that is until the biological impacts of racism and inequality take root and spread into future generations but remember that's the biology of racism not the biology of race I mean even the US Census Bureau which is misused the
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term race for centuries now even they make it clear that when they use the term race they're not talking biology here it is this is their clarification as posted on the official website these are their words not mine quote the racial categories included in the census questionnaire generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this country and not an attempt to define race biologically anthropologically or genetically so let's let's wrap this up and clear up the enduring ambiguity
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associated with the way we understand the relationship between race and human variation already in this course we've identified evidence that reveals our human origins now let's think about how our origins and our evolutionary history critically inform our understanding of race and human variation first we know that technically were primates upright-walking apes to be precise and we know that the earliest humans split off from our common ancestors with contemporary chimpanzees and bonobos
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apes and that happened some 7 million years ago and after that early humans they found creative solutions to filling bellies and producing future generations and in the lectures from unit 1 we examined the Paleolithic record including the fossil remains of ancestors like art of Pittacus and Homo habilis and this fossil record it clearly shows us how early humans had been migrating in and out of africa populating the planet for some 2 million years when we added genetics to our
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investigation we found that anthropologists trace modern humanity back to an original East African population of early homo sapiens we shared origins we are one one species one race the human race now those early homo sapiens they migrated near and far from the equator and eventually through evolutionary processes variations in skin merged as did hair types and skull shapes and more but those variations were as they say skin deep surface level different skin colors yes but different
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genetic origins absolutely not we are one one human race
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