What we perceive to be physical racial differences are simply a result of adaptations due to natural selection over thousands of years. The subset of genes to which these differences are due is too small and is not variable enough to be classified as racially distinct.
If you want to learn more about this topic, take a look at the short video below created by the BBC and Open University:. Since race has been separated from biology, scientists and philosophers have argued that race is a social construct. A social construct is an idea that is created and accepted by society or a social group.
Some important examples include government, laws, and marriage, as well as race and gender. While all these things are socially constructed, they still have a big impact on our daily lives. Also they're not fixed. Likewise, our understanding of race has changed a lot over time.
It all depends on how you define 'real'. But there are lots of other social constructs that we would most definitely say are real. The value of money is a social construct, created by society so we could trade goods, and I think we would all agree that money is very real. It can change over time as they come to understand themselves differently or as social understandings change.
But how people are treated because of how they are racialised how other people understand their race also has very real impacts on their lives.
Race may be entirely constructed but it is experienced by many people every day. Should we stop using the word 'race' altogether? Here are some of the key arguments for and against this. Eliminativists argue that we should abandon the concept of race because the term race is historically linked to biological groupings, and there are no such distinct biological groups that match our modern day concept of racial groups. For example, there are certain genetic markers, such as skin colour, that we use to identify race, but not every person of the same skin colour is part of the same race.
Plus, there are people within races that have variation in skin colour. There are lots of other examples of physical traits, such as eye shape and hair texture, that only complicate this further. However, other philosophers, called race constructivists, say that we should keep the concept of race. They, along with supporters of critical race theory CRT , believe that racial prejudice is already built into our society.
Society already labels and often discriminates against people according to racial categories. Many scholars and activists argue that we need the term race to recognise this racial discrimination so we can make social and political progress against the racial injustice that is built into many of our social systems. They support race conscious policies that acknowledge racial discrimination in order to address it. We've seen some of the negative effects that systemic, institutionalised racism can have in the recent police brutality cases in America, and the development of the Black Lives Matter movement that followed.
To learn about this, take a look in the additional resources at the short documentary, 'Black Lives Matter explained: The history of a movement'. Unfortunately, these measures have also been controversial. In the United States, republican politicians have tried to ban CRT and similar approaches from being taught in public schools and universities.
Twenty more states are attempting to do so. They object to anyone being taught that the US is fundamentally racist or sexist, or that members of a certain race are more inclined to oppress others. Ethnicity is a term much more commonly used by governments, healthcare and in the legal system to identify different groups.
Many people believe it's a better term to use as it's less influenced by a history of conflict and segregation. If we were to eliminate our concept of race, ethnicity may be a good substitute as it would still enable us to track social progress and what still needs to change. Employers and other institutions, like universities and schools, use ethnicity data to ensure they are being fair in their recruitment and selection processes, and that people from all backgrounds are given equal opportunities.
The biggest difference between race and ethnicity is that it is self-identified. Race is often decided by other people, who might racialise you and treat you differently, but it is up to you which box you tick. Kofi Annan, Nobel Peace Prize winner and previous Secretary-General of the United Nations, once said: "We may have different religions, different languages, different colored skin, but we all belong to one human race.
Historian Onyeka Nubia explores why some people are racist - and talks about his own experiences of racism. It's pretty hard to define race, and so the term 'ethnicity' is generally used by governments, businesses and public services. The UK government collects data about its population every 10 years in a record called a census. It was last performed in Take a look at what ethnic diversity in the UK was like then This map shows the proportion of each ethnic group in the UK from the census.
How do you think these numbers might have changed since ? Is it important that we collect data about ethnicity? We show black children have much lower rates of upward mobility and higher rates of downward mobility than white children, leading to black-white income disparities that persist across generations.
The two Americas theme echoes the warning issued by the Kerner Commission when it released its report 50 years ago. Black children born to parents in the top income quintile are almost as likely to fall to the bottom quintile as they are to remain in the top quintile.
By contrast, white children born in the top quintile are nearly five times as likely to stay there as they are to fall to the bottom. There positions in the income distribution are unlikely to change over time without efforts to increase their rates of upward mobility. Following this, while there is fruitful debate about when to locate race historically, there is general agreement that it comes into force as a function of modernity, and in particular the expansion of Europe within the context of colonial invasion and imperial domination.
This does not discount the fact that, as Cedric Robinson and others have shown, it percolates within Europe and is fundamental to the development of early capitalism within Europe itself. This view tends to confine race within the idea of a taxonomical hierarchy of groups within the human population usually on the basis of assumed biological or genetic difference. The idea of heredity was there, certainly, and notions concerning the purity or impurity of blood and so on were intrinsic to major events in the history of race, most notably, the expulsion or forced conversion of Jews and Muslims in Spain.
However, other practices of demarcation were also in place that mapped cultural and religious practices, gender and sexuality, as well as geographical location onto the body. Race is worked out in the contexts of colonial invasion, enslavement, the solidifying of nation-states and practices of bordering, etc. Race, following Barnor Hesse , on the planetary scale, is really about the division of Europeanness and non-Europeanness as a way, not only of ordering the world, but of justifying the domination of the majority of the world by Europeans to this day.
This division of the world for the purposes of racial-colonial governance draws on the theorisation of humanness as bound up with European man and not in the first instance, woman. In fact, the development of ideas about what constituted universal humanity was a response to, or an extension of, earlier religious debates, that questioned the humanity of Indigenous people. This debate — are they human, and thus susceptible to Christian salvation, or beyond, in the realm of the non-human?
However, what we know about what later unfolded is that land theft, enslavement, and the exploitation of resources and labour went on whether or the people who were subjected and exploited were considered assimilable into humanity, at the level of practice. Even after the formal emancipation of slavery, for example during the colonisation of Africa, exploitation persisted apace even when there was an official route for African colonised peoples to be integrated into colonial culture, institutions of governance, etc.
Race, on the planetary scale, is really about the division of Europeanness and non-Europeanness as a way, not only of ordering the world, but of justifying the domination of the majority of the world by Europeans to this day. This formulation contains the two sides of race — the slippages which it always contains, its ability to slide around, as Stuart Hall would have it, and also the immutability which race installs.
Certainly, the US-American experience of slavery and its afterlives would seem to back up this view, and the total otherisation of Black people in other contexts also speaks to it.
However, I think there may be room for talking about how all those who are negatively racialised in some way can be placed in the space of the non-human, meaning that there is also always a way out. The point is that this is at the pleasure of white racializing power, which is why I feel we need more relational thinking between differently raced positions, not more replication of the divisiveness that race itself puts in place.
So, it is possible to see, I think, that when I speak about whiteness, I am speaking about power. As many others have pointed out, whiteness is above all an institutional formation that is synonymous with the operationalisation of racializing power which, since the birth of capitalism which cannot be analysed without understanding its co-development with race, also means economic and political power.
It is the way in which power is expressed in modernity which, following the decolonial school, is best understood as colonial-modernity. In these circumstances, the notion of white privilege confines race and white supremacy — this large, complex system of ideas and practices which has driven the world for the last years — to the behaviour of individual white people.
But, boiling down the operations of race to an easily digestible idea like white privilege implies that changes in white behaviour alone can bring about an end to racial rule.
In contrast, I would say that behavioural change and even institutional changes are important, yes, but alone they do not change the basis of power.
They can paradoxically give power back to individual white people to be the agents and arbiters of change, where what we should all be aiming for is a lessening of that power as it is expressed through local, national, and global institutions. The notion of white privilege confines race and white supremacy—this large, complex system of ideas and practices which has driven the world for the last years—to the behaviour of individual white people.
SN An important reference in your work is Stuart Hall. What has he brought to the understanding of race to you? I came to the study of race via antiracist activism, and so I am really self-taught. He was already quite ill and walking with a stick. He gave a brilliant talk in which he evoked C. I was so moved, not only by his talk, but also by the fact that after four years at a university where there were no professors working on race my supervisor was a German social theorist and only a handful of students, that here was someone speaking to my concerns and passions.
I literally cried! So, Stuart Hall has always been close to my heart, and I would say I am still discovering his work, because it is so extensive, and he touched on so many areas.
Stuart Hall has always been close to my heart, and I would say I am still discovering his work, because it is so extensive, and he touched on so many areas. There are four main ways Hall has been important for me. It is what he calls a floating or a sliding signifier that attaches itself to many different processes and projects and is hard to pin down.
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