RACELesson 1

Unit 1

Ethics and Religion

WHAT DOES RACE MEAN?

Race is a difficult concept to define.

It is used in many different contexts: Defining different animals within a species

Defining different Human groups

There is no question that human beings are diverse and that there are different cultural groups…

A Human race is a group of people who perceive themselves

and are perceived by others as possessing distinctive hereditary traits.

However, the socially constructed ideas that surround race have led to racism

RACES IN HUMANS ARE ARBITRARY

The physical and cultural features used to define humans races are random.

Ex) Red-haired people are not considered a different race

These two babies are twins. Are they a different race?

RACE IS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION

Humans like putting things into categories

Human races were categorized by a) physical appearance, genetic

similaritiesb) language, culture c) Living area, place of origin

They also liked to classify which race was better than another. This stems from scientific racism.

SCIENTIFIC RACISM

When humans began categorizing animals, and the word race was starting to be used, different groups of humans were considered inferior to European white people.

Scientists are people too. Their findings reflected their socially embedded beliefs that some humans were inferior to white people.

LINNAEUS Linnaeus created the first

taxonomy. A taxonomy is the classification of organisms into groups based on their similarities: physical and (in the case of humans) cultural traits.

Linnaeus decided to rank human races:

1) European (White) 2) Africans (Black) 3) Asians (Yellow) 4) American Indians (Red)

* This sort of classification did not stop with Linnaeus.

BLUMENBACH

He followed in the footsteps of Linnaeus. He found a “perfect” skull in a place called

caucus, and assumed that it must have been of a white person. He believed that as people moved, they degenerated from the Caucasian race. He changed the names of races, some of which are still used today.

1) Caucasian (white) 2) American Indian 3) Ethiopians 4) Mongolian (Asian) 5) Malay (Australian)

SAMUEL GEORGE MORTON AND ROBERT KNOX

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSHZkXEQTqQ