Race - Genetics, Evolution, Anthropology

race

Table of Contents

Introduction
The many meanings of “race”
“Race” as a mechanism of social division
- North America
- South Africa
The difference between racism and ethnocentrism
The history of the idea of race
- The problem of labour in the New World
- The enslavement and racialization of Africans
- Human rights versus property rights
- Building the myth of Black inferiority
- Immigration and the racial worldview
- Legitimating the racial worldview
  - Enlightenment philosophers and systematists
  - Scientific classifications of race
  - The institutionalizing of race
  - Transforming “race” into “species”
  - The false assumptions of anthropometry
- The decline of “race” in science
  - The influence of Franz Boas
  - Mendelian heredity and the development of blood group systems
- “Race” and intelligence
Hereditarian ideology and European constructions of race
- Hereditary statuses versus the rise of individualism
- The Germanic myth and English constructions of an Anglo-Saxon past
- Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of Human Races
- Galton and Spencer: The rise of social Darwinism
“Race” ideologies in Asia, Australia, Africa, and Latin America
- European conquest and the classification of the conquered
- India’s caste system
- Japan’s minority peoples
- Race in Asia
- Latin America
  - The colonial period
  - Postcolonial society
“Race” and the reality of human physical variation
Modern scientific explanations of human biological variation
The scientific debate over “race”

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Contemporary scientists hold that human physical variations, especially in those traits that are normally used to classify people racially—skin colour, hair texture, facial features, and to some extent bodily structure—must be understood in terms of evolutionary processes and the long-range adaptation of human groups to differing environments. Other features may simply reflect accidental mutations or functionally neutral changes in the genetic code. In any given habitat, natural forces operate on all of the living forms, including human groups. The necessary interaction with these forces will affect the survival and reproduction of the members of these societies. Such groups already have ...(100 of 15129 words)

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