Race

Race is one of the most complex concepts in sociology, not least because of the contradiction between its everyday usage and its scientific basis (or absence thereof). Many people today believe, mistakenly, that humans can be readily separated into biologically different races. This is not surprising considering the numerous attempts by scholars to establish racial categorizations of the peoples of the world.

Scientific theories of race arose in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. They were used to justify the emerging social order as England and other European nations became imperial powers ruling over subject territories and populations. Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882), who is sometimes called the father of modern racism, proposed the existence of three races: white (Caucasian), black (Negroid) and yellow (Mongoloid). According to de Gobineau, the white race possesses superior intelligence, morality and will-power; these inherited qualities underlie the spread of Western influence across the world. The blacks, by contrast, are the least capable, marked by an animal nature, a lack of morality and emotional instability. The ideas of de Gobineau and fellow proponents of scientific racism later influenced Adolf Hitler, who transformed them into the ideology of the Nazi party, and other white supremacist groups such as the Ku-Klux-Klan in the United States and the architects of apartheid in South Africa.

In the years following World War II, ‘race science’ has been thoroughly discredited. In biological terms there are no clear-cut ‘races’, only a range of physical variations in human beings. Differences in physical type between groups of human beings arise from population inbreeding, which varies according to the degree of contact between different social or cultural groups. Human population groups are a continuum. The genetic diversity within populations that share visible physical traits is as great as the diversity between them. In virtue of these facts, the scientific community has virtually abandoned the concept of race. Many social scientists concur, arguing that race is nothing more than an ideological construct whose use in academic circles only perpetuates that commonly held belief that it has a biological grounding (Miles 1993). Other social scientists disagree, claiming that race as a concept has meaning to many people, even if its biological basis has been discredited. For sociological analysis, they argue, race remains a vital, if highly contested concept.

What is race, then, if it does not refer to biological categories? There are clear physical differences between human beings and some of these differences are inherited. But the questions of why some differences and not others become matters for social discrimination and prejudice has nothing to do with biology. Racial differences, therefore, should be understood as physical variations singled out by the members of a community or society as socially significant. Differences in skin colour, for example, are treated as significant, whereas differences in colour of hair are not. Race can be understood as a set of social relationships which allow individuals and groups to be located, and various attributes or competencies assigned, on the basis of biologically grounded features. Racial distinctions are more than ways of describing human differences – they are also important factors in the reproduction of patterns of power and inequality within society.