User:Peak/Preamble

The term race is used in a wide variety of contexts, with related but often distinct meanings. The word itself often inspires controversy, largely because of fundamental disagreements about such issues as whether all extant Homo sapiens belong to a single human race or not. Alan Templeton, a population biologist at Washington University in St. Louis, summed it up this way when speaking of human races: "Race is real in a political, social sense, but it's not biological." [1]

In certain fields in biology, race is used as a synonym for subspecies or, in botany, variety; for example, honeybee subspecies are often referred to as races. In this usage, race serves to group members of a species that have, for a period of time, become geographically or genetically isolated from other members of that species, and as a result have diverged genetically and developed certain shared genetic characteristics that differentiate them from other members of that species. Although these characteristics rarely appear in all members of the given race, they are more marked in or appear more frequently in that race than in members of other races. Some feel that this usage justifies the division of humans into races.

The term race, however, is infrequently used in international forums devoted to scientific classification; in zoology, for example, the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (4th edition, 2000) divides species into subspecies but does not attempt to codify any "infrasubspecific entities". Further details may be found at subspecies.

The use of the word race as applied to human groupings has long been, and remains, controversial. This article surveys the history of the concept and reviews the historical construction, social functions, and cultural meanings of racial schemata. The article also describes the main points of controversy, and the ethics and politics of the term.

Whereas this article is primarily concerned with the concept of race itself, the article on racism is primarily concerned with questions about the significance if any that can be attached to knowing an individual's "race".

Classification Criteria

It is important to distinguish between two distinct classes of criteria:

1. criteria that have been proposed for defining or identifying different races;
2. criteria that have been proposed for classifying individuals into one or more such racial categories.

For example, a survey might ask respondents to indicate their race or racial categories by selecting from a menu, or they might simply be asked to state what their race is.

Points of view about the concept of race

Apart from the variety of viewpoints about the significance of an individual's "race", there are many points of view about the concept of race itself, as the word has been used to define groups of humans. The following is an attempt to cover the spectrum of such views, but to avoid tedium, the negation of each stated view is not given explicitly.

• The idea of race is an ancient one.
• Modern phylogeny supports the division of humanity into several races.
• Race has a scientific basis.
• Race is a social construct.
• Race does not exist.
• There are several distinct human races and everyone alive today is a member of one or more of these.

Meanings

The Wiktionary has these two entries for race in the general sense of a kind of classification:

1. a group having common ancestors
2. a classification of human beings on superficial traits such as skin color, and shape of facial features

There are several variations of these meanings.

The word race in the general sense of a group of individuals that resemble each other because of common ancestry was introduced into English in about 1580.

For some, the division of the human species into race is as unproblematic as identifying a person's eye color.

Racial categorization has usually been based on one or more of the following criteria:¹

  1. skin color (see Example 1 below);
  2. ancestry or origins, and especially "origins in original peoples" (see Example 2 below);
  3. clustering of morphological characteristics;
  4. clustering of genetic characteristics;
  5. self-identification based on terms derived from the above considerations. 

Of course not every objectively-defined cluster would be called a race. Most diseases, for example, can be defined using a clustering technique. The question of which set of characteristics should be included is one of many issues concerning the concept of race if it is conceived in terms of clustering. Some of the issues regarding attempts to define race in scientific terms are identified in the section on Taxonomy and Race below.

Views about the concept of race differ widely in other respects as well, notably with regard to these questions:

   * Are racial categories mutually exclusive?
   * Is race a social construct?
   * What are the ethical uses of the concept? 

This article explores such questions from a variety of perspectives, drawing on several examples. In the following subsection, two examples from the U.S. experience are presented as they have already been referred to.

• Example 1
  • Congress in 1790 restricted naturalization to "white persons". This prerequisite remained in force until 1952.

This example illustrates a definition of race that was intended to define mutually exclusive categories.

• Example 2
  • In 1997, an arm of the U.S. government promulgated OMB Statistical Directive 15, "Standards for Maintaining, Collecting, and Presenting Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity," as follows:

This classification provides a minimum standard for maintaining, collecting, and presenting data on race and ethnicity for all Federal reporting purposes. The categories in this classification are social-political constructs and should not be interpreted as being scientific or anthropological in nature.

The standards have five categories for data on race: American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, and White.

The directive emphasizes that these are not intended to be mutually exclusive groups. This is consistent with the definitions of the different "categories", e.g. an American Indian or Alaska Native is:

A person having origins in any of the original peoples of North and South America (including Central America), and who maintains tribal affiliation or community attachment.

Footnote

1. Sometimes other criteria may be included as well; for example, OMB Statistical Directive 15 (Example 2 in this article) mentions "shared customs, history, and language". However, groups defined primarily in terms of cultural haracteristics are usually called by other names, such as ethnic group, nation, or family.