5 Race and Ethnicity

On May 25, 2020, police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota were called to a convenience store to investigate a man trying to pay for cigarettes with an alleged counterfeit $20 bill. About 20 minutes after the first police car arrived at the store, the customer, George Floyd, a 46-year old Black man, was unconscious, pinned down by three of the officers, who, according to reports, were not following protocols of the Minneapolis police department.  Mr. Floyd was handcuffed and lying face down. One of the police officers is seen on video, from security cameras and passers-by, with his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck for an extended period of time. He did not remove his knee until after emergency medical technicians (EMTs) arrived on the scene, but by this time, Mr. Floyd had already been unconscious for a few minutes. The Press Release from the county medical examiner states that the manner of Mr. Floyd’s death was homicide, and specifically he died from, ‘Cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression.’ Mr. Floyd was buried in Texas, where he was raised, on June 9, 2020 .

Mr. Floyd’s death sparked memories in France of the death of Adama Traoré in 2016. Mr. Traoré was a 24-year-old French Malian man who died while in police custody near Paris. After his death, his sister, Assa Traoré, founded the organization Truth for Adama, which aims to prove that Adama died of asphyxiation while in police custody. On July 19, 2016, the National Gendarmerie, a branch of the French Armed Forces mainly responsible for suburbs, smaller towns, and rural areas, stopped Adama and his brother near Paris. Adama did not have his identification with him and he fled the police for fear of arrest. Random identity checks are part of a French law and serve as a way to crack down on illegal immigration, but it has come to light that police may use their power against any Black person or person of color in the suburbs of Paris. Officers rushed after Adama and detained him by force. He died in police custody on his 24th birthday. What struck his family and France was that a French court ruled in favor of the French gendarmes and attributed Mr. Traoré’s death to underlying health conditions. There have been two separate autopsies. At first, there was no agreement as to whether he died of asphyxiation due to the officers pinning him to the ground or due to other health conditions. The family’s lawyer stated that Mr. Traoré had a total of 551 pounds on top of him as three officers held him down on the ground. Heart failure was listed on the official medical report as the cause of death. A second autopsy, independently requested by Mr. Traoré’s family, found that he died of suffocation from being pinned down, which counters the medical report.  On May 29, 2020, the three officers involved in the arrest of Mr. Traoré were officially cleared of any wrongdoing. The report attributed his death to underlying health issues, with tetrahydrocannabinol, the active ingredient of cannabis, also contributing to his death (Cole 2020).

Protests erupted in France after the death of George Floyd as people saw similarities between the two cases. Both were Black men who died in police custody. The death of Mr. Traoré prompted people to join together to protest against police brutality and the unjust treatment of Blacks and persons of color. It represented the fear and terror that Black French people and Maghrebis (North Africans) who live in the suburbs of Paris experience because they are targeted by the police. A report by Human Rights Watch published in 2012 noted that “young black or Arab French people living in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods in French cities are more likely to be stopped by the police, suggesting that the gendarmes and police in France engage in racial and ethnic profiling” (Martirosyan 2020 ).

After the death of Mr. Floyd in Minneapolis, people in France began to connect with the Black Lives Matter movement, as they saw the parallels between the deaths of Mr. Traoré and those of Mr. Floyd, Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner—all of these Black men could not breath, and as a result died, in police custody (ibid.). Black Lives Matter, an organized movement, was started in 2013  as a response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, who shot and killed a Black teenager, Trayvon Martin, in Florida in 2012 while he was visiting his family in the same neighborhood in which Zimmerman lived. The movement urges non-violent means of protesting police brutality against Black people and persons of color as well as policy changes. Black Lives Matter also encourages inclusivity. The website reads, “We affirm the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, undocumented folks, folks with records, women, and all Black lives along the gender spectrum.” After the death of Mr. Floyd, protests erupted across country and the world. These protests took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, when gatherings of large groups were restricted in many places and social distancing was strongly encouraged to prevent the spread of the disease. On June 2, 2020, “Nearly 15,000 demonstrators defied police orders and marched in a sprawling protest against police violence outside the Paris tribunal Tuesday night, largely inspired by the killing of George Floyd last week in the United States” (McAuley 2020). Even before the worldwide protests began, people argued that the COVID-19 pandemic and the restrictions and orders put in place to prevent its spread, revealed the systemic racism in society.

Experts hypothesized how the protests would impact the spread of the coronavirus, especially at a time when the United States and countries around the world were beginning to open up public spaces and their economies after nearly three months of isolation. Maimuna Majumder, an epidemiologist was quoted as saying, ‘All things considered, there’s little doubt that these protests will translate into increased risk of transmission for COVID-19.’ Majumder did not, however, object to the protests and their purpose: ‘I personally believe that these particular protests—which demand justice for black and brown bodies that have been brutalized by the police—are a necessary action. Structural racism has been a public-health crisis for much longer than the pandemic has’ (Meyer 2020).

If you look at the COVID-19 data for Fairfax County, Virginia (located in Northern Virginia about 30 minutes from Washington, D.C. where George Mason University is located) available through the Health Department, for instance, you will notice that whites make up 52% of the county’s population, however, they only make up 20% (as of the end of August 3, 2020) of coronavirus cases. Latinx comprise 16% of the county’s population, but they make up 59% of the coronavirus cases. This trend is not unique to just Fairfax County, but has been seen across the country as Black and indigenous people and persons of color are disproportionately affected by COVID-19. This trend has been part of the recent protests that call attention to police violence as well as systemic  racism: “Thus continues the disparate trend that has characterized this pandemic, whereby African-Americans become infected and die from Covid-19 at higher rates than whites. These disparities are the outcomes of several varied instances of systemic racism that regularly and systematically devalue and treat Black lives as disposable” (Weller 2020). We must think critically about how restrictions and practices put in place at local and national levels impacted groups differently. For example, there is no doubt that we are grateful for the doctors and nurses who serve on the front-lines of the pandemic, but what about the hospital staff who cleans the rooms? What about construction workers or those in other typically low-wage occupations, such as landscaping, who continued to report to work? What about the grocery store employees or truck drivers? How  about those who worked in the restaurant kitchen, often in close quarters, to prepare food for take-out or delivery during the pandemic when dining rooms were closed? What about childcare workers who continued to care for essential employees’ infants and toddlers? How about those who worked in meatpacking plants where COVID-19 spread rapidly due to poor facility conditions? Due to the fear of a food shortage, President Trump ordered that meatpacking plants remain open. However, as professor Anya Jabour (2020) of the University of Montana writes, “Meatpacking facilities have become major centers of COVID-19 outbreaks. This has focused attention on the workers at these facilities, a majority of whom are immigrants and refugees.” As will be discussed in greater detail throughout this chapter, anthropology has long argued that we do not see biological race, as there is no gene that codes for skin color, nor is there a gene found in one population that cannot be found in another. However, COVID-19 has brought to light how race is socially real with genuine impacts and consequences on human bodies and people’s everyday lives.  The anthropologist Clearance Gravelee (2020) captures this well when he writes of COVID-19, “But much of the public and scientific reaction has instead invoked baseless ideas about unknown genes that make African Americans vulnerable to the virus, rather than focusing on abundant evidence for the devastating biological consequences of systemic inequality and oppression.” Anthropologists do not deny that those who identify as a certain race or ethnicity may be more prone to certain diseases, such as COVID-19, but rather than look to biology, they consider social history and investigate what it is about society that makes some groups may be more susceptible than others.

Seth Holmes, a physician and anthropologist, has conducted fieldwork among Mexican migrant farmworkers in the United States, mainly on the West Coast. As part of his work, Holmes (2017) explores the sociocultural factors that influence the patient-provider encounter between medical professionals and undocumented Triqui (an indigenous people from Oaxaca, Mexico) workers. He found that frequently the physicians and nurses would fault the workers’ biology or their behavior for their illness or pain. He suggests that the structure of the U.S. health care system in the United States in combination with the cultural context out of which it developed prevent the providers from looking to the social determinants of health—the conditions within which people live—such as education, socioeconomic status, support networks, and employment. Holmes (2017) argues that Triqui migrant workers who pick berries on farms in Washington state were left with few economic opportunities in Oaxaca due to international policies (such as NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement) that decimated their local economies, forcing them to cross the border in search of arduous work. Holmes writes, “Knee, back, and hip pain are only a few of the ways in which the social context of migrant farmwork—especially living and working conditions—affects the bodies of my Triqui companions” (2017, 278). Holmes understands their sickness and pain to be real physical problems, that may prevent them from working or picking the minimum weight to be paid for the day, but he also situates them within the social hierarchies in which the migrant workers live and work. The source of the problem is not race or ethnicity or their biology, but rather, it is the fact that society has placed some groups in privileged positions and others is less advantageous ones .

Gravlee writes in his response as to why more of the Black community than Whites in the United States die from COVID-19, “The racist idea that vulnerability is intrinsic to blackness comes from politicians, scientists, physicians, and others…This racialized view of biology is not only wrong but harmful…For starters, we know that race is a poor proxy for human genetic variation. Compared to other primates, humans exhibit remarkably little genetic variation—a consequence of our relatively recent origin as a species—and the variation that does exist is patterned geographically but not racially.” Suggesting that race is not biologically real but real in the social sense, as Gravlee and Holmes do, requires a paradigm shift. W.E.B. DuBois, who earned a PhD from Harvard University and whose work continues to be highly influential and sociology and related disciplines, laid the groundwork for this shift in his book The Souls of Black Folk (1903). He complicates the claim that race is a social construct, as this makes it seem that race is not real or experienced, by demonstrating how power is stratified in society and how racism impacts groups differently. We may be accustomed to thinking that skin color is purely determined by genetics and that people’s experiences are related to how they look, however, we must also consider the role that the stratification of power in society impacts the constructions of race at particular historical moments. The construction of race in anthropology and in different parts of the world will be traced in the following parts of the chapter.

Race: Scientifically or Culturally Constructed?

We must ask the question: is race scientifically or culturally constructed? One of the earliest racial classification systems appeared in Systema Naturae published by botanist Carl Linnaeus in 1735. Linnaeus is best known for his taxonomy, or his classification of animals, plants, and minerals. There are three kingdoms which are then divided into classes and broken down further into orders, genera (plural of genus), and species. In Systema Naturae, Linnaeus suggested there are four human races: African, Asian, European, and Native American. There were multiple versions other racial classification systems like that of Linnaeus. In the decades after World War II, there was a general dissent of these types of systems and more scholars favored studies of human diversity.

We must consider the intimate connection between race and European colonialism: “Contemporary global expressions of race and racism are deeply rooted in systems of classification that western Europeans created as they expanded their colonial empires into Africa, Asia, the Pacific and the Americas beginning in the 1400s” (Guest 2016, 128). Europeans linked people’s looks with assumptions about intelligence, culture, physical abilities, and worth. The story in the Book of Genesis of how Noah cursed the descendants of Ham, his son, making them servants for Ham’s brothers, Shem and Japheth, and their progenies was used incorrectly in the past to justify colonization and the enslavement of African peoples. This passage has encouraged scholars to examine how the concept of race originated and how and why people began to believe that there were stark racial difference. The curse of Canaan, Ham’s son, was viewed by some 19th century Christians as justification for slavery: ‘Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be to his brothers.’ [Noah] also said, ‘Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem; and let Canaan be his servant. May God enlarge Japheth, and let him dwell in the tents of Shem, and let Canaan be his servant” (Genesis 9: 25-27). Scholars of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, have interpreted the story differently, but ultimately, Ham is considered to be the forefather of Blacks and Africans, whereas Japheth is the forefather of Europe and parts of Asia and Shem of the Middle East and Asia Minor; therefore, “blackness, servitude and the idea of racial hierarchy became inextricably linked” (Lee 2003). The collection of essays, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1973), edited by Talal Asad, prominent anthropologist and Professor Emeritus at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York,  deliberates how British anthropologists supported and helped shape British colonial policy and practices in countries like those in Africa. In the introduction to the volume, Asad observes that anthropologists, prior to the time of his writing in the early 1970s, tended not to acknowledge the power structure within which the discipline developed. Anthropology is entrenched in an unequal power balance between the West and the East or Third World given that colonialism was just one part of British and European history, but often has a long-lasting impact on the communities they colonized. Asad poses that anthropologists during the height of the colonial period did not attempt to challenge the unequal power structures in the world, but usually supported these structures through their ethnographic research, cultural and historical access to colonized groups, and scientific studies of human morphology.

In the 1800s, and continuing through the first half of the 1900s, scientists tried to prove that some people—particularly northern and western Europeans or those who trace their heritage to the area—were naturally, or biologically, superior to others who did not look the same as them. Their studies reinforced the notion that colonialism was justifiable as it was a way to help others outside of places like Europe and the United States. One such scientist was Paul Broca (1824-1880), a French physician and anthropologist. Broca advanced the field of anthropometry (the measurement of the human body). He founded the Anthropological Society of Paris (Société d’Anthropologie de Paris) in 1859, “the oldest professional anthropological society in the world. Although it has kept its original name, is now considered to be more than simply the French society for biological anthropology. Its objective is the study of the natural history of the human species, its origins and its biological diversity” (Springer 2015). Broca made the claim that Europeans and Africans did not have the same origins, and some suggest this also implied that he believed Europeans were superior. This was an a priori assumption, meaning that he made this claim based upon his own ideas rather than on empirical evidence. There is discussion as to whether or not a priori justifications need evidence to back them up “or whether, instead, some propositions can be ‘default reasonable’, or that a person can be entitled to accept certain propositions independent of any evidence, perhaps because they are reasonable presuppositions of some area of inquiry” (Bruce 2020). Given the time period in which Broca was working, during the expansion of the French colonial empire, his claim may have seemed reasonable, but in reality, it only added to the false notion that colonialism was justifiable because it would help others .

Broca relied exclusively on quantitative  data: “As he continued to study morphological differences between human races, Broca moved from taking just cranial measurements to measuring the rest of the body” (Ashok 2017, 32). In addition to measuring skulls, he measured arms, forearms, upper and lower legs, and clavicles (collarbone).  But, the data Broca collected could not definitely prove that Europeans were superior based on their body measurements  . Broca measured skeletons, not living people. In some cases, his data showed that Africans were further from apes—the closest human ancestor—than Europeans: “Broca accepts that in studying the skeleton one often finds mosaic characteristics, despite being a superior or inferior race…For Broca, this is clear evidence in support of the polygenist belief in the plurality of human origins” (Ashok 2017, 34-35). Some scholars, such as Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002), a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, claimed Broca used ‘numbers not to generate new theories but to illustrate a priori conclusions’ (Gould 1981, 74 cited in Ashok 2017, 35) about race. However, Broca’s experiments generally countered all of his ideas about the inferiority of Africans or that they were somewhere in between apes and Europeans.

A few decades after Broca’s studies of race, Robert Bean (1874-1944) “offered up everything from the size and shape of black people’s skulls to ‘the broad grin characteristic of the Black Race’ as evidence of black inferiority” (Bean 1932 quoted in Bay 2000, 83). A professor of anatomy and anthropology at the University of Virginia, Bean is a descendant of the First Families of Virginia (families who descended from the colonists of Jamestown and were wealthy and held high social status). Bean “argued that the physical features of African Americans confirmed their inferiority when compared to whites. Furthermore, he advanced ‘human types that represent different degrees of susceptibility of disease may be segregated and given differential treatment’” (Reynolds 2020). Bean, considered one of the “leading men of eugenic science” (Reynolds 2020). Bean, along with a like-minded colleague, taught about one-fifth of the courses in the medical school at the University of Virginia (Reynolds 2020). In 1906, Bean published an article that compared the brains of blacks and whites. The brains came from bodies that were unclaimed and as a result had been given to medical schools. In the article, he emphasized the inferiority of blacks. He also stated this research showed that both Black and White women are inferior to men of the same races (Johnson n.d.). Critics of this study have pointed out that it was not blind, meaning that Bean knew which brains came from blacks and which brains came from whites. It was not surprising that he would show the data supporting his assumption that Whites were superior.

Like Broca, Bean “argued and published in leading scientific journals that the study of cranial configurations and cranial area sizes showed that whites were more intelligent than blacks” (Shilgba 2011, 286). One critic was Franklin Mall (1862-1917), who repeated the study, but it was blind and had a less skewed population. Mall did not know if the 106 brains, including 18 from Bean’s original study, came from blacks or whites or from men or women. Mall came to a different conclusion than Bean; he found that there were no differences between the brains, meaning one race was not superior to another (and neither was one sex). It is important to “remember the dark side of science, which is the fact that a scientist or group of scientists can bring up ‘evidence to support virtually anything on earth” (Shilgba 2011, 286).

Critics of scientists who supposedly demonstrated that certain races were inferior to others pointed to the flaws in their methods used to prove their theories. One such critic was Joseph Auguste Anténor Firmin  (widely known as Anténor Firmin, 1850-1911). Firmin was born in Haiti and moved to Paris where he was a member of the Société d’Anthropologie, which was founded by Broca. Firmin published De l’égalité des races humaines, published in English as The Equality of Human Races, in 1885, decades before Franz Boas was writing against racial inequality. This was in response to Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the Inequality of Human Races) by Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, the French writer who used scientific racism to argue that there is a master Aryan race and to ultimately justify racism, which also helped legitimize colonization. Firmin critiqued the methods used by scientists who suggested different races belonged to different species and revealed the biases which influenced their research (Bernasconi 2008). This was pioneering since many anthropologists at the time aligned with racist ideas, and even the idea for his book came from the debates that had been occurring in the Société (Bernasconi 2008). Firmin was skeptical of crania (skull) studies. He used empirical evidence from Egypt to argue against racial inferiority. He suggested ancient Egypt had developed from a Black society, meaning “some of the more simplistic theories of racial hierarchy would collapse” (Bernasconi 2008, 378), given that ancient Egyptians were known for advancements in technology and agriculture, as well as in law and society (trade, literature, and art, for instance).

Firmin is also known for being one of the creators of the idea of Pan-Africanism in the late 1800s as a way to fight colonialism on the continent and helped organized the First Pan-African Conference, which was held in 1900 in London; W.E.B. Du Bois was an attendee. Pan-Africanism rejected racial inequality, refused the notion that Africans were not able to be civilized, and highlighted Africans who had made significant contributions to the literature and society (Magloire-Danton 2005). In The Equality of Races, Firmin wrote about the significance of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) that ceased French control of Haiti and drew attention to the subsequent achievements of Haitians to the country and the world, such as Dr. Louis Audain, trained as a physician at the Faculté de Paris and who went on to hold a high-ranking position at a hospital near Paris, in an area were French doctors were plentiful. Firmin writes, “Everything seems to suggest then that if a bronzed disciple of Aesculapius [Roman God of Medicine] can practice his profession there, it is because he is considered at least as capable as any other physician. Heart and mind in the balance, Dr. Audain can sustain comparison with any many of any race” (2000, 217).

Firmin refers to griffes, people of three-quarter Black descent and one-quarter White descent, such as Dr. Audain, in his book, suggesting the “offspring of a Black and a mulatto is the subject best suited for our study of the question with which we are concerned in this book” (2000, 217). He states that scientists of the time believed that the less White (Western and Northern European) a person’s ancestry, the less civilized and intelligent the person would be. Firmin also reminds his audience that Haitians who have Black and White ancestry were oftentimes children of Black slave women and their White male owners. The women became pregnant not due to their free-choice, but due to sexual violence that resulted from the imbalance of power in the relationship. Since mulatto refers to a person of mixed Black and White ancestry and a griffe refers to someone who has one mulatto parent and one Black parent, “the less satisfying the resulting hybrids would be. Such is the opinion of most scientists who support the notion of inequality of the races” (Firmin 2000, 217). Firmin purposely highlights the notable accomplishments of griffes in various domains, such as medicine, law, art, and literature, to counter this claim. Even though Firmin was critical of polygenism (the notion that Blacks are a different species than Whites) and instead accepted monogenism (all humans are the same species regardless of skin color), he still endorsed a view of progress or evolution, which in and of itself is problematic. Regardless, Firmin made groundbreaking claims for his time against scientific racism, which we can also see echoed in the work of Franz Boas in the United States a few decades later .

What Do We See When We Look at Others? Do We See Race?

Anthropology has come to accept race as a belief system that is concerned with human differences. Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1994) developed a theory of ‘racial formations’ (cited in Whitehead 2009, 326). The theory “describes the ‘sociohistorical processes through which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed’” (Omi and Winant 1994, 55 quoted in Whitehead 2009, 326). Racial formation develops at both the upper levels of society (policies, social movements, structure) and within people’s daily experiences (such as relations with other people). Kevin Whitehead (2009) builds upon this theory as he explores racial discourses and racial formation within interactions at the individual level, as he charges that Omi and Winant focus more so on the ‘macro-level’ of society. Whitehead examines “this questions of the reproduction of race in interaction, identifying and explicating a set of practices that implicate a mechanism through which it occurs” (2009, 326). What Omi and Winant and Whitehead point to is that race is not static as a concept and can hold different meanings depending on the context.

Race was used to separate, rank, and bring colonized people under the control of colonial powers. Using race in such a way is not exclusive to colonialism and the time when Europe expanded its empires. Race played a key role in immigration policies in the United States int the 19th and 20th centuries. Adolf Hitler and the Nazis used the concept of race as a justification to kill 11 million people who they claimed were lesser races, such as Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, and Africans, and to commit other horrendous crimes and grave human rights violations during the Holocaust. The AAA issued a statement in 1998 on race that the association deems to represent that vast majority of anthropologists and its members. The statement notes that we often are trained to see race as a natural way to divide humans given it is based upon what we see when we look at other people. The AAA counters this claim, however, by stating: “With the vast expansion of scientific knowledge in this century, however, it has become clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups. Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g., DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94% lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic ‘racial’ groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes. This means that there is greater variation within ‘racial’ groups than between them.” The AAA points out that in populations who live near each other there are similarities in their genes and their physical appearance. No racial group is non-human, but rather, historically, when groups have had contact with each other over time, they reproduced (or interbred). Genes are shared, which means that all modern humans are one species.

Jonathan Marks, a biological anthropologist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, wrote the book What It Means to be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and Their Genes (2003). In it, Marks makes the argument that humans are physically more similar to populations that are geographic close by and different from those located further away. He writes, “People are similar to those geographically nearby and different from those far away” (2002, 65). Marks argues against the claim that race is a biological category and human behavior can be explained by genetics. Stephen Jay Gould, a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, makes a similar argument. He poses that biological definitions of race are not visible, but instead what we see is geographic variation that is continuous and systematic. Gould suggests that human variation is a continuum, meaning there are too many differences within groups to make accurate racial classifications. There is no denying that even though race may not be “real” in the biological sense, race is very real in the social sense and has profound impacts on people’s everyday lives.

The concept of race is a problematic and complicated outcome of the Enlightenment, alternatively known as the Age of Reason (discussed previously in this resource). A time period of mainly European history dating between the 1700s to the 1800s that is associated with the Scientific Revolution and a focus on empirical evidence and rational thought. Race dates to the Enlightenment when hierarchical thinking was in favor.  It is difficult write a complete history of race given it carries many different meanings depending upon culture, geographic location, and everyday experience. Ivan Hannaford (1996) wrote Race: The History of an Idea in the West and in it he traces the view of race as a classification system based on skin color, which was also seen to predict behavior, thought, and ability, to the Enlightenment. Hannaford suggests it is a harmful outcome “deliberate manipulation of texts by scientists and historians abandoning earlier paradigms of descent, generation, and right order (and especially the political order) for an even later one (the racial order)” (1996, 6). Hannaford contends that race is “fundamentally and Enlightenment notion used within the structural of legitimate intellectual inquiry to explain complex human arrangements” (1996, 6). Similar to Marks and Gould, Hannaford argues that race is much too complex of a concept—there are too many differences within groups of people who are classified similarly and it is defined in multiple ways—to support having definitive categories based on physical appearance. Hannaford also points out how the concept of race developed out of particular political and economic contexts and scientific paradigms, showing that its definition is not void of external factors.

This categorization can also lead to dangerous consequences, such as the development of stereotypes, which are fixed or generalized representations of people that seem to be natural and perhaps even connected to biology, but in fact, they have no biological underpinnings, and they are not true but rather created and legitimated over time. The idea that skin color can be a good predictor of personality or background came out in the experience of Magid Magid, a black Muslim former Member of European Parliament (MEP). He was told that he needed to exit the building by security on his very first day. Mr. Magid thinks that him being black was a factor given that the majority of people in power in Europe are white, even though Europe is much more diverse. Mr. Magid commented, ‘We’ve all been socially conditioned to expect what a politician looks like, behaves like. Because I didn’t fit that narrative, I didn’t fit that stereotype, clearly [to security] I was lost. I didn’t belong as a member of the European Parliament” (Morgan 2020).

Giving Race Meaning

Whereas in the United States, we are often asked to check boxes about race and ethnicity on various forms. American colleges and universities started to collect race and gender from applicants in the 1960s and 1970s as a way to track diversity. Needing this gather this demographic data was a result of affirmative action policies stemming from the Civil Rights Movement, which are meant to guarantee that minority  groups and women receive equal treatment (West 2018). In 2020, Dr. Jessica Krug, faculty in the Department of History at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. whose work focused on Africa and the African diaspora, with an interest in Central Africa, admitted that she was not a Black woman, even though she had claimed to be. Dr. Krug had assumed several identities in her life, in her words: ‘within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean  rooted Bronx Blackness.’ In fact, she is white and stated she was raised as Jewish near Kansas City, Missouri. In a statement, the Department of History called for her resignation. Dr. Yomaira C. Figueroa, a professor at Michigan State University, questioned why Dr. Krug “would have gone to such lengths to maintain a racial façade” when many whites study African history and politics. Dr. Figueroa stated that it is important to see what Dr. Krug had access to given her false identities, such as grants or fellowships that are intended for minority academics and researchers.

On the contrary, it is illegal in France to collect such data on race and ethnicity (Morgan 2020).  A report by the European Commission (2017) states, “In the overwhelming majority of Member states, however, the concept of race or racial origin is not used in data collection. The way racial and ethnic origin is understood impacts on the protection provided by the RED [Racial Equality Directive] and informs whether treatment apparently based on proxies such as immigrant status, nationality, language and certain religious practices is seen as direct or indirect, covert or overt discrimination” (6). One the one hand, some in Europe are concerned that these data may contribute to discrimination based on race or ethnicity or to essentialize minority groups. One the other hand, some in Europe are worried that data on language, education, poverty, and immigration cannot accurately be used to gauge racial and ethnic discrimination in society, although the two types of data (i.e., on race and ethnicity and on structural measures) may overlap. The word or category of White is constructed. Defining who is White and who is not has been a key part of how race has been defined in the United States. Dr. Peggy McIntosh (Wellsey College) used the term “white privilege” in her 1989 paper “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” to reference “a set of unearned assets that a white person in American can count on cashing in each day but to which they remain largely oblivious.” Christine Emba in an article that appeared in the Washington Post, comments, “ Obviously not all white people are wealthy, and yes, there are minorities who have achieved wealth and other marks of status. But white privilege is something specific and different – it’s the idea that just by virtue of being a white person of any kind, you’re part of the dominant group which tends to be respected, assumed the best of, and given the benefit of the doubt.”

Brazil, along with the United States, is one of the largest multiracial countries in the Western Hemisphere. However, these two countries have very different ways of framing race and identities. Brazil made slavery illegal in 1888, and by that time, it had one of the largest African populations in the New World (Guest 2017). Almost half of Africans in the slave trade were forcibly brought to work on plantations in Brazil during its time as a Portuguese colony (ibid.). Today, race in Brazil racial terminology has hundreds of words, a far more expansive list than what is found in the United States where relatively few categories exist. Scholarship has shown, “Race in Brazil is not solely a function of skin color. In fact, race intersects closely with class—including land ownership, wealth, and education—in determining social status. Because of the power of class, a Brazilian’s racial position can be modified by his or her level of affluence” (Guest 2017, 208). However, the literature and media in Brazil has also highlighted that inequalities still exist, as shown in the book Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown (2003) by Donna Goldstein. Goldstein conducts here research among working poor women from a favela in Brazil who are domestic workers for middle-class Brazilians. Many of those who are poorer are Afro-Brazilian with darker skin colors, and many of those who are wealthier, are White. Some suggest the idea of Brazil being a “racial democracy” is used to cover up racism in society, or the “repressive practices, structures, beliefs, and representations that uphold racial categories and social inequality” (Welsch and Vivanco 2016, 155). Goldstein analyzes how Brazil’s poor use humor to cope with exclusion and discrimination. Among the women she works with, Goldstein looks at the role of laughter in their everyday confrontations with being marginalized in Brazil based upon race, class, and gender.  In particular, she notes that domestic workers and their employers would laugh at various points when they would watch television shows that dramatized the problems of encountered by the Brazilian middle-class. These shows were so different from the experiences of the domestic workers—who are structurally marginalized in society—that they induced “laughter out of place.”

Race-Specific Diseases: Biology, Culture, and Health

Genetic anthropologist Dr. Jada Benn Torres (Vanderbilt University) and Professor Rick Kittles (University of Arizona) write of how the intersection of race and genetics is usually framed within biomedical research: “In describing the human species, race is an accepted sociocultural concept but one that lacks supportive genetic evidence. When race is used in biomedical research, it is often as a proxy for measurable indicators of group differences such as diet, socioeconomic status, cultural lifestyle, and shared biology” (2007, 196). Dr. Torres and Dr. Kittles point out that genome research has exposed the variations within racial and ethnic groups, but yet these continue to be used to explain differences in health, such as higher risks for developing certain diseases, between groups.

Race is often invoked in discussions of diseases. Sickle-cell disease is more common in people of African and African American ancestry. (Sickle-cell disease is a group of blood disorders, the most common being sickle-cell anemia.) Its occurrence is more frequent among individuals from parts of the world or trace their heritage to parts of the world where malaria is or was common because the sickle-cell trait provides protection against malaria. Sickle-cell disease is recessive, which means that to have the disease, you must have inherited two copies of the gene (one from either parent). Those who carry just one copy do not have the disease and have resistance to malaria (World Health Organization 2006). Cystic fibrosis (affects the lungs and digestive system) is more common within the White population in the United States who trace their ancestry to Northern and Western Europe. It is less common in those who identify as African American and Asian American. It is not clear as to exactly why Cystic fibrosis is more common among Whites, but some theories suggest that carrying the gene provided resistance to cholera, typhoid fever, or tuberculosis.

Another example of a disease that is associated with those who identify as a specific race is Type 2 Diabetes. Research has shown that racial and ethnic minorities have higher rates of diabetes than those who identify as White in the United States (Spanakis and Golden 2013). Michael Montoya in his book Making the Mexican Diabetic: Race, Science, and the Genetics of Inequality (2011) questions why race is so prevalent in debates about diabetes. Genetics permeates how we understand illness, identity, and race. Montoya writes, “The ramifications of the use of genetics to think, talk, and solve the problem of type 2 diabetes, and of ethnoracial differences in health more generally, is the subject of this book” (2011, 1). It is the much more frequent form of diabetes, “More than 90 percent of all diabetics have type 2 diabetes, which is characterized by elevated blood glucose triggered by poor insulin production or insulin resistance in skeletal muscle and lipid tissue” (Montoya 2011, 3).

Montoya analyzes the use of race in science through his ethnography of type 2 diabetes among Latinx, “predominantly Mexicano-identified peoples in the United States and elsewhere” (Montoya 2011, 22). He points to the dangers of naturalizing race when it comes to understanding disease, or in his case, of homogenizing the Mexican-American population in the discussions of diabetes. His book is based upon his extensive ethnographic fieldwork, in which he describes as “studying-up”: “Not only in the sense that I am mounting a repatriated anthropology studying power elites, but also in the sense that the estrangement and alienation that once served as the hallmark of ethnographic practice is re-created in my practice” (Montoya 2011, xix). He conducted research primarily among scientists at sites of international diabetes research, such as offices and labs in Chicago; DNA sample collections along the U.S./Mexico border; and conferences and professional meetings on diabetes research.

Based on the data collected at various fieldsites, Montoya argues that diabetes is not directly linked with “race,” but rather, we must look at the social history of groups to understand why some “races” are at higher risk than others. Montoya contends that type 2 diabetes is more prevalent in groups who are or have been displaced, moved, or colonized and outlines a process he calls “bioethnic conscription,” which refers to how “the social identities and life conditions of DNA donors are grafted into the biological explanations of human difference and disease causality” (Montoya 2007, 94). In this process, he points to the power structures that have influenced why diabetes is more prevalent in some groups than in others—this higher prevalence cannot be completely explained by biological race, but rather, we must consider the social and political constructions of race and the impacts that they have had on lifestyles, foodways, and livelihoods.

For instance, we can extend his argument to the fact that Native Americans tend to be at higher risk for developing diabetes. One semester when Hughes Rinker taught the introductory course to Cultural Anthropology at George Mason University, a student who identifies as Native American raised the point that their community’s lifestyle, foodways, and culture changed dramatically when reservations were created and indigenous populations were forced to move. Specifically, they noted that their traditional diet even today, such as meals eaten with their family and on special occasions, are high in carbohydrates, which carried over from being placed within restricted areas and lacking resources they once had. The student stated that the contemporary conditions on reservations are often poor with high incidences of poverty and a lack of infrastructure, which means people may not be able to make choices that would benefit their health and lower their risks for diabetes, such as having access to healthier types of foods. Moreover, those who identify as African American or trace their ancestry to Africa are also at higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Dr. Steve Harris-Scott in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University made a comment to one of the authors (Hughes Rinker) about why fried foods are common among minority communities in the South, which could be a contributor to developing diabetes given their high fat and carbohydrate content. Dr. Harris-Scott noted that frying food was common among slaves on Southern plantations given that they were often not provided with delicious food to eat, so they fried what they had to make it taste better and this cooking method was passed down through generations. The student and Dr. Harris-Scott highlighted the points made by Montoya about Latinx in the United States, in that it is not biology that makes some groups more susceptible to diabetes, even though this is often how it is framed in research and the media, but it is how race and people have been viewed historically and the power dynamics that impacted these perceptions.