Race (social)

“Race” as a distinction between different types of humans entered the European vocabulary as early as the end of the 15th century,[1] particularly in Iberia. It quickly came to mark Europe over the next few centuries, especially in the drive to state sovereignty; by the late 19th century, the race concept had assumed throughout Europe a sense of naturalness and a taken-for-granted ordering of social arrangements. “Science and literature, scripture and law, culture and political rhetoric all worked in subtle and blunt ways to establish the presumption of white supremacy… and black disenfranchisement”.[2] Nor was this confined to the western hemisphere: Yan-Fu (1853-1902), the Chinese scholar who promoted Darwinian theory, considered that there were “four main races on the earth: the yellow, the white, the brown and the black… The black race is the lowest…” [3]

By the end of the 20th century, a rather different consensus had emerged amongst academics from all disciplines – the humanities, the social sciences and the biological sciences – that biological races do not exist in humans.[4] Nevertheless, for a lay person the idea of race seems to have retained its value as a useful concept in managing and interpreting the world at the individual level. This “commonsense approach” thus marks out popular discourse from that of the scientific community; nor do advocates of “racialism” feel the need to justify what is, to them, obvious. The task of social science is to explain the persistence of racial beliefs, the patterns of behaviour and their consequences: it is not sufficient to deny that race exists,[5] although social science is far from unanimous in how to deal with issues of studying racism and racial phenomena.

References

[1] Michel Wieviorka (1995): The Arena of Racism, London: Sage, p. 2

[2] David Goldberg (2004): ‘The end(s) of race’, Postcolonial Studies, 7/2, p. 212

[3] cited in Frank Díkötter (1996): ‘The Idea of “race” in Modern China’, in J. Hutchinson and A.D. Smith (eds), Ethnicity, Oxford: Oxford University Press

[4] Lisa Gannett (2004): ‘The Biological Reification of Race’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 55, p. 323

[5] Bob Carter (2000): Realism and Racism, London: Routledge

See also the following:

• See race (biology) for the biological concept of human races.
• See subspecies for the broader concept of race (of any species).
• See race (sports) for sports racing.