1.2

• Phenotype


  The composite observable traits and behaviors of an individual or group
• Genotype


  A person's genetic makeup
• Phenotype is the physical manifestation of genotype
• Phenotype differences


  • Skin tone
  • Hair texture
  • Lip thickness
  • Height
  • Eye shape
• Past racial categorisations


  • Based on geographic regions (Mongolia, Caucasus Mountains)
  • Based on skin tones (Black, white, yellow, red)
• There are more physical differences within a race than between races
• Due to interracial reproduction, many people have mixed ancestry
• Racial categorisation is often arbitrary or illogical
• The "one-drop rule" in the US defined someone as Black if they had any African ancestry
• In Brazil, the term Black is reserved for someone with no European ancestry
• Humans are more than 99.9% the same in their DNA, physical differences account for less than 0.1%
• Evolutionary evidence shows physical differences are a result of human migration and adaptation to environment
• Race is a social construct, not a biological reality
• Social science organizations reject biological explanations of race
• Racialized science has been used to maintain and reinforce racial inequality
• Over time, the typology of race that developed during early racialized science has fallen into disuse, and the social construction of race is a more sociological way of understanding racial categories
• Racialized science, with its emphasis on identifying immutable differences between racial groups, can be expected only to maintain and reinforce existing racial inequality, in that its adherents indirectly argue that no degree of government intervention or social change will alter the skills and abilities of different racial groups
• Research suggests that race is not biologically identifiable and that previous racial categories were arbitrarily assigned, based on pseudo science, and used to justify racist practices
• From the 17th through the 19th centuries, the merging of folk beliefs about and scientific explanations of group differences produced what social anthropologist Audrey Smedley has called an "ideology of race" which, often in the name of (racialized) science, serves to justify the racial hierarchy and racial hegemony
• Race is a means of creating and enforcing social order, a lens through which differential opportunity and inequality are structured
• The most important "criterion of status" remains to be the distinction between white and Black
• The rise of the transatlantic slave trade created an incentive to categorize human groups in order to justify the subordination of Africans as slaves
• As Europeans began to sort themselves and others into groups based on physical appearance, they attributed to individual members of these groups certain behaviors and capacities that were supposedly deeply ingrained
• These supposed physical, intellectual, behavioral, and moral differences soon became part of common folk belief
• During the time of slavery in the U.S. South, the skin tone of enslaved peoples lightened over the years as babies were born from the union, often in the form of rape of enslaved individuals, by slave owners and other whites
• As it became difficult to tell who was "Black" and who was not, many court battles over people's racial identity occurred
• People who were accused of having Black ancestry would go to court to "prove" they were white in order to avoid enslavement or other problems
• Litigation over race continued long past the days of slavery
• The tradition of hostility between the English and the Irish was a powerful influence on early European thinking of the Irish as an inferior "race"
• The atrocities committed against the Irish by the English veterans of the war in Ireland in the early 1600s would be repeated against American Indians/Alaska Natives (AI/AN)
• Both AI/AN and Mexican Americans lost their land, and often their lives, due in part to Manifest Destiny, the Mexican American War, and whites' belief in their god-given (superiority and) right to inhabit (and steal) lands in which people were already living
• Irish Americans were treated similar to African Americans during the 1800s; it was not until they "became white" that the stigma of their Irish ancestry would be erased and they would gain access to property, power and privilege, similar to other whites
• Following World War II, alongside empirical and conceptual problems with "race," evolutionary and social scientists were acutely aware of how beliefs about race had been used to justify discrimination, apartheid, slavery, and genocide
• The social construction of race has developed within various legal, economic, and sociopolitical contexts, and may be the effect, rather than the cause of major race-related issues
• Race has real, material effects in housing discrimination, in the legal process, in policing practices, in education, in workplace discrimination, and many other domains of society characterized by institutionalized practices of preference and systemic oppression
• Racial groups possessing relatively little power often find themselves excluded or oppressed
• Law enforcement officers often utilize race to profile suspects, a term commonly referred to as racial profiling
• This use of racial categories is frequently criticized for perpetuating an outmoded understanding of human biological variation, and promoting stereotypes
• Racial formation


  Race development as a socio-historical process involving political struggle, where race signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies
• Socioeconomic factors, in combination with early but enduring views of race, have led to considerable suffering within disadvantaged racial groups