What do you think is meant by the term racial smog?How do racial categories shape our identities and social status?Option B:

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Chapter Outline

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Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, you should be able to:

1. Discuss the relationship between human biology and culture.

2. Explain the nature of contemporary human variation.

3. Explain how the idea of human races devel- oped and how human biological variation is understood today.

4. Discuss racism and its relationships with racial prejudice and racial discrimination.

5. Discuss the scientific errors and social prob- lems involved in the belief that social roles are caused by biology.

6. Explain the relationships between biology, culture, and intelligence.

7. Discuss the influence of culture on IQ test scores.

8. Discuss ethnicity and its politics.

Biology and Culture: Race and Ethnicity

3

3.1 Biology and the Capacity for Culture

• Race and Culture • Racialism • Racism

3.2 Race, Cultural Ability, and Intelligence

• Intelligence Testing

3.3 Ethnicity

• Race and Ethnicity • Ethnicity and Politics

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.1 Biology and the Capacity for Culture

In this chapter we consider the interplay of biology and culture. We will explore the concepts of racism, its functions in society, and its lack of scientific validity. We will also examine how ideas about differences between men and women influence the ways in which social roles are assigned. Not all cultures have assigned different social roles based on concepts of race. In such cases, differences are best understood as artifacts of culture rather than biology.

3.1 Biology and the Capacity for Culture

Human beings differ from other animals in their heavy reliance on culture as their means of adapting to their environment. Humans are, in short, cultural animals. Because this can be said of no other species, one might assume that human biol- ogy has distinctive characteristics that make it possible for us to acquire a culture. In other words, human biology makes culture possible, and the biological characteristics of our species may be seen as the reason why cultures, despite their diversity, nevertheless also have numerous universals.

However, to say that human biology makes culture possible does not imply that biology determines the specific characteristics of a culture. It is generally acknowledged that “human nature,” in the sense of our innate biological predispositions, does not consist of rigidly pro- grammed responses to stimuli. The human species is the product of evolutionary processes that resulted in a large brain with the capacity to learn and use both language and complex ideologies, which are passed down from one generation to the next through socialization rather than through biology itself. In this chapter, we will question ideas about biological determinism by exploring the interplay of culture, race, and ethnicity.

Race and Culture Humans are not a homogeneous species, but differ in some of their physical characteris- tics from one part of the world to another. It has become common throughout the world to use these differences to group people into a variety of races, groups that supposedly reflect closeness based on common ancestry. One major problem with the idea that humans belong to different races is that people who use the concept of “race” typically assume that there are clear-cut genetic boundaries between these groups. In reality, so-called racial characteristics vary in frequency from one part of the world to another, and changes rarely happen so abruptly that one can state with certainty that a clear boundary exists between an area where a characteristic is common and another where it is rare. Furthermore, the cluster of biological traits that are commonly thought of as distinguishing one race from another do not vary from one part of the world to another as a cluster. For instance, skin tone varies most markedly from dark to light as one moves further north or south from the equator, while other so-called racial differences vary east to west, from lower eleva- tions to higher ones, and from climate to climate (the tallest and slenderest humans being concentrated in hot, dry areas).

Overall, despite variation, the major human geographical groups around the world (which are commonly thought of as distinct races) differ in only about 0.5% of their genetic mate- rial (Levy, 2007), and all human populations have the capacity to learn and be socialized into a particular culture. Thus, the so-called human races are not actually separate groups

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.1 Biology and the Capacity for Culture

in the way they are commonly thought to be, and the differences that can be seen around the world are superficial differences when it comes to the capacity for culture. In short, the human “races” are best understood as cultural constructs rather than truly distinct biological subdivisions of our species.

In the early 1900s, Franz Boas (1911) emphasized the fact that whatever biological dif- ferences may exist between human races do not account for cultural differences. People of the same race may have quite different cultures, and people of different races may participate in the same culture. Normal individuals of every race have the same capacity to acquire any culture. The purpose of this chapter is to further explore this relationship between “race” and culture.

Racialism Racialism is the belief that clear-cut, bounded human races actually exist. It is an idea that developed in Europe as explorers and merchants began to travel to far-flung places around the world beginning in the 1500s and was furthered by the efforts of taxono- mists and natural historians in the 1700s to develop scientific categories that they hoped would describe recently discovered human biological variations. Unfortunately, these early taxonomies gave rise to the mistaken impression that human differences could accurately be described in terms of discretely different groups.

The Origin of Racialism Throughout most of history, people interacted only with close neighbors who differed very little from them biologically. When their cultures differed radically, an individual’s status was likely to be described in nonbi- ological terms, as a stranger. Those who held such sta- tuses might be treated ethnocentrically as social inferi- ors and expected to play inferior roles. But it was not until the peoples of distant parts of the world began to interact that the idea of race became a common way of identifying social contrasts among groups.

The belief that humankind is divided into several major races began during the age of European colonial expansion. European exploration of remote parts of the world brought people together from places where the most frequently observable biological traits such as skin color or hair texture differed enough to be read- ily noted by travelers. These physical contrasts became the basis for creating racial statuses when the politi- cal need arose. Colonial expansion was undertaken to obtain economic and political benefits for the home- land. Expecting members of the colonized societies to play subordinate roles to the colonizers supported this goal. The emerging racial ideology helped to maintain the distinction between “us” and “them,” and to justify European domination.

Everett Collection/SuperStock Throughout history there has been an effort to portray Caucasian people as superior to others. In the 1800s this took on a more evolutionary approach as shown in Ernest Haeckel’s 1868 popular illustrated book titled Naturliche Schopfungsgeschichte (English title, History of Creation).

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.1 Biology and the Capacity for Culture

Even today, the criteria by which “races” are defined vary from culture to culture. Usually, these criteria include easily observable traits such as skin color, the shape of facial features, hair color and texture, or body stature. Less observable traits such as blood type would not allow quick and easy decisions about what social roles should be played between people. In North America, skin color and hair texture are often the main determinants of the “race” to which one is thought to belong. In Bolivia, on the other hand, nonbiological attributes such as clothing and dialect or accent may greatly influence one’s perceptions of another’s “race.”

That there is no precise number of human races is illustrated by the fact that the number of so-called human races differs from one culture to another. For instance, European scholars often spoke of three major racial groups, but American scholars commonly treated Native Americans as a fourth, supposedly distinct, race. In the American subculture in which I grew up in southern California in the 1950s, Americans of that area commonly added “Mexicans,” as if they were a distinct fifth race. The variability in social perceptions of racial categories indicates that “race” is really a cultural construct rather than a natural biological subdivision of our species.

The Belief in Distinct Races The human species is quite varied in the biological characteristics found from person to person, and the same physical traits are not equally found throughout the world. Instead, any given trait may vary in frequency from region to region. Because in particular envi- ronments a certain physical trait may confer some survival advantage on those who have it, advantageous traits eventually become more common in the environments in which they are of benefit. Thus, for instance, the largest lung capacity is most common among peoples who live at the highest altitudes, and the body shape that best conserves tends to be most common in the coldest climates. Nevertheless, enough interbreeding happens between neighboring groups that traits that have an advantage in a particular environ- ment are also passed from group to group, out of one environment and into others.

However, simple variation in the frequency of traits from one region to another does not mean that a species is made up of distinctly separate races or that races have clear bound- aries that separate them one from another. In fact, the number of human races that people believe exist depends on what they have been socialized to believe, and ideas about that vary from one culture to another. Human groups are simply not isolated enough from one another to have developed distinctive races characterized by clusters of genetic traits that disappear as one crosses a distinct boundary between them. The bottom line is that there is much more variation between the characteristics of individuals within any of the so-called “races” than there is between those “races.” This can be illustrated with mea- surements of genetic differences between human groups. A significant number of human genes and the variants of their alleles are unchanging. Hence, they are not subject to evo- lutionary pressures and are more or less common from one part of the world to another.

Biological anthropologist Richard Lewontin (1972; Lewontin et al. 1982, p. 123) compared genetic traits in individuals from seven different geographical areas of the world and determined that these genes are so widely distributed that if all human beings except those of any one of these “racial” groups, say sub-Saharan Africa, were somehow wiped out by a great catastrophe, only 6.7% of these variable human genes would be lost from the human species. More recent studies with improved methods for measuring genetic

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.1 Biology and the Capacity for Culture

diversity have confirmed Lewontin’s conclusion that most human genes are shared by all so-called “races.” These studies show that only 6–10% of human variation can be explained by the “races,” and that about 94% of physical variation occurs within “racial” groups (AAA, 1998). Further, Yu et al. (2002) found that there are equivalent average genetic dif- ference between two individuals of the same race and two individuals of different races. Similarly, Jin and Chakraborty (1994) examined DNA markers among about 12,000 people from 59 different groups and found that up to 98.5% of genetic variation occurred within groups. As noted above, as much as 99.5% of human genes are found in each of the parts of the world that are commonly thought of as representing the major three or four human races. Thus, the way human traits are distributed around the world does not conform to the common idea that there is an objective number of clearly recognizable, distinct races.

Although some scientists who are interested in the biological diversity within our spe- cies also use the word “race,” their studies actually reveal something quite different from the common idea: The frequencies of human biological traits vary gradually from region to region without clear-cut boundaries between them. Neighboring human groups are constantly migrating and exchanging genes from group to group through mating, and no human groups are really isolated from their neighbors, even when rigid taboos exist. For instance, sociologist Robert Stuckert (1958, 1966) estimated that approximately 23% of persons classified as White in the United States in 1960 had at least one ancestor of African origin. This mixing occurred despite the very strong social taboos against inter- racial mating in the United States. The rates at which genes are passed from one human group to another throughout most of human existence are likely to be much greater than that which Stuckert calculated for Blacks and Whites in the United States prior to about 1960. In fact, population geneticist Mark Shriver and his colleagues at Penn State have found that about 30% of self-identified “White Americans” have some African ancestry, and between 17 and 18% of the ancestors of self-identified “Black Americans” were of European origin, and about 10% of these “Black Americans” are more than half European in their ancestry (Shriver, et al., 2003). Thus, the so-called “races” referred to in popular culture are not nearly so different from each other as people imagine.

Rather than think about “races” as discrete groups, it is more useful to think about bio- logical variation along a continuum of gradual (rather than abrupt) change. We see this, for example, with skin color, which varies along a gradient from one group or geographic region to another. In fact, much human variation is better explained by geographic dis- tance than by biology: Groups living close to one another tend to be more physically alike compared to those living farther away (Templeton, 1998). It is for these reasons that anthropologists (especially cultural anthropologists) think about “race” as a social con- struct. This is not to say “race” does not exist: It remains a commonly used classificatory system; it is integral to social interaction; and race and racism form part of people’s social experiences. However, “race” is based more on social and historical factors than on bio- logical facts.

Racism Since racial classifications are social conventions, they differ from culture to culture. The defined racial categories may include as few as two socially relevant categories or a mul- titude of them. Brazil, for example, reportedly has more than 500 racial terms. Despite the arbitrariness of racial classifications, they may seem quite real to those who have been

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.1 Biology and the Capacity for Culture

socialized into using them. The power of social beliefs in racial differences can be so great that people may be dealt with on the basis of the qualities that are culturally attributed to their race rather than the qualities they actually demonstrate as individuals. Stereotypes about differences between racial groups can lead to the assignment of somewhat differ- ent social roles to members of the different racial groups. These differences commonly involve the subordination of those of one racial status to those of another racial status. Such subordination has been supported at various times in different parts of the world by the force of law, as in the case of the post–Civil War United States when Black Americans were sometimes required by law to live under both geographically and economically seg- regated conditions. Even without the force of law, racial prejudices continued to play a role in such things as discriminatory hiring practices.

Especially when the roles that are commonly available to members of different racial groups involve a consistent ranking of one racial group over others, the differences in roles may be perpetuated by racial prejudices. Racial prejudice is an attitude made up of feelings of dislike and contempt for people who are thought of as belonging to a racial group different from one’s own. It may be learned from and supported by the ideology of a culture, and may be manifest in institutions such as laws, public policy, and corporate practices. Racial prejudice—as an antipathy that is felt by individuals—is translated into behavior when we treat members of other racial groups differently than we would treat members of our own. Such behavior is called racial discrimination. Although discrimina- tion may be evidenced by the way an individual manifests his or her racial prejudice (such as joking about minority races), it is also evidenced by institutional practices, such as a company policy of not hiring members of minority races, or a law forbidding marriage between members of different races. This kind of institutionally based discrimination is one of the components of racism, which is best understood as culturally mandated, insti- tutionally supported discrimination against members of minority races.

Racism is normally supported by racist beliefs, which involve the mistake of thinking that expected social roles are actually inborn racial characteristics. The belief that socially imposed racial differences are innate legitimizes the subordination of one racial group to another. Though inaccurate and demeaning, racist beliefs have evolved because they serve a variety of societal needs, such as supporting the political and economic goals of the dominant segments of society.

Economic and Political Roots of Racism The social applications of racism have consistently represented nonscientific and arbi- trary judgments that serve the changing, often ethnocentric, values of society. This is evi- denced by two scientifically untenable characteristics of racist standards. First, standards of racial classification have been highly arbitrary in biological terms, as they are socially directed to supporting the supposed “purity” of the dominant group. For instance, in the United States, anyone who admits to having even one Black ancestor is commonly classified by others and treated socially as a Black—regardless of physical appearance. It would be just as logical to classify someone who has a small amount of “White blood” as a White. But the function of racial classification historically in the United States has been to deny equal access to economic and political power to people who are not of northern European ancestry.

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.1 Biology and the Capacity for Culture

The second major piece of evidence that racism grows out of the predominant social val- ues of the day is that racist ideas about the behavioral tendencies of the “races” change with the shifting winds of public and political sentiment. Thus, in the United States in 1935, the Japanese “race” was commonly viewed as progressive, intelligent, and industri- ous. Only 7 years later, in 1942 and within the context of World War II, the Japanese were widely viewed as an inherently cunning and treacherous “race.” In that year, an executive order by President Roosevelt was used to exclude Japanese Americans from the Pacific Coast, including all of California and much of Oregon. Japanese citizens were taken from their homes in those areas and confined to internment camps in Arkansas and in various West Coast and Great Basin states. After 1950, as political allies of the United States, the Japanese once again came to be viewed as hardworking and progressive. Similarly, when there was a labor shortage in California during the construction of the transcontinental railway line, the Chinese who provided cheap labor were described as a frugal, sober, law- abiding “race.” Then, when competition for jobs became severe and it became economi- cally desirable to exclude further immigration of Chinese laborers, the Chinese “race” suddenly became described as dirty, unable to assimilate, and even dangerous.

The racist approach has consistently failed to have any scientific validity. On the contrary, it supports social prejudices by claiming that socially created group differences are bio- logically determined and therefore unchangeable. Such an argument provides a political rationale for people to oppose attempts to change the current race-based limitations in access to social prestige and political and economic power. For that reason, the racist argu- ment has persisted for several centuries, even though it has never proven itself to be of any scientific value in explaining human social difference.

The arbitrariness of racial categorizations that function to legitimize differences in how people are customarily treated is well illustrated by the experience of a young American boy named Greg Williams. Born in 1944, he was reared in Virginia where he attended schools that only accepted White students and where he swam in segregated swimming pools for Whites. Greg inherited his father’s light skin tone, and he had straight black hair. This did not interfere with his being classified socially as “White.” However, at the age of 10, Greg’s father moved with him and his siblings to Muncie, Indiana, where his relatives were considered to be Black. His light-skinned father told him and his brothers that “[i]n Virginia you were White boys. In Indiana, you’re going to be colored.” But things weren’t quite that simple. As a teenager in Muncie, Greg was taunted by Black teens as “White,” and White people were upset when they saw him with White girls. On the other hand, as a university student, Greg Williams was classified as Black when the university reported the percentages of its students in different racial categories (Williams, 1996).

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.1 Biology and the Capacity for Culture

Slavery and Racist Beliefs Racism is essentially a modern phenomenon. The modern racist way of reacting to “out- siders” by claiming that they are biologically inferior and unable to learn the “superior” customs of the racist’s own group, came into existence as a way of protecting the 18th- and 19th-century institution of slavery when voices began to speak out against it. Defenders of slavery even claimed the institution was divinely willed. For example, in 1772 the Rever- end Thomas Thompson published a work entitled The Trade in Negro Slaves on the African Coast in Accordance with Humane Principles, and with the Laws of Revealed Religion, and in 1852 the Reverend Josiah Priest published A Bible Defense of Slavery.

Figure 3.1: Evolution toward greater civilization?

Source: Adapted from The March of Progress by Rudy Zallinger.

If cultural evolution was linear, why did man develop the best tools and a highly industrialized economy, yet struggle in countering social inequality, poverty, and war?

When the use of Africans as slaves began in the United States, there was little need to jus- tify it with racist arguments. Ethnocentric values sufficed as rationales for the institution of slavery. Slave owners could claim that their slaves were better off with them than as free persons within their own allegedly inferior cultures. It was supposed that they had been given the chance to learn a superior way of life, higher moral values, the true religion, and a more enlightened way of thinking, in addition to enjoying a higher standard of living, better medical knowledge, and a longer life expectancy than if they had been permitted to

Go back. We messed

everything up.

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.1 Biology and the Capacity for Culture

remain in their former state. In ethnocentric terms, it was said that one could not simply discharge a slave after a few years of service because releasing a slave to his or her own devices in a complex society would be “inhumane.” According to this argument, the complexity of the “superior way of life” would be more than a person taken into slavery as an adult could learn to cope with. Thus, it was the slavehold- ers’ burden to take care of these “innocents” for the rest of their lives. And, of course, it was only fair—so the argument ran—for them to work for their “bene- factors” in return for these acts of “kindness.” See Figure 3.1.

Such ethnocentric rationales were not so useful when applied to the second generation of slaves. If a slave’s children are exposed from infancy on to the way of life of the slave owner, they cannot be described as any less aware of how to live “prop- erly” than any other member of the society unless one adds a new rationale to the old ethnocentric one. To continue to rationalize slavery into the sec- ond and third generations, the slave-owning group had to develop the view that the group they held in bondage was somewhat inferior in that its members

were genetically unable to learn the new way of life adequately to participate on an equal footing in a “civilized” society.

With this change from a simple ethnocentric argument to a concept of an inherent incapac- ity of some non-White “races,” the old claim of inferiority took on an even stronger aura of inevitability. Although the old institution of slavery no longer may be used as the vehicle for the domination of one group by another, the concept of differences in the capacities of different “races” lives on as a rationale for the dominance of one culture over another or of one segment of a society over its other members.

Rationalizing Social Inequality Looking at human differences in a racist way holds that the traits that lie within a person are responsible for his or her behavior. Such inner traits include willpower, determination, ego, inborn potentials, intellectual capacities, and the like. This tradition has made it dif- ficult to convince many people of the value in viewing behavior as being affected by cul- tural factors that are outside the person. Racist thinking served as a way of rationalizing the inequalities from which the dominant members of society were benefitting. Unequal treatment of social minorities could be perceived as the result rather than the cause of the differences between the various segments of the society. Because it is an effective way of supporting the status quo, the racist approach to explaining human behavior became a common way of reacting to human behavioral differences and remains unquestioned by large segments of society today, two centuries after it originated.

Universal Images Group/SuperStock Once people accept that a particular group is unequal, it justifies their unequal treatment as well.

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CHAPTER 3Section 3.1 Biology and the Capacity for Culture

Legalized Racial Distinctions Often the racism of the politically dominant segment of a society receives official sanction through legislation. Since the politically dominant segment of the United States has generally been composed of Whites, laws about supposed racial differences have often been preju- diced by ethnocentrism that favored Whites. The “White way of life”—that is, northern- European–based, industrialized, capitalistic culture—was assumed to be the superior way of living and therefore the most deserving of protection by law. Because the ability to participate in a way of life was thought to be “in our blood,” it followed that the most effective way of preserving the “White civilization” would be to maintain as much separation of the races as possible. Thus, at one time over three quarters of the states in the United States had laws prohibiting interracial marriages. That is, people of non-White racial statuses were forbidden to marry Whites, although marriages between members of different non-White races were not consistently forbidden. Nineteen states still had such laws as recently as 1967 when they were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court as unconstitutional.

It was not just racial intermarriage that was illegal in the United States. A host of so-called “Jim Crow laws” continued to perpetuate racial segregation in the United States well into the second half of the 20th century. For instance, as late as 1971, Black students were still being bused from the school dis- tricts in which their families lived into predominantly Black school districts that were farther from their homes. In that year, the practice was finally declared unconstitutional, but even overturning laws that perpetu- ated racial segregation did not mean that segregation disappeared, as even without the force of law private prejudices have made it difficult for minorities to find employment and housing outside the areas in which they were born.

A recent example of a society built on the principle of racial segregation is South Africa, in which legal barri- ers prevented a non-White majority from achieving social equality with the dominant White minority until the system of apartheid (legal racial segregation) was dismantled between 1989 and 1994. South African law recognized the existence of four “races”: Whites, Africans, Coloureds, and Asians. Whites were those of European ances- try, mostly descendants of Dutch Boers and English settlers. Africans were native African Blacks. Asians were people of Indian descent whose ancestors came to South Africa in the 19th century. “Coloureds” were peoples of mixed descent. The rigid separation of the “races” was maintained by laws forbidding interracial marriages, the legal require- ment of segregated residence, separate systems of education, and unequal voting rights. Africans made up over 71% of the population but lacked voting rights that would give them a corresponding influence over the government. The gove

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