10.

2 The Meaning of Race and Ethnicity

Learning Objectives

1. Critique the biological concept of race.

To understand this problem further, we need to take a critical look at the very meaning of race and ethnicity in
today’s society. These concepts may seem easy to define initially but are much more complex than their definitions
suggest.

Race

Let’s start first with race, which refers to a category of people who share certain inherited physical characteristics,
such as skin color, facial features, and stature. A key question about race is whether it is more of a biological
category or a social category. Most people think of race in biological terms, and for more than 300 years, or ever
since white Europeans began colonizing populations of color elsewhere in the world, race has indeed served as
the “premier source of human identity” (Smedley, 1998, p. 690).

It is certainly easy to see that people in the United States and around the world differ physically in some obvious
ways. The most noticeable difference is skin tone: some groups of people have very dark skin, while others have
very light skin. Other differences also exist. Some people have very curly hair, while others have very straight hair.
Some have thin lips, while others have thick lips. Some groups of people tend to be relatively tall, while others
tend to be relatively short. Using such physical differences as their criteria, scientists at one point identified as
many as nine races: African, American Indian or Native American, Asian, Australian Aborigine, European (more
commonly called “white”), Indian, Melanesian, Micronesian, and Polynesian (Smedley, 1998).

Although people certainly do differ in the many physical features that led to the development of such racial
categories, anthropologists, sociologists, and many biologists question the value of these categories and thus the
value of the biological concept of race (Smedley, 2007). For one thing, we often see more physical differences
within a race than between races. For example, some people we call “white” (or European), such as those with
Scandinavian backgrounds, have very light skins, while others, such as those from some Eastern European
backgrounds, have much darker skins. In fact, some “whites” have darker skin than some “blacks,” or African
Americans. Some whites have very straight hair, while others have very curly hair; some have blonde hair and
blue eyes, while others have dark hair and brown eyes. Because of interracial reproduction going back to the days
of slavery, African Americans also differ in the darkness of their skin and in other physical characteristics. In fact

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it is estimated that about 80% of African Americans have some white (i.e., European) ancestry; 50% of Mexican
Americans have European or Native American ancestry; and 20% of whites have African or Native American
ancestry. If clear racial differences ever existed hundreds or thousands of years ago (and many scientists doubt
such differences ever existed), in today’s world these differences have become increasingly blurred.

Another reason to question the biological concept of race is that an individual or a group of individuals is often
assigned to a race on arbitrary or even illogical grounds. A century ago, for example, Irish, Italians, and Eastern
European Jews who left their homelands for a better life in the United States were not regarded as white once they
reached the United States but rather as a different, inferior (if unnamed) race (Painter, 2010). The belief in their
inferiority helped justify the harsh treatment they suffered in their new country. Today, of course, we call people
from all three backgrounds white or European.

In this context, consider someone in the United States who has a white parent and a black parent. What race is this
person? American society usually calls this person black or African American, and the person may adopt the same
identity (as does Barack Obama, who had a white mother and African father). But where is the logic for doing
so? This person, as well as President Obama, is as much white as black in terms of parental ancestry. Or consider
someone with one white parent and another parent who is the child of one black parent and one white parent. This
person thus has three white grandparents and one black grandparent. Even though this person’s ancestry is thus
75% white and 25% black, she or he is likely to be considered black in the United States and may well adopt this
racial identity. This practice reflects the traditional “one-drop rule” in the United States that defines someone as
black if she or he has at least one drop of “black blood,” and that was used in the antebellum South to keep the
slave population as large as possible (Wright, 1993). Yet in many Latin American nations, this person would be
considered white. In Brazil, the term black is reserved for someone with no European (white) ancestry at all. If we
followed this practice in the United States, about 80% of the people we call “black” would now be called “white.”
With such arbitrary designations, race is more of a social category than a biological one.
 10.2 The Meaning of Race and Ethnicity 333

President Barack Obama had an African father and a white mother. Although his ancestry is equally black and white, Obama

considers himself an African American, as do most Americans. In several Latin American nations, however, Obama would be

considered white because of his white ancestry.

Steve Jurvetson – Barack Obama on the Primary – CC BY 2.0.

A third reason to question the biological concept of race comes from the field of biology itself and more
specifically from the studies of genetics and human evolution. Starting with genetics, people from different races
are more than 99.9% the same in their DNA (Begley, 2008). To turn that around, less than 0.1% of all the DNA in
our bodies accounts for the physical differences among people that we associate with racial differences. In terms
of DNA, then, people with different racial backgrounds are much, much more similar than dissimilar.

Even if we acknowledge that people differ in the physical characteristics we associate with race, modern
evolutionary evidence reminds us that we are all, really, of one human race. According to evolutionary theory,
the human race began thousands and thousands of years ago in sub-Saharan Africa. As people migrated around
the world over the millennia, natural selection took over. It favored dark skin for people living in hot, sunny
climates (i.e., near the equator), because the heavy amounts of melanin that produce dark skin protect against
severe sunburn, cancer, and other problems. By the same token, natural selection favored light skin for people who
migrated farther from the equator to cooler, less sunny climates, because dark skins there would have interfered
with the production of vitamin D (Stone & Lurquin, 2007). Evolutionary evidence thus reinforces the common
humanity of people who differ in the rather superficial ways associated with their appearances: we are one human
species composed of people who happen to look different.
334 Sociology

Race as a Social Construction

The reasons for doubting the biological basis for racial categories suggest that race is more of a social category
than a biological one. Another way to say this is that race is a social construction, a concept that has no objective
reality but rather is what people decide it is (Berger & Luckmann, 1963). In this view race has no real existence
other than what and how people think of it.

This understanding of race is reflected in the problems, outlined earlier, in placing people with multiracial
backgrounds into any one racial category. We have already mentioned the example of President Obama. As
another example, the famous (and now notorious) golfer Tiger Woods was typically called an African American
by the news media when he burst onto the golfing scene in the late 1990s, but in fact his ancestry is one-half Asian
(divided evenly between Chinese and Thai), one-quarter white, one-eighth Native American, and only one-eighth
African American (Leland & Beals, 1997).

Historical examples of attempts to place people in racial categories further underscore the social constructionism
of race. In the South during the time of slavery, the skin tone of slaves lightened over the years as babies were
born from the union, often in the form of rape, of slave owners and other whites with slaves. 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 (Staples, 1998). Litigation over race continued long past the days of slavery. In a relatively
recent example, Susie Guillory Phipps sued the Louisiana Bureau of Vital Records in the early 1980s to change
her official race to white. Phipps was descended from a slave owner and a slave and thereafter had only white
ancestors. Despite this fact, she was called “black” on her birth certificate because of a state law, echoing the
“one-drop rule,” that designated people as black if their ancestry was at least 1/32 black (meaning one of their
great-great-great grandparents was black). Phipps had always thought of herself as white and was surprised after
seeing a copy of her birth certificate to discover she was officially black because she had one black ancestor about
150 years earlier. She lost her case, and the U.S. Supreme Court later refused to review it (Omi & Winant, 1994).

Although race is a social construction, it is also true, as noted in an earlier chapter, that things perceived as real
are real in their consequences. Because people do perceive race as something real, it has real consequences. Even
though so little of DNA accounts for the physical differences we associate with racial differences, that low amount
leads us not only to classify people into different races but to treat them differently—and, more to the point,
unequally—based on their classification. Yet modern evidence shows there is little, if any, scientific basis for the
racial classification that is the source of so much inequality.

Ethnicity

Because of the problems in the meaning of race, many social scientists prefer the term ethnicity in speaking
of people of color and others with distinctive cultural heritages. In this context, ethnicity refers to the shared
social, cultural, and historical experiences, stemming from common national or regional backgrounds, that make
subgroups of a population different from one another. Similarly, an ethnic group is a subgroup of a population
with a set of shared social, cultural, and historical experiences; with relatively distinctive beliefs, values, and
 10.2 The Meaning of Race and Ethnicity 335

behaviors; and with some sense of identity of belonging to the subgroup. So conceived, the terms ethnicity and
ethnic group avoid the biological connotations of the terms race and racial group and the biological differences
these terms imply. At the same time, the importance we attach to ethnicity illustrates that it, too, is in many ways
a social construction, and our ethnic membership thus has important consequences for how we are treated.

The sense of identity many people gain from belonging to an ethnic group is important for reasons both good and
bad. Because, as we learned in Chapter 6 “Groups and Organizations”, one of the most important functions of
groups is the identity they give us, ethnic identities can give individuals a sense of belonging and a recognition of
the importance of their cultural backgrounds. This sense of belonging is illustrated in Figure 10.1 “Responses to
“How Close Do You Feel to Your Ethnic or Racial Group?””, which depicts the answers of General Social Survey
respondents to the question, “How close do you feel to your ethnic or racial group?” More than three-fourths said
they feel close or very close. The term ethnic pride captures the sense of self-worth that many people derive from
their ethnic backgrounds. More generally, if group membership is important for many ways in which members of
the group are socialized, ethnicity certainly plays an important role in the socialization of millions of people in the
United States and elsewhere in the world today.
Figure 10.1 Responses to “How Close Do You Feel to Your Ethnic or Racial Group?”

Source: Data from General Social Survey, 2004.

A downside of ethnicity and ethnic group membership is the conflict they create among people of different ethnic
groups. History and current practice indicate that it is easy to become prejudiced against people with different
ethnicities from our own. Much of the rest of this chapter looks at the prejudice and discrimination operating today
in the United States against people whose ethnicity is not white and European. Around the world today, ethnic
conflict continues to rear its ugly head. The 1990s and 2000s were filled with “ethnic cleansing” and pitched
battles among ethnic groups in Eastern Europe, Africa, and elsewhere. Our ethnic heritages shape us in many
336 Sociology

ways and fill many of us with pride, but they also are the source of much conflict, prejudice, and even hatred, as
the hate crime story that began this chapter so sadly reminds us.

Key Takeaways

• Sociologists think race is best considered a social construction rather than a biological category.
• “Ethnicity” and “ethnic” avoid the biological connotations of “race” and “racial.”

For Your Review

1. List everyone you might know whose ancestry is biracial or multiracial. What do these individuals consider
themselves to be?
2. List two or three examples that indicate race is a social construction rather than a biological category.

References

Begley, S. (2008, February 29). Race and DNA. Newsweek. Retrieved from http://www.newsweek.com/blogs/lab-
notes/2008/02/29/race-and-dna.html.

Berger, P., & Luckmann, T. (1963). The social construction of reality. New York, NY: Doubleday.

Leland, J., & Beals, G. (1997, May 5). In living colors: Tiger Woods is the exception that rules. Newsweek 58–60.

Omi, M., & Winant, H. (1994). Racial formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (2nd ed.).
New York, NY: Routledge.

Painter, N. I. (2010). The history of white people. New York, NY: W. W. Norton.

Smedley, A. (1998). “Race” and the construction of human identity. American Anthropologist, 100, 690–702.

Staples, B. (1998, November 13). The shifting meanings of “black” and “white,” The New York Times, p. WK14.

Stone, L., & Lurquin, P. F. (2007). Genes, culture, and human evolution: A synthesis. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Wright, L. (1993, July 12). One drop of blood. The New Yorker, pp. 46–54.