Race

Question 1

Who was the first natural philosopher to use the term “race” in a scientific application?

Answer 1

Buffon

Question 2

Who was the first natural philosopher to divide up humans into geographic varieties of different color, but did NOT use the term “race”

Answer 2

Linnaeus

Question 3

Linnaeus’s descriptions show that the same racial stereotypes have been used with us for three centuries

Answer 3

• skin color
• medical temperament
• posture
• physical traits
• behavior
• clothing
• form of government

Question 4

The ideas of Buffon and Linnaeus got smooshed into the concept of____

Answer 4

race as a geographic variant

Question 5

How has physical anthropology contributed to race?

Answer 5

• the field of physical anthropology has a long history of attempts to justify racism scientifically
• one preoccupation was determining the number of races
• a related aim was to rank the races in order of how “evolved” they were

Question 6

Polygenism

Answer 6

• The idea that the different human races had different evolutionary origins
• races as different species

Question 7

Monogenism

Answer 7

The idea that all humans share a single common origin

Question 8

Race according to Darwin is polygenism…

Answer 8

“The diversity… shows that they graduate into each others, and that it is hardly possible to discover clear distinctive characters between them”

Question 9

The classical rate concept:

Answer 9

A geographic variants/sub-species/species of Homo

The groups are defined by physical characteristics:
- especially skin color
- hair color and texture
- eye color and shape
- other facial features (nose and lip shape)

The groups are discrete
The groups are stable
The groups are deterministic

Question 10

The scientific pursuit of race in the 18th and 19th centuries led to the establishment of the Eugenics movement, “Social Darwinism,” and the Nazi party

Answer 10

True

Question 11

Human variation is not discrete

Answer 11

• There are no biological markers that appear in all members of one race and no members of another race
• the phenotypic features typically associated with race vary continuously
• the allele frequencies and genetic variation that human biologists study also vary continuously

Question 12

“There are no races, there are only clines.”

Answer 12

Livingstone (1962)

Question 13

Racial groups are not stable

Answer 13

• the number of groups has never been agreed on
• people racialize groups for the purpose of discrimination
  (example of Italian and Irish immigrants in the US)
• part of what is meant with the concept of “race as a cultural construct”
• the biological traits used to define groups are not fixed

Question 14

What was used to show that southern Italians were like Africans

Answer 14

Head measurements

Question 15

Boas challenged the idea that racial types were fixed with studies of American immigrants

Answer 15

He showed that measurements like cephalic index and facial width used to define racial groups changed between immigrants and their first-generation descendants

Question 16

Researchers recently showed that genome of living Europeans is a mix of ____

Answer 16

three ancient groups

Question 17

Human variation has always been______

Answer 17

continuous and changing

Question 18

This research highlights how

Answer 18

• the genetic signature of a population is a snapshot in time
• populations living in those same places didn’t always have that same genetic signature
• the genetic signature of people living in a place changes over generations

Question 19

An example of concordance between phenotype and genetic variation

Answer 19

• I can look at your skin color and guess your genotype

FALSE

Question 20

Human phenotypic and genetic variation can be NON-concordant

Answer 20

different phenotypic traits can have different distributions
- also genotypes and phenotypes can have different distributions

Question 21

An example of phenotypic NON-concordance

Answer 21

Where darkly pigmented skin is present with lightly pigmented hair

Question 22

There are biological differences among people and _____

Answer 22

they are geographically patterned

Question 23

The classical concept of race springs external

Answer 23

• present in the writings of Linnaeus in 1700s
• present in the Eugenicists/Social Darwinists in late 1800 and early 1900s
• present in the 20teens in A Troublesome Inheritance
• there are a number of discrete races
• these are “proven” by science
• these groups are associated with particular abilities

Question 24

The “Anthropological Genetic Present”

Answer 24

• A time sometime in the mid-15th century before transoceanic European conquest, slave trade, and colonialism when we can be certain about what human variation was like
• “… allows us to talk about race, without talking about racism”

Question 25

Humans distinguish themselves culturally

Answer 25

“… that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society”
- in other words, as the myriad things that we key on to differentiate “us” from our neighbors, “them”
- Recognizing modern humans in the fossil record is a matter of anatomically vs. behaviorally modern humans
- this is part of what it means for a group to be culturally constituted or culturally constructed… it is a grouping defined by culture
- degree of cultural distinction doesn’t always map onto the degree of genetic distinction

Question 26

Boas challenged the idea that racial types were fixed with studies of American immigrants

Answer 26

• he showed that measurements like cephalic index and facial width used to define racial groups changed between immigrants and their first-generation descendants
• introduced the idea that race and culture are separate entities

Question 27

TO understand race properly, we must:

Answer 27

• appreciate that it is a bicultural category
• the result of a negotiation between patterns of difference and perceptions of otherness
• sameness vs. otherness

Question 28

There is NO set number of races

Answer 28

Arbitrary

Question 29

Racial groups can encompass different things

Answer 29

• The Jewish race: Religious group
• The Teutonic or Nordic race: Geographic group
• The German race: Language or national group
• The White race: morphological group

Question 30

Is Hispanic a race?

Answer 30

NO; it is an ethnicity

Question 31

How is race and ancestry different?

Answer 31

Race is a social construct that categorizes people based on physical characteristics, while ancestry refers to a person’s familial or genetic background. While race is often used to make assumptions about individuals, ancestry provides a more specific and accurate understanding of a person’s heritage and lineage

Question 32

Forensic anthropologists can take measurements from a skull and guess whether it. came from a Black American or White American with about 80-85% accuracy

Answer 32

ANCESTRY

Question 33

Whether you find support for races in biology is a matter of confirmation bias

Answer 33

True

Question 34

Races are NOT populations

Answer 34

True

Question 35

Population

Answer 35

Group of individuals more likely to reproduce with one another than individuals outside of that group
- geographic component
- cultural component
- time component

Question 36

Deme

Answer 36

An ecological and social unit in nature
- another word for race?

Question 37

Boas

Answer 37

• Franz Boas that race is primary and that racism arises from conflict between races and can be mitigated primarily through race mixture (1921)