Question

Are our racial categories and how we assign race accurate and authentic reflections of biology and how groups of people with a shared phenotype or phenotypic characteristics are related? In other words, is there biological reality to our racial categories? Why or why not? What do racial classifications reflect?

Answer 1

A race is a grouping of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into categories generally viewed as distinct by society. The term was first used to refer to speakers of a common language and then to denote national affiliations. By the 17th century the term began to refer to physical (phenotypical) traits.

Scientists have actually been saying for quite a while that race, as biology, doesn't exist - that there's no biological basis for race. And that is in the facts of biology, the facts of non-concordance, the facts of continuous variation, the recentness of our evolution, the way that we all commingle and come together, how genes flow, and perhaps especially in the fact that most variation occurs within race versus between races or among races, suggesting that there's no generalizability to race.

We all live in a racialized society. And individuals of color are exposed to it more obviously, with more virulence, more force, than anybody is. Racism rests in part on the idea that race is biology; it is based on biology. So, the biology becomes an excuse for social differences. The social differences become naturalized in biology. It's not that our institutions cause differences in mortality; it's that there really are biological differences between the races.

So, basically race is just a term that society has come up to classify people of similar phenotypical traits and there is no such biological explanation to it. Having different phenotypes and different ways of living is just a part of evolution.