Race04.08.14Race is a Myth Concept of race is largely socially constructed Race A group of people who share a set of characteristics typically, but not always physical ones Said to share a common blood line Concept of race has some biological element, but also attached to social characteristics The Early Days Race in the early modern world was often based on biblical or religious definitions of race Got different definitions depending on where you were European explorers explained the genetic differences by interweaving them into their holy scriptures Africans descend from the Ham, cursed in Genesis 9 Ham’s descendants cursed because his sons walked in on him changing Scientific Racism The Enlightenment moved the world towards SCIENCES and the western definition of race adjusted accordingly Scientific Racism describes theories of race from the 18th century Theories linked racial differences to biological explanations rather than biblical ones Physical features were the most common biological element Phrenology Science of head bumps Shape and bumps on one’s head were linked to psychological temperament Leading pseudoscience in the 1800’s Dr. Gaul became a sensation Mark Twain was a great debunker Walt Whitman great supporter Originally was a manual pseudoscience Machine build to read bumps on heads, prints out overview of personality Got linked to race really quickly Leads to racial classification based on skull measurements Inferior race (to the Europeans) always referred to as drunken monkeys Cultures create this Social Darwinism Survival of the Fittest All races=same species Some races were more evolved, better fit to survive or rule others Eugenics Pseudoscience that links social and psychological temperament to bloodlines H. H. Goddard argued that immigrants were lesser than native born Americans due to their test scores Nativism gained social support during this period (19th century into the early 20th century) Essentially the idea that saw humans in the same way that breeders saw dogs Desirable traits passed on when you breed two certain humans together 20th Century Anti-Semitism Hatred/discrimination of the Jews Brings about some shifts in the common classifications of raceRace04.08.14 Nazi’s update eugenics and bring back classification by racial measurement in order to identify Jews In America in the mid 20th century, they focused on hard lined differences between races based on blood One Drop Rule The belief that one drop of black blood made a person black Tied to laws related to miscegenation Miscegenation (the interbreeding of people considered to be of different racial types) Multicultural marriage Dated, politically charged term Laws against intermarriage overturned by Loving v Virginia, 1967 Race or Ethnicity? Often used interchangeable but are separate things Race Externally imposed Involuntary Hierarchal Exclusive Unequal Ethnicity Voluntary Self-Defined Non-Hierarchal Fluid Cultural and Planar The US has thousands of different ethnic groups Sometimes they are
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