social construction of race essay

Social Construction of Race: Examples, Definition, Criticism

The social construction of race is a sociological concept that holds that the category of race is defined in language and culture rather than objective or biological fact (Gergen, 2015).

It emphasizes that race is not a biological fact, but rather a socially constructed concept that is constructed differently across different societies and cultures, and that can change over time.

From this perspective, society is seen as the source of racial categories. To exemplify this model, scholars have shown how the racial category of “white” has change over time. Whereas once Italians were considered non-whites, they tend to be seen as white people today.

Critics, however, argue that the idea that identity categories like race are “socially constructed” lacks any basis in science and fails to acknowledge biological differences between racial groups.

How is Race a Social Construct?

A social construct is a category that is primarily defined socially. Often, we consider gender, social class, and beauty to be ideas that are constructed by society.

The simplest way to understand this idea is to compare current ideas about categories to past ideas about the same things.

For example, 150 years ago, the idea of ideal beauty was different to today. There was a time when plump women were seen as the epitome beautiful because it was a sign that they were wealthy and had good taste for cuisine!

We can then look at this idea for social categories that we tend to believe to be more biological, such as race and gender.

For example, the social idea of a woman as ‘property’ or incapable of leadership was once normal but is now entirely unacceptable. Here, gender as a social construct changed, and now our idea of what a woman is (and is not) has changed (Butler, 2004).

For race, we can look at the era of slavery in the USA. A mere 200 years ago, African-Americans were literally seen as unintelligent and property with the same status as animals. Clearly, the concept of an African-American in the public imagination today versus back then is completely different (Burr, 2015).

Here, we can see that the idea of an African American has been socially constructed , and this social construct has changed over time.

Racialization: From Skin Pigmentation to Moral Capacity

Many scholars argue that race is one of the most important social categories by which arbitrary social hierarchies are created.

The argument is that skin pigmentation, geographical location, and culture were used as key ways to classify people into racialized groups – black, white, etc.

This categorization is seen to be somewhat arbitrary because there are more differences between people within races than across races. Why were intelligence, height, skill, age, or body weight not used as categories for constructing hierarchies instead of skin color?

As Feldman et al. (2022) argue:

“Race is a recent human invention, a social construct designed to divide members of a society into a hierarchy of social, economic, and political advantage or disadvantage based on a set of randomly selected normal human variations in phenotype.” (Feldman et al., 2022)

This isn’t to say that there weren’t physical differences in ethnic groups throughout history, but rather than the idea of race as a key way to construct social hierarchies and prejudices is relatively new in human history.

History shows that choosing race as a key way to produce social heirarchies and prejudices has led to devastating damage to hundreds of millions of people. The effects of the racialization of society continues to this day.

Thus, scholars today attempt to explore how normal variations in phenotype were used to construct race categories that extended beyond just minor physical variations and arbitrarily superimposed ideas about intellect and morality onto social ideas about racial groups:

“The ideology of race became a means of maintaining a social system that stratified people based on physical appearance and assigned individuals from each racial group with inherent cognitive, emotional, physical, behavioral, and moral characteristics, which were ultimately adopted as societal beliefs.” (Morukian, 2022)

Interestingly, a lot of the research on the social construction of disability directly follows-on from this logic.

Note that there are arguments against this perspective, e.g. from medical scientists who explore the unique healthcare disparities across racial categories – see the criticisms section at the end of this piece.

Social Construction of Race Examples

• Racial stereotyping – The central way of exploring social construction of race is to examine the stereotypes that exist in the social imaginary. As stereotypes about racial categories change, the very definition of those categories change. As a result, the ways people interact with racial groups also change, which dramatically affects the lives those people can live.
• Italians as whites – Interesting historical research by Dewhurst (2008) has demonstrated how Italians were not seen as white people in early colonial Australia. As a result, they faced increased discrimination. Over time, as Italian-Australians assimilated and influx of darker-skinned migrants arrived, Italians slowly became included in the category of whiteness in Australian discourse.
• African Americans – Whereas in the 18th and early 19th Centuries, African Americans were considered in parts of the USA as the property of whites, lacking legal rights, and being seen as lesser humans. Over time, thankfully, African-American civil rights have been embraced as social construction of African Americans has changed significantly.
• Orientalism – Famous postcolonial scholar Edward Said wrote in Orientalism that Westerners socially construct people Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Pacific in simplistic and stereotypical ways. They were seen as backward, simple, irrational, and exotic. Over time, as people have increased their understanding of other cultures, this paternalistic perspective has been tempered, leading to a change in the social construction of nonwhite people.
• Police encounters with black people – Most Western nations have reported disproportionately negative encounters between the police and people of color. Often, but not always, this is based on police stereotypes of black people as untrustworthy or criminal. Were people of color socially constructed in a more positive way in dominant discourse, these encounters may change over time.
• Racialized langauge – The way people are spoken about in media, movies, news, etc. affects how they are socially constructed. 150 years ago, the ways people of color were talked about were horrific by today’s standards. That language helped construct in our social imaginary negative racial stereotypes that worked to construct people of color as a particular type of people.

How Race is Socially Constructed (Still!)

According to poststructural theorists, race is socially constructed whenever it is spoken about. It is through speaking about a race category – repeatedly by many people – that the category is defined and re-defined.

Key ways in which we speak about, and therefore construct, race, include:

• Language – The words we use, the phrases, and the metaphors employed in society all subtly send messages about what to expect of a racial group before you even encounter them.
• Historical Events – The social construction of race can be changed through important historical events. For example, the key events of the Civil Rights era, and the activism of African Americans and allies to change how being black is seen in America, caused a shift in American social understandings of people of color in America.
• Media – Media, including television, movies, and news, all affect how we think about racial groups. Continued negative stereotypes or negative depiction of people of color on media help to perpetuate prejudicial perceptions. Furthermore, the fact media narratives center the experiences of white people contines to caste whites as heroes and non-whites as irrelevant or dehumanized.
• Discourse – Discourse is a term to describe the social narratives that are repeated over and over again until they are seen as natural. Normative racialized discourse is repeated everywhere we look (see also: discourse analysis ).

The way race is socially constructed changes upon two axes:

• Time – Across generations, definitions of racial groups change, and so too do our cross-racial interactions.
• Culture – Social constructs also change across cultures. Different cultures may perceive different racial groups in different ways (so, in this case, we can consider race to be culturally constructed )

Criticisms of the Social Construction of Race

1. race is a biological reality.

If we took a purely biological perspective on the issue of race, it becomes clear that there are clear biological differences between people that can be categorized under scientific categories of race.

Examples of biological differences include skin pigmentation, facial features, height, and susceptibility to certain diseases. These features are hereditary and biological fact (Burr, 2015).

As a result, many people – particularly in the hard sciences – contest the notion of social construction of race .

The primary argument against this criticism is that there are more biological differences within races than between races. No matter the race, humans share a significant majority of features, and race is but one way to categorize and dissect society. Despite this, societies have gotten very hung up on racial categories as a way to divide and discriminate (Smedley & Smedley,. 2005).

Furthermore, the biological categorization of race in medical science is not fixed, either. As science progresses and changes, so too do the definitions of the categories presented in scientific literature.

2. The Social Constructionist Perspective Detracts from Individual Experiences of Racialized People

Many racialized groups believe that their race is a fixed and essential feature of how they self-identify. For example, the unique experience of being Black in America is something many people choose to celebrate.

For these people, a claim that their race is socially constructed may detract from their experience of identity, much in the same way that claiming homosexuality is socially constructed might undermine an LGBTQI+ person’s claim that their sexuality is an inherent part of who they are (Smedley & Smedley,. 2005)..

Nevertheless, most scholars of social constructionism – whose research comes from a symbolic interactionist, postcolonialist , postmodernist, or poststructuralist perspective – tend to hold both that race is a social construct and that a person’s socially constructed race is a part of that person’s lived experience.

Therefore, they tend to examine how a person has been racialized (their race has been socially constructed, often against their will), and then go on to examine how those people relate to, embrace, subvert, and utilize this social construction as part of their identity (Here’ we’re going deep into postmodernism – for more, see my article on postmodernism here ).

Why Study the Social Construction of Race?

If we were to proceed from the premise that race is socially constructed, several lines of academic inquiry are opened up that have important implications.

Most importantly, the knowledge that race is socially constructed opens up opportunities to explore ways to re-construct race in more socially equitable ways.

For example, scholars will often examine how race is constructed in movies and, seeing inequities, advocate for more inclusive representation. This advocacy has made headway in recent years with, as but one example, CBC reality shows committing to a 50% people of color cast for all future seasons.

The idea that race is socially constructed is based on the premise that the definitions of all social categories – including race, gender, and even disability – are socially and culturally mediated. Moving from this premise, scholars can explore how the way we define people can marginalize, normalize, include, or exclude people within society.

Nevertheless, the notion of social constructionism has received significant pushback in recent years, with people arguing that this perspective is undermining reality – i.e. that race is real and we can find objective definitions of racial categories that can last the test of time and, perhaps more importantly, help scientists and researchers focus on improving the health outcomes of people from disadvantaged racial groups.

Read Next: The Social Construction of Childhood

Burr, V. (2015). Social constructionism. New York: Routledge.

Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender . Cambridge: Routledge.

Dewhirst, C. (2008). Collaborating on whiteness: representing Italians in early White Australia. Journal of Australian Studies , 32 (1), 33-49. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/14443050801993800  

Feldman, H. M., Blum, N. J., Elias, E. R., Jimenez, M., & Stancin, T. (2022). Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics E-Book . Elsevier Health Sciences.

Gergen, K. J. (2015). An invitation to social construction . An Invitation to Social Construction. London: Sage Publications.

Morukian, M. (2022). Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for Trainers: Fostering DEI in the Workplace . American Society for Training and Development.

Said, E. (1978). Orientalism . London: Sage.Smedley, A., & Smedley, B. D. (2005). Race as biology is fiction, racism as a social problem is real: Anthropological and historical perspectives on the social construction of race. American psychologist , 60 (1), 16. doi: https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0003-066X.60.1.16

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Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

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Race and racial identity are social constructs.

Angela Onwuachi-Willig , a professor of law at the University of Iowa College of Law, is the author of "According to Our Hearts : Rhinelander v. Rhinelander and the Law of the Multiracial Family."

Updated September 6, 2016, 5:28 PM

Race is not biological. It is a social construct. There is no gene or cluster of genes common to all blacks or all whites. Were race “real” in the genetic sense, racial classifications for individuals would remain constant across boundaries. Yet, a person who could be categorized as black in the United States might be considered white in Brazil or colored in South Africa.

Unlike race and racial identity, the social, political and economic meanings of race, or rather belonging to particular racial groups, have not been fluid.

Like race, racial identity can be fluid. How one perceives her racial identity can shift with experience and time, and not simply for those who are multiracial. These shifts in racial identity can end in categories that our society, which insists on the rigidity of race, has not even yet defined.

As I explain in my book " According to Our Hearts ," whites in interracial black-white marriages or relationships frequently experience a shift in how they personally understand their individual racial identity. In a society where being white (regardless of one’s socioeconomic class background or other disadvantages) means living a life with white skin privileges — such as being presumed safe, competent and noncriminal — whites who begin to experience discrimination because of their intimate connection with someone of another race, or who regularly see their loved ones fall prey to racial discrimination, may begin to no longer feel white. After all, their lived reality does not align with the social meaning of their whiteness.

That all said, unlike race and racial identity, the social, political and economic meanings of race, or rather belonging to particular racial groups, have not been fluid. Racial meanings for non-European groups have remained stagnant. For no group has this reality been truer than African-Americans. What many view as the promising results of the Pew Research Center’s data on multiracial Americans, with details of a growing multiracial population and an increasing number of interracial marriages, does not foreshadow as promising a future for individuals of African descent as it does for other groups of color.

Unlike their multiracial peers of Asian and Native American ancestry who tend to view themselves as having more in common with monoracial whites than with Asians or Native Americans, respectively, multiracial adults with a black background — 69 percent of whom say most people would view them as black — experience prejudice and interactions in ways that are much more closely aligned with members of the black community. In fact, the consequences of the social, political and economic meanings of race are so deep that my co-author Mario Barnes and I have argued that whites who find themselves discriminated against based on racial proxies such as name (for example, Lakisha or Jamal), should have actionable race discrimination claims based on such conduct. In sum, the fact that race is a social construct, defined by markers such as skin color, hair texture, eye shape, ancestry, identity performance and even name, does not mean that racial classifications are free of consequence or tangible effects.

More than 50 years ago, Congress enacted the most comprehensive antidiscrimination legislation in history, the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Half a century later in 2015, the same gaps in racial inequality remain or have grown deeper. Today, the unemployment rate for African-Americans remains more than double that for whites, public schools are more segregated now than they were in the 1950s and young black males are 21 times more likely to be shot and killed by the police than their white male peers. Even a white fourth-grade teacher in Texas, Karen Fitzgibbons, openly advocated for the racial segregation of the 1950s and 1960s on her Facebook page.

Where will we be 50 years from now? Need I answer that question? It definitely won't be in a post-racial society.

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Social Construction of Race in the United States Essay

Introduction, racialism in the usa, view of race in brazil, language affects, social construction, concluding remark.

Race, one of the significant inventions of 18th Century, categorizes people on the bases of some biological traits. Moreover, it is a social outlook that artificially divides people into different groups based on characteristics such as physical features (specifically skin color), personal characteristics, ancestral heritage, cultural affiliation, cultural history, ethnic classification, and “the social, economic and political needs of a society at a given period of time” (UC Davis, December, 2003).

Racial outlook in US focuses on the white-nonwhite dichotomy till 1967 there were prohibitions on marriages and sexual relation between a man and a woman of different races. The one drop rule (one drop of black blood makes someone black) let white people consider themselves eligible to “pass” as white when there arises questions of black people. But the present condition exposes a view that new immigrant groups have been successful to be White.

Skin color determines courses of racism in Brazil. In terms of class and status Brazilian system of racism is practiced. The proper observation of the practice of racism arises the question that how race gets constructed in classrooms when status and social class standard determines racism. Any inquiry led among the teachers will simply show that taking a student into account is categorized by “color prejudice” though teachers claim that individually they are away from this outlook as they often say, “For me, it doesn’t exist” (Barlett , p.8).

Student to student interactions also often shows prevalent state of racism. A racist acts in the classroom, e.g. nicknaming, by addressing a teacher or a student “”burnt ember,” “devil,” or “vulture.” Though occurred in a playful, joking manner creates an even greater problem and difficulty for the person being addressed, because if s/he takes the “joke” too seriously then that person is marginalized on socialatand point. So Brazilians who are darker in color are often forced to cooperate even under this type of discrimination without any argument. Again, speech and literacy shame unlike in the US darker people in Brazil experience speech as racialized, as a student in an NGO adult literacy class speaks out:

“I used to be ashamed to enter places. For example, if there was a party, I wouldn’t go, because I thought since I was black I couldn’t mix with whites.… For us, being black, and not knowing how to speak, and not knowing how to read you are isolated. Because you don’t know how to speak, other people don’t attention to you, because you don’t know how… to converse with people.” (Barlett , p.8)

Furthermore, Speech and literacy shame are not limited to race; while speaking, people sharply remain aware of their race, class, gender, rural/urban origin, regional origin, and other driving forces that affect the reception of their speech. It is also observed that a student has who has been ignored by his/her respective teacher has got dropped out of his school after such experience that address to them was associated with the varied consideration of being a whiter or wealthier South and Southeast. The worst case can be like a teacher is reinforcing literacy and speech shame by forcing students to read aloud and correcting them publicly. “Lack of recognition of connections between language” (Barlett, p.9) and power thus complicates any positive racial identification.

That race is a social construction does not mean denial of the obvious differences in skin color and physical characteristics that people normally manifest; rather, these physical differences should be understood as “an assortment of differences on a continuum of diverse physical possibilities rather than as reflecting the presence of innate genetic differences among people” (Fitchue, 1998, p.3). Different goals and objects come into the “play” when race is in talk about social experiences, identities or statuses (Otieno, July 07).

Race is a phenomenon as such is scientifically flawed and politically compromised. Some concludes that if race is socially constructed, it is an illusion that does not have any real existence. Again, it is an idea that the race is “a diffuse, massive, socially constructed social fact with real consequences in people’s lives”. Moreover, for the use of Omi and Winant’s famous formulation (1986:68)” (Otieno, July 07).… an unstable and ‘de-centered’ complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle ” (Otieno, July 07).

No single characteristic is ever found that shows the exclusive belonging to individuals in one racial group and not to any individuals in another racial group. Scientific status or the biological difference helps a scientist consider racism or race as something constructed by biological issues. This also often agrees race is biologically based prevalent in society, determining traits and abilities. Rockquemore and Brunsma (2002) write “racial identity is malleable, rooted in both macro and micro social processes, and that it has structurally and culturally defined parameters” (Shih, et.al., 2007).

A heightened awareness of race as social construction among multiracial individuals arises from the unique experiences as multiracial individuals often encounter during their upbringing (Shih, 2007, p.126). These experiences of multiracial individuals can bring into consideration when they are “grappling with issues surrounding their racial identity” (Shih, et.al., 2007, p.126). Viewing race as a social construction lets race to be less informative about an Individuals’ innate characteristics and traits, more likely to identify less strongly with their racial identity. Although, unidentification and viewing race as a social construction likely to be closely related, are not the similar of construction.

One can easily unidentify himself from an identity without believing that the identity is a social construction. Many of these experiences questions on racial differences. For instance, multiracial individuals encounter the home directions directly contradicting to the messages sent by the society barrierring between racial groups and the inescapable and inevitable nature of racial conflicts. Emphasizing race as a social construction and the de-emphasis of the biological basis of race can diminish the impact of race-based stereotypes (Shih, et.al., 2007, p.126).

When race is a social construction to an African American man, he identifies strongly himself with his race because he finds himself that his race affects his experiences in his social context. That is why, rejection of the biological basis of race can lessen one’s identification with the stereotyped identity. It has often been seen by the multiracial individuals that they are more likely to emphasize the social construction of race and this emphasis reduces vulnerability to racial stereotypes. Biological differences, e.g. skin colour; hair colour and texture; and eye, nose and lip shapes were thought to reflect distinctive biological and behavioral differences between people. Recent findings in genetics reject the scientific evolution of the concept of race.

“Advances in DNA research in the last 20 years demonstrate that, on average, 99.9 percent of the genetic features of humans are the same; of the remaining percentage that accounts for variation, differences within groups are larger than between groups; only six genes out of at least 100,000 that make up the human genome account for differences in skin colour; variations in colour are not discrete, but are distributed along a continuum, which reflects different levels of melanin in the skin; and many physical differences are due to environmental adaptations” (UNRISD, 2001). Racial ideas often influence discourses on “social integration or accommodation, encourage insular or xenophobic practices, and distort perceptions about rights and citizenship” (UNRISD, 2001).

It is suggested that education and encouraging people to be thoughtful about issues of race may be an important tool in the fight against the negative consequences of racism and prejudice. Government of every respective countries should assure effective protection and remedies against any acts created beceuse of racial discrimination. Organizing and mobilizing education and information relevant to the protection of all human rights can promot the issuses related to racism (Otieno, July 2007).

Article 12 of the Declaration on the Prevention of Genocide, adopted on 11 March 2005 by the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), “urges the international community to look at the need for a comprehensive understanding of the dimensions of genocide, including in the context of situations where economic globalization adversely affects disadvantaged communities, in particular indigenous peoples” (Otieno, July 07). Lack of effective enforcement of laws should be removed. States must prohibit racial discrimination and enact laws in order to protect citizens as it is clear that genocidal activities can be linked to the Government’s violations of human rights.

Bartlett, Lesley. (2002). How Schools Mediate the Social Construction of Race in Latin America. Policies and Reforms in Latin American Education Teachers College. Web.

Fitchue, M. Anthony. (1998). Alain LeRoy Locke on The Social Construction of Race. Third Annual National Conference (1998). People of Color in Predominantly White Institutions. University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Web.

Otieno, Alex. (07). Eliminating Racial Discrimination: The Challenges of Prevention and Enforcement of Prohibition. The Soliderity of People. 3132 TS Vol. 35. Web.

Shih, Margaret. et. al., (2007). The Social Construction of Race: Biracial Identity and Vulnerability to Stereotypes. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology. the American Psychological Association. Vol. 13, No. 2, 125–133. Web.

UC Davis. (2003). The Principles of Community. Web.

UNRISD, (2001). The Social Construction of Race and Citizenship. Racism and Public Policy Conference. Durban, South Africa. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2021, August 17). Social Construction of Race in the United States. https://ivypanda.com/essays/social-construction-of-race-in-the-united-states/

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Race as a social construction, we often hear that race is a social construction. but what does that mean.

Posted December 5, 2016 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

Trevor Noah , host of The Daily Show , recently released an autobiography entitled Born a Crime : Stories from a South African Childhood . As a biracial man born and raised in South Africa, he shares fascinating insights into how we racially categorize people and the consequences of such categorization.

He recounts how, as the son of a Black mother and a White father, his biracial status put in him a middle ground, considered “inferior” by half of his family and “superior” by the other half. After all, in South Africa, there have historically existed many gradations of whiteness and blackness as social categories, each of which comes with different social standing.

For instance, Noah describes how his Black grandmother was much less severe with him relative to his Black cousins, given his privileged status as half-White. He also explains how under the apartheid system one’s racial category or status could change, both socially and legally.

This is in sharp contrast to how race is conceptualized in the US, where the “one-drop rule” has long dominated. Although American culture recognizes the biracial category, people are generally considered Black (and treated as such) if they have descended from any Black relatives to any degree. That is, even a “drop” of Black blood has rendered someone Black (but even this varies depending on whether the perceiver is White or Black, among other factors).

As such, even being 1/16th Black historically resulted in your categorization as Black. (Incidentally, the Nazis held similar views, where having Jewish ancestry, even in a distant sense, categorized one as Jewish).

This is known as hypodescent , a process whereby a biracial person is categorized fully or primarily in terms of the lower status (or disadvantaged) social group. The fact that status plays a role in social categorization clearly demonstrates that categorization (e.g., as White, as Black) is a social construction.

Yet when I talk about race in class, it becomes apparent that students grapple with the notion of race as a social construction. Some will say, “But I can see race. I can see that you’re White, that she is Asian, and that he is Black." Others, including those in the media, are suspicious of the notion of race as a social construction, fearing that such ideas represent a left-wing ploy. A trick. A trap.

But recognizing race as a social construction does not make race less “real." Marriages are social constructions, but they have serious legal, cultural, and interpersonal implications. Oftentimes the social aspect is what makes a phenomenon so central to our lives.

So what do we mean by social construction in the racial context? Rather than draw on scientific or philosophical discussions of race and essentialism, my goal here is to describe some concrete examples that might help to elucidate what is meant by race as social construction.

Let’s start with President Barack Obama. When he was running for president, we witnessed a range of responses from the voters and pundits. To some, he was clearly “too Black." For others, he was clearly “not Black enough." Even within social groups, there were disagreements. For some Black Americans he was not Black enough because he did not descend from slavery in an American context (i.e., his father moved from Kenya).

The fact that there exists disagreement, whether between Whites and Blacks, or within Whites and Blacks, drives home the point of this article: Race is a social construction with no true or absolute biological basis. If we can disagree about whether someone is of Race X or Y, and if there are consensual rules for determining such designations (e.g., based on social status, slave history), and if such a designation can change over time or across cultures (e.g., US vs. South Africa), then we are dealing with a social construct, not a biological one. As a society we develop cultural rules about race and then we apply these rules when psychologically categorizing people.

Need more convincing? Let’s turn to some interesting science. Kemmelmeier and Chavez (2014), using a variety of different methods across studies, exposed White participants to a range of photos of Barack Obama. Cleverly, the researchers darkened or lightened the photos systematically. The task of the participant was to identify which photo reflected Obama’s true skin colour.

In both studies, those higher in symbolic racism (i.e., feeling resentment toward Black demands for equality; denial of anti-Black discrimination ) selected the darker photos to reflect his true colour, and this was true both before and after each election cycle. Interestingly, those with stronger identification as a Republican supporter also perceived Obama’s skin to be significantly darker, but this latter effect was observed only prior to the election, not after the election.

Think about that for a minute. Political partisanship predicted “how Black” Obama is, but only in the context of a political race where a Black man might subsequently take or retain power of the White House. In the words of the authors, “… partisan biases in the perception of skin tone are activated as a function of political intergroup conflict” (p. 149).

Put simply, Obama’s “blackness” was systematically determined by racial biases of the perceiver, by the political partisanship of the perceiver, and by the temporal proximity of the testing session to an election. These patterns reflect the social construction of race. If Obama were Black or biracial simply as a matter of biological race, we would not see such patterns, whereby his degree of Blackness is a moving target and a topic of debate. Obama is who he is, but people categorize him as more or less Black as a function of their own psychological processing. When the target stands still but his categorization “as X” or “as Y” moves, there is a reasonable conclusion: Categorization is a social construction with psychological roots.

And let’s keep in mind some basic differences between cultures in how they think about race. In the US, one has historically been considered “Coloured” (although that term is becoming increasingly disavowed) to the extent that one has Black ancestry.

In South Africa, “Coloured” refers to someone of mixed White-Black background, not someone of a Black-only background. In South Africa, therefore, Black is Black and Coloured is mixed White-Black. Comparing these countries, it is clear that being “Black” (or not) varies as a function of social and cultural conventions, not biology.

Obama is widely considered as Black in the US, but as Coloured (and higher status) when he steps off of Air Force One in South Africa. Prior to becoming an international symbol and one of the world’s most powerful men, he would have also been treated very differently as a result of being Black (US) or Coloured (South Africa). Again, race is a social construction, where societies generate informal or formal rules about what we see (i.e., perception) and how to act and treat others (i.e., discrimination).

Scientists generally do not recognize races as biologically meaningful. Yet scientists, including me, discuss race and describe the racial composition of our samples.

To be clear, I am not advocating that we ignore race. In fact, there are many dangers in ignoring race as a social topic. Race is “real." But race is socially real, not biologically real.

Socially important categories can be very real and meaningful, but arguably nonetheless arbitrary in nature. From a Social Dominance Theory perspective, “the arbitrary-set system is filled with socially constructed and highly salient groups based on characteristics such as clan, ethnicity, estate, nation, race, caste, social class, religious sect, regional groups, or any other socially relevant group distinction that the human imagination is capable of constructing” (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999, p. 33).

Like race, nations are arbitrary but real. What we call Belgium is not biologically or essentially Belgium; what is called Belgium is a region that the international community agrees is Belgium. It is socially constructed. It might not have the same boundaries in the future, and it certainly did not in the past. This doesn’t make Belgium unreal. On the contrary, it has very real meaning and is of psychological, political, and legal significance. But humans created it as a concept. Belgium itself has no essence in a biological sense, and race works much the same way.

As I’ve argued, the degree to which a person is categorized into a racial category can vary as a function of the social context (e.g., power differentials between groups; temporal proximity to elections), personal factors (e.g., racism in the perceiver; political partisanship in the perceiver), or an interaction between personal and social factors. And how the person personally identifies is yet another valid factor to consider (as is the case with sexual identity , a topic I may revisit in a future column). All of this renders “race” a social construction. We make it, we agree on it, we reward and punish people as a result of it.

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-december-5-2016-1.38… (for a lengthy interview with Trevor Noah).

Ho, A.K., Sidanius, J., Levin, D.T., & Banaji, M.R. (2011). Evidence for hypodescent and racial hierarchy in the categorization and perception of biracial individuals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100, 492-506. DOI: 10.1037/a0021562

Kemmelmeier, M., & Chavez, H.L. (2014). Biases in the perception of Barack Obama’s skin tone. Analyses of Social Issues and Policies, 14, 137-161. DOI: 10.1111/asap.12061

Sidanius, J., & Pratto, F. (1999). Social dominance: An intergroup theory of social hierarchy and oppression. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Gordon Hodson, Ph.D. is a professor at Brock University.

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The Impact of Race as a Social Construct

This essay about the constructed nature of race and its implications discusses how the concept, while often perceived as biologically rooted, is actually shaped by social, historical, and political forces. It highlights the documentary series “Race: The Power of an Illusion,” which reveals the lack of genetic basis for racial categories and traces the origins of racial thinking to justify inequalities. The essay explores the consequences of racial constructs, including disparities in education, healthcare, and justice, while acknowledging how these constructs also foster community and resistance against oppression. It argues for the importance of education in dismantling racial myths and promoting equity, emphasizing that recognizing race as a social construct is crucial for moving toward a more just and inclusive society. The essay underscores the need to view human diversity beyond the myths of racial difference, advocating for an approach that celebrates shared humanity and cultural richness.

How it works

The notion of ethnicity, often perceived as a biological determinant, is indeed a potent mirage sculpted by socio-cultural, historical, and political currents. This illusion, though abstract, yields tangible repercussions that pervade societies universally, molding perceptions, actions, and systemic frameworks. The documentary series “Ethnicity: The Potency of a Mirage” elucidates this intricate theme, uncovering how ethnicity has been fabricated and wielded to rationalize disparities and how its apparent authenticity impacts us collectively. This discourse probes the origins of ethnic constructs, their ramifications on civilization, and the imperative of deconstructing these divisive barriers.

Central to the issue is the realization that ethnicity lacks a genetic or empirical foundation. Historical testimony and genomic exploration attest that the diversities within purported ethnic cohorts are as consequential as those amidst them, dismantling the fallacy of discrete biological ethnicities. Nonetheless, the genesis of ethnicity as a concept served to legitimize imperial conquests, enslavement, and the subjugation of non-European populations by deeming them inherently inferior. Across epochs, these notions were enshrined into statutes and conventions, entrenching ethnic stratifications into societal tapestries.

The repercussions of ethnic constructs are profound and extensive. They have sculpted social dynamics, access to assets, and life prospects, frequently to the detriment of those categorized as belonging to particular ethnicities. Education, livelihood, healthcare, and legal systems evince stark disparities that often stem from ethnic biases and prejudice. Such imbalances are not innate but are the upshot of measures and norms that have systematically favored particular cohorts over others predicated on ethnicity.

The potency of the mirage of ethnicity also lies in its capacity to nurture identities and communities. While wielded as an instrument of disunion and oppression, the socio-cultural fabric of ethnicity has also facilitated the genesis of opulent cultural legacies, solidarity amidst marginalized factions, and endeavors for civil liberties and parity. The endeavor against ethnic injustice has precipitated momentous societal metamorphoses and strides toward parity, albeit the odyssey remains incomplete.

Acknowledging ethnicity as a socio-cultural construct constitutes the primary stride in disassembling its divisive potency. Education assumes a pivotal function in this endeavor, as it can elucidate the historical and societal origins of ethnicity, counter stereotypes, and foster comprehension and compassion amidst heterogeneous groups. Furthermore, policies aimed at redressing ethnic disparities must transcend colorblindness, which habitually disregards the lived experiences of prejudice, to actively disassemble systemic obstacles and foster equity.

In summation, “Ethnicity: The Potency of a Mirage” compels us to scrutinize and confront the entrenched preconceptions of ethnicity. By apprehending ethnicity as a mirage with substantive repercussions, we can commence disentangling the intricate fabric of social, economic, and political facets that perpetuate ethnic disparities. This awareness is indispensable for cultivating a more equitable and just civilization where individuals are not delimited by the capricious confines of ethnicity. As we progress, it is the shared humanity and the opulence of diverse heritages that ought to delineate our interactions, not the myths of ethnic disparity.

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10.2 The Meaning of Race and Ethnicity

Learning objectives.

• Critique the biological concept of race.
• Discuss why race is a social construction.
• Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of a sense of ethnic identity.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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 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

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

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.

Sociology Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

The Social Construction of Racism in the United States

by Coleman Hughes

In the 1980s, people all around America became convinced that day care centers were secretly practicing demonic ritual sex abuse on children. These allegations stayed in the national news for the better part of a decade. Hapless day care workers were falsely convicted of running sex rings. Evidence of their guilt was manufactured as necessary. In hindsight, this episode looks absurd. How could anyone have believed that there were Satanic day care centers throughout the country? Yet at the time, many reasonable people were swept up in the delusion—as were the prosecutors and elected officials who promised to put a stop to the fake problem. Such is the nature of moral panics. What looks like obvious absurdity from the outside seems totally reasonable to those on the inside.

Some moral panics are mysterious in origin. Others are the product of specific ideas. Since about 2014, we have been facing a new moral panic surrounding race, gender, and sexuality. Unlike Satanic day cares, this one is not a complete fabrication. Bigotry is real. Yet the public perception of bigotry has surpassed the reality to such an extent that it has become a moral panic. White supremacy is said to be rampant. Black people should fear for their lives when going for a jog, one New York Times op-ed argued.

Yet as political scientist Eric Kaufmann lays out in this paper, the public has a mistaken perception of how much racism exists in America today. This misperception is not only driven by cognitive biases such as the availability heuristic, it is also driven by ideas. Critical race theory and intersectionality—formerly confined to graduate seminars—have seeped into corporate America and Silicon Valley, as well as into many K–12 education systems. With their spread has come an increase in the misperception that bigotry is everywhere, even as the data tell a different story: racism exists, but there has never been less racism than there is now.

If America’s racial tensions ever heal, it will be because we were able to align our perceptions with our reality and leave moral panics at the door.

Executive Summary

This paper begins with a version of Tocqueville’s paradox:[ 1 ] at a time when measures of racist attitudes and behavior have never been more positive, pessimism about racism and race relations has increased in America.

Why? An analysis of a wide variety of data sources, including several new surveys that I conducted, suggests that the paradox is best explained by changes in perceptions of racism rather than an increase in the frequency of racist incidents. That is, ideology, partisanship, social media, and education have inclined Americans to “see” more bigotry and more racial prejudice than they previously did. This is true not only regarding the level of racism in society but even of their personal experiences. My survey findings suggest that an important part of the reported experience of racism is ideologically malleable. Reports of increased levels of racism during the Trump era, for example, likely reflect perception rather than reality—just as people have almost always reported rising violent crime when it has been declining during most of the past 25 years. In addition, people who say that they are sad or anxious at least half the time, whether white or black, are about twice as likely as others to say that they have experienced racism and discrimination.

None of this means that racism is an imaginary problem. However, efforts to reduce it should be based on strong empirical evidence and bias-free measures. The risks of overlooking racism are clear: injustice is permitted to persist and grow. Yet there are also clear dangers in overstating its presence. These go well beyond majority resentment and polarization. A media-generated narrative about systemic racism distorts people’s perceptions of reality and may even damage African-Americans’ sense of control over their lives.

Key Findings Include:

• Eight in 10 African-American survey respondents believe that young black men are more likely to be shot to death by the police than to die in a traffic accident; one in 10 disagrees. Among a highly educated sample of liberal whites, more than six in 10 agreed. In reality, considerably more young African-American men die in car accidents than are shot to death by police.
• Black Biden voters are twice as likely as black Trump voters to say that they personally experienced more racism under Trump than under Obama. Black Trump voters reported a consistent level of racism under both administrations. Black respondents who strongly agree that white Republicans are racist are 20–30 points more likely to say that they experience various personal forms of racism than African-Americans who strongly disagree that white Republicans are racist.
• Reading a passage from critical race theory author Ta-Nehisi Coates results in a significant 15-point drop in black respondents’ belief that they have control over their lives.
• A slight majority of African-Americans and whites overall felt that political correctness on race is demeaning to black people rather than necessary to protect them. Among blacks, the difference between liberals and conservatives was 3 points (51% of the liberals thought it was demeaning vs. 54% of the conservatives). Among whites, however, there was a nearly 20-point divide between liberals and conservatives (43% of the liberals thought it was demeaning vs. 62% of the conservatives).
• Liberal African-Americans with a college degree are nearly 30 points more likely to find a statement by a white person such as “I don’t notice people’s race” or “America is a colorblind society” offensive than African-Americans without degrees who identify as conservative. Among whites, the gap between liberals and conservatives is 50 points.
• When asked to choose between a future in which racially offensive remarks were so heavily punished as to be nonexistent and one where minorities were so confident that they no longer felt concerned about racial insults, black respondents overall preferred, by a 53%–47% margin, the resilience option. White liberals preferred the punitive option, by a 71%–29% margin; black liberals chose the second option by just 6 points, 53%–47%.
• In general, African-Americans’ opinion on race issues appears to be less affected by ideology and partisanship than white opinion. In a 2015 Pew survey, 20 points separated “very conservative” and “very liberal” African- Americans on whether racism is a very big problem. The gap between “very conservative” and “very liberal” whites was 65 points; the gap between “very conservative” and “very liberal” Hispanics and Asians was 40 points.
• Exposure to social media and other media appears to be related to survey respondents’ views of both the national prevalence of racism and their personal experience of it.

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Introduction

Is racism real or is it, to some significant degree, socially constructed? While it is important to be skeptical of social scientists who overstate the malleability of categories like race, there is no question that perception does play a role in how people view social reality. This paper uses survey data to make the case that racism in America lies, in significant measure, in the eyes of the beholder. This not only concerns people’s perceptions of the prevalence of racism in society but even of their personal experience.

In their landmark work, The Social Construction of Reality , Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann argued that the dominant ideology in society shapes the way people think about the social world, defining roles, norms, and expectations. Ideology is central to the social constructionist argument, defining right and wrong, and what constitutes a violation of moral “reality”; that is, the norms and social facts everyone “knows” to be true (even if they are not based on objective truth).[ 2 ]

The dominant ideology in today’s cultural institutions is what I have elsewhere termed left-modernism, a hybrid worldview that applies socialist theories of conflict to identity categories first developed by liberalism.[ 3 ] From liberalism comes the idea that majorities are often tyrannical while racial, religious, gender, or sexual minorities require protection. From socialism comes the notion that society is best understood as a struggle between oppressive and oppressed groups. Freudianism, with its focus on the subjective, has also shaped left-modernism through its focus on psychological sensitivity, which has fused with left-modernism’s outlook to produce demands not only for material but for therapeutic equality and safety.

Religions typically concentrate on a handful of totemic issues. For example, conservative Christian politics has, over time, focused on causes such as restricting the sale of alcohol, the teaching of evolution, or the provision of abortion. Left-modernism is instead centered around a trinity of totemic categories: race, gender, and sexuality. Race stands at the apex of the system, producing what John McWhorter concludes is a religion of antiracism.[ 4 ] For Jonathan Haidt, the sacralization of race, sexuality, and gender lies at the heart of the progressive worldview.[ 5 ] This means that it becomes difficult to objectively assess the scientific validity of claims made about disadvantaged identity groups, lest one transgress the sacred values of the ideology and even be perceived as having committed an act of blasphemy.

Moreover, racism itself is not a fixed term. While expanding the range of phenomena covered by a term like racism can make sense in some circumstances, we are arguably well past that point.

Given the prevalence of left-modernism in the elite institutions of society—universities, much of the media, large corporations, and foundations—there has been considerable cultural distortion in the definition of racism. Psychologist Nick Haslam calls the expanding meaning of clinical terms “concept creep,” which applies also to concepts such as bullying, abuse, trauma, and mental disorder. Left-modernism’s therapeutic ethos, combined with the centrality of race in its pantheon of sacred values, helps explain this “conceptual stretching” of racism.[ 6 ] For the writer Coleman Hughes, expanding the meaning of racism is part of an ideological project that seeks to heighten minority threat perceptions to underpin claims of harm that can justify silencing.[ 7 ] The endpoint of this logic is to criminalize such dissent as “hate.”[ 8 ]

The Media and Public Perception of Racism

It is well known that the media, with their ability to frame events and social trends, have an impact on public opinion. This is especially the case when it comes to the visibility and political prominence of certain issues, what political scientists call issue “salience.” For example, there is a close relationship in Europe between media coverage of immigration and salience—the number of people saying that immigration is the most important issue facing their country.

The same appears to be true for race. Gallup data show that the civil rights era of the 1950s and early 1960s, as well as the race riots in the late 1960s, saw the public salience of race spike ( Figure 1 ). The public salience of race then remained muted until 1992, when the Los Angeles riots, in the wake of Rodney King’s beating, sent questions of race to the top of 15% of the public’s priority lists. Since 2014, a series of events (including the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after the shooting death of Michael Brown by a police officer; and the election of Donald Trump) pushed the race issue above 10% salience. In 2020, despite the Covid-19 pandemic, the George Floyd/Black Lives Matter protests elevated race back to the top spot: it was named as the leading concern by nearly 20% of the public in mid-June 2020. This was the highest salience level recorded for race since the late 1960s, eclipsing the Rodney King spike.

Media events affect the prominence of issues of race and racism in the public consciousness, but they also shape how people evaluate the quality of race relations. Other Gallup data show that during 2001–14, nearly 70% of Americans said that relations between whites and blacks were good. After the Ferguson protests, this fell to 47%, hovered in the low 50s between 2015 and 2019, and has since tumbled to 44% following the BLM protests ( Figure 2 ).

The Decline of Racist Attitudes

The increasing pessimism over race relations stands in contrast to the steady, long-term liberalization among white Americans across a range of racial attitudes measured in the leading General Social Survey (GSS) since 1972. In the 1970s, for example, nearly 60% of white Americans agreed with the statement that blacks shouldn’t “push themselves where they’re not wanted.” This response had declined to 20% by 2002, when the question was discontinued. The share of white Americans who agree that it is permissible to racially discriminate when selling a home declined from 60% as late as 1980 to 28% by 2012.[ 9 ]

For decades, American National Election Studies (ANES) posed a question of whether minorities/ blacks should help themselves or whether the government should help them more. There was a gradual rise in support for government assistance to blacks during 1970–2016 of about a half-point on a seven-point scale.[ 13 ] Meanwhile, police killings of African-Americans declined by 60%–80% from the late 1960s to the early 2000s and have remained at this level ever since.[ 14 ] Racist attitudes and behaviors have sharply declined, though the problem has not been eradicated.

The Racism Paradox

The increasingly sour national mood on race relations in the U.S. may likely be related to the higher salience of race since the 2014 Ferguson protests. While it is too early to be definitive, the emergence and rapid spread of social media may account for this. Combined with smartphone citizen journalism, social media mean that knowledge of white-police-on-black-suspect violence is more likely to circulate widely, where it can ignite riots and boost the salience of the race question. Thus, even as the number of such incidents is declining, each event is more likely to be captured alive and to possess a higher media multiplier effect.

Evidence that social media may be shaping perceptions of racism is provided in Figure 4 , which shows that black respondents on social media in 2016 were considerably more likely to report experiencing discrimination than those not on social media. This is a statistically significant effect that holds when controlling for age, education, income, partisanship, ideology, gender, and contact with whites. On questions about whether black people have experienced people acting suspicious of them or thinking that they are not smart, the gap between those on social media and those not on it reaches as high as 20 points.

People who care passionately about an issue (or see it flagged in the media) tend to overestimate its prevalence. For example, Americans and Europeans routinely overestimate the population shares of minorities, immigrants, and Muslims while underestimating the white share. In France, the average person in 2016 thought that the country was 31% Muslim; the correct answer was 7.5%. In the U.S. and Canada, the same survey shows that people estimated their countries to be 17% Muslim, compared with the actual 1% and 3%, respectively. Anti-immigration whites overestimate more than liberal whites.[ 15 ] Meanwhile, minorities tend to overestimate their share of the population more than whites do because they extrapolate from their locale to the nation. Black respondents in a 2005 survey said that the U.S. was 38% black rather than the actual 12%, and Hispanics said that the country was 39% Hispanic rather than 13%.[ 16 ]

In terms of racial discrimination, a 2019 study asked people how many résumés a black person would have to send out to get a callback from an employer if a white applicant gets one callback for every 10 applications. It found that Democrats thought that a black person would have to send 26 résumés to get one callback, while Republicans said 17. The correct answer was 15. Overall, blacks were not significantly more likely than whites to overestimate discrimination: partisanship, rather than race, is what apparently led to misperceptions.[ 17 ]

Perceptions about trends over time are somewhat more accurate. In Western Europe, for example, concern about immigration is connected to actual immigration levels over time and tends to rise when inflows are high.[ 18 ] But this is not always the case. In the U.S., crime rates were flat between 1989 and the mid-1990s, and then fell every year until 2019. Unmoved, a majority of Americans in every year but two since 1989 said that crime had risen over the past year. In 2019, 64% of Americans said that crime had risen in the previous year, even though it had actually continued its gradual post-1990s decline.[ 19 ] Emotive issues that feature in the news affect people’s perceptions of the size of a problem.

The Great Awokening

Videos of interracial violence circulate on social media; yet this has not led to noticeably cooler feelings between America’s racial groups in ANES surveys.[ 20 ] Something distinctive has changed with respect to perceptions of racism since 2014 that cannot be explained solely by technological change.

Ideological shifts are an important independent factor to investigate when trying to explain the racism paradox. At the U.S. state level, Google searches for “racism” are highly correlated with searches for “sexism,” which is, in turn, correlated with the Democratic share of the vote. Liberal states such as Vermont tend to come out highest on both indices, while southern and mountain states score lowest. Searches for “racism,” in short, serve as a useful barometer of left-modernism.

While the salience of racism fluctuates with events, the use of the term “racist” and “racism” has increased in three waves since 1960. Figure 5 , based on big data from Google’s Ngram Viewer, tracks the popularity of terms in English-language books. It shows that the use of the term “racism” first rose sharply in the late 1960s, a time of New Left student activism. After reaching a plateau, it surged again and rose to a new level in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when political correctness and speech codes came into vogue. Then, around 2014, there was another upsurge, in tandem with the current period of left-modernist ferment. The use of terms such as racism (or racist/s) took off especially sharply in left-leaning media outlets such as Vox and the New York Times .[ 21 ]

A 2018 report, “Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape,” published by More in Common, found that “Progressive Activists,” who make up 8% of the U.S. population, are 3.5 times more active than the “exhausted majority” two-thirds of the population in posting political content on social media.[ 22 ] While the rise of social media, citizen journalism, and a surge in online partisan websites has been associated with what Matthew Yglesias calls the “Great Awokening,” it is not associated with right-wing populist voting, which is stronger among older and less educated voters who use social media platforms less.[ 23 ] Many left-modernist ideas have older roots in critical theory, but technological change helped left-modernists organize and spread new moral innovations, such as “microaggressions,” or causes, such as gender recognition.[ 24 ]

To what extent the most recent “Awokening” would have occurred in the absence of social media is an open question. Whatever the case, the Great Awokening has coincided with a large-scale shift to the left in attitudes toward questions of race, diversity, and immigration, especially among white liberals. Thus, partisanship and ideology increasingly affect perceptions of racism. The importance of ideological differences in perceptions of racism is shown in Figure 6 , which reveals that among white conservatives, there has been little to no increase since 1995 in the share who think that racism is a “big problem.” White liberals show the greatest increase, with white moderates in between. The post-2014 trend (see Figure 2) of perceiving worse relations between whites and blacks is, therefore, less a reflection of statistical reality than of rising consciousness of racism, notably among liberals.

Defying Reality by Stretching Perception

The split between liberals and conservatives in their perception of racism in society indicates that an individual’s ideology shapes his estimate of the size of the problem. Racism thus contains an important socially constructed component.

There are important reasons that egalitarians may find it especially difficult to adjust their perceptions of racism to the reality of its decline. As Alexis de Tocqueville remarked almost two centuries ago in his classic Democracy in America :

In a similar vein, Coleman Hughes, in a pathbreaking 2018 essay, remarks on Tocqueville’s paradox as it concerns racial liberalism in America: “It seems as if every reduction in racist behavior is met with a commensurate expansion in our definition of the concept. Thus, racism has become a conserved quantity akin to mass or energy: transformable but irreducible.”[ 26 ]

Tocqueville’s and Hughes’s observations have now been confirmed scientifically as a variant of a wider phenomenon known as “prevalence-induced concept change.” This takes place when people reframe reality to conserve a concept into which they have been socialized. Citing work by Harvard University’s Daniel Gilbert, British psychologist Peter Hughes (no relation to Coleman) writes:

Black Public Opinion

Much of the evidence about perceptions of racism so far comes from national samples, which are dominated by white respondents. Though sample sizes for African-Americans in such surveys are typically small and there are fewer black-only surveys, it is apparent that black opinion is characterized by a weaker ideological divide than exists within white opinion. Data from Pew, for example, show that among blacks, 75% of liberals, but also 55% of the smaller group of conservative blacks, say that discrimination makes it harder for blacks to get ahead ( Figure 7 ). By contrast, 17% of “very conservative” whites and 82% of “very liberal” whites agree. A modest 20-point partisan difference among blacks balloons to 65 points among whites. Since 2016, several surveys show that white liberals place to the left of minorities on questions of race, diversity, and immigration.[ 28 ]

There is also a substantially larger ideological gap among whites than blacks when it comes to viewing racism as a serious problem. Pew’s 2015 survey, profiled in Figure 8 , found that “very liberal” whites evince nearly as much concern over racism (76%) as African-Americans, while moderate (33%) and conservative (11%) whites view racism as a much less important problem. The ideological slope is greatest for whites, with over 60 points separating conservatives from “very liberal” whites. The incline is less steep among Asians and Hispanics and gradual among blacks, with “very liberal” and “very conservative” blacks only differing 20 points in their assessment that racism is a very big problem (64% vs. 84%).

Are White Republicans Racist?

Another way to appraise how partisanship can skew perceptions about race is to compare white and black responses to the “white Republicans are racist” and “white Democrats are racist” questions fielded in a survey that I conducted on Qualtrics during April 20–June 2, 2020 (see below, Original Surveys Conducted for This Report ).

Whites and blacks who self-identified as liberal were similar in their agreement that “white Republicans are racist” (64% of liberal blacks, 61% of liberal whites) and in their low level of agreement that “white Democrats are racist” (23% for black liberals, 21% for white liberals). The bigger racial difference was among conservatives, where 10% of white conservatives but 36% of black conservatives said that white Republicans are racist, a 26-point difference. When it comes to the statement “white Democrats are racist,” 38% of white conservatives agreed, but only 28% of black conservatives agreed.

Responses to this question among African-Americans, as will be explored below, are strongly associated with both national perceptions and reported personal experiences of racism.

Fatal Police Shootings

The likelihood of a young black man dying from a car accident is considerably higher than his being killed by police. Even among young men of all races being killed by police, shootings form only part of total killings.[ 29 ] Nevertheless, eight in 10 African-American respondents to the Qualtrics 2 survey (Nov. 20–Dec. 1, 2020) believed that young black men are more likely to be shot to death by the police than to die in a traffic accident.[ 30 ] Only one in 10 disagreed.

This belief, at variance with reality, is not the result of counting respondents who are unsure of the answer jumping one way: there is a “neither agree nor disagree” option, but it was chosen by only one in 10 people. Nor is it a matter of educational level. Among the survey’s noncollege graduates, 78% believe that police shooting are a more common cause of death than traffic accidents, but so do 76% of university graduates—only 14% of whom contest this view. Neither age nor the share of African-Americans in a respondent’s neighborhood significantly affected the results.

With regard to police shootings, however, political outlook did shape people’s perceptions of social reality. For example, Qualtrics 2 found that while 53% of the black Trump voters (64 individuals) believed that police shootings are the leading cause of death for young black men, 81% of black Biden voters (597 individuals) did so, a statistically significant and powerful difference ( Figure 9 ). While education and age made no significant difference in the respondents’ answers to this question, partisan perceptions of racial attitudes played the most important role. Thus, 95% of African-Americans who “strongly agree” that “white Republicans are racist” (22% of the sample) say that police kill more young black men than cars do, while 56% of blacks who “strongly disagree” that “white Republicans are racist” say this.[ 31 ]

The fact that politics matters more than education or age indicates that ideologically motivated reasoning[ 32 ] plays a role in governing perceptions of how frequently young black men are shot to death by the police. On the other hand, the fact that 53% of black Trump voters still agreed with the statement tells us that this belief is widespread and not simply a function of ideology.

However, this perspective on an empirical question is not unique to African-Americans. Of the 391 white respondents in the Prolific 4 survey (Dec. 1, 2020), 70% of whites who “strongly agree” that “white Republicans are racist” also believed that young black men are more likely to be shot to death by the police than to die in a car accident ( Figure 10 ). This is noticeably higher than the 53% of black Trump voters in Qualtrics 2 and vastly higher than the 15% of white Trump voters in Prolific 4 who believe this.

The gap between Trump and Biden voters on the question about fatal police shootings is 28 points among African-Americans (81%–53%) but 38 points among whites (53%–15%) in Prolific 4. Education level was not a significant predictor of accuracy on this question. These results echo those that recently found that only about a fifth of liberals but close to half of conservatives gave the right answer to a question on how many unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019. Fully 54% of “very liberal” Americans thought that more than 1,000 were killed compared with the actual figure of between 13 and 27.[ 33 ]

To be sure, African-Americans are more likely than whites to believe that the risk of young black men being shot to death by police is greater than dying in a traffic accident. However, ideology is about as important as race in influencing perceptions. Combining black and white responses to this question in Qualtrics 2 and Prolific 4, a person’s race predicts 25% of the variation in beliefs while ideology, the 2020 presidential vote, and a person’s view of whether “white Republicans are racist” predicts 29%.[ 34 ]

Figure 10 above compares data from two different samples, but Qualtrics 1 permits a comparison of blacks and whites on another question. That question was whether people agree or disagree with the statement, “White males kill more people than any other group in the United States.” In contrast to fatal police shootings, there is no clearly correct answer. While African- Americans commit slightly more murders than whites, the question could also be interpreted to encompass those who kill in other ways, such as through drinking and driving, in which case the statement is accurate. Results show that white liberals answer the question similarly to blacks (overall), with about half agreeing with the statement, while white conservatives diverge substantially, with 10% giving their assent.

The Social Construction of Personal Experience

Though politics doesn’t shape black opinion as much as white opinion, it remains the case that black views on national-level race issues also vary by ideology. The position of blacks as the traditional target of racial exclusion also means that focusing on black opinion can help us understand whether ideology affects people’s perceptions of having personally been the target of racism. This is, in many ways, a “harder” measure of reality than perceptions about racism in general because it concentrates on personal experience.

Figure 4 showed that the use of social media heightened black perceptions that others had acted in racially biased ways toward them. This suggests that part of the racism paradox may have to do with new peer-to-peer technologies. Ideology could also be a factor, inducing liberal African-Americans to read more racism into their personal interactions, or recall more racist incidents, than black conservatives do.

Looking at racism through the lens of social constructionism leads to a pair of testable propositions: first, that perceptions of whether one has experienced racism will be conditioned by ideology and partisanship; and second, that many minorities do not view socalled microaggressions as racist, while many whites who subscribe to left-modernist ideology do.

Personal Experience

In order to assess whether partisanship affects people’s personal experience of racism, Qualtrics 2 asked African-Americans, “How often would you say that you experience racism in your daily life?”[ 35 ] A similar share of both Biden (32%) and Trump (30%) voters responded that they experienced racism on at least a monthly basis. These results were similar to Qualtrics 1, showing that 26% of black Biden[ 36 ] voters and 25% of black Trump voters reported experiencing racism on at least a monthly basis.

Much later in the 80-question Qualtrics 2 survey, I asked, “How often would you say that you experienced racism in your daily life during Barack Obama’s period in office, 2008–16?” I then asked the same question about experiencing racism “during Donald Trump’s period in office, from November 2016 until now.” Biden voters—the vast majority of the black sample— were twice as likely to say that they had experienced racism on at least a monthly basis (42%–21%) under Trump than under Obama ( Figure 11 ).

Black Trump voters indicated a similar experience of racism under both administrations, but partisan prompts appear to have reduced personal reporting of racism among black Biden voters during the Obama years and increased it during the Trump years. The fact that Biden but not Trump voters deviated from their initial answer (when neither Trump nor Obama was mentioned) suggests that Democrats are largely responsible for changing their answers in response to partisan cues. The result is a partisan difference of 7 points in personal perceptions of racism during Obama’s administration and 14 points under Trump.

The partisan gap between black Trump and Biden voters of 7–14 points widens to 37 points when we compare black voters who “strongly agree” that “white Republicans are racist” with blacks who strongly disagree with this statement. Fully 56% of blacks who strongly agreed that “white Republicans are racist” said that they experienced racism under Trump, compared with 19% among blacks strongly disagreeing with the statement.

If racist behavior was actually higher under Trump, this should affect both groups of black supporters in equal measure. Moreover, we shouldn’t see a 10- point partisan difference between answers to the “how much racism do you experience” (answered in early November 2020) and “how much under Trump” versions of the question.[ 37 ] While it is possible that African-Americans who experienced more racism under Obama switched to Trump while those who encountered racism under Trump switched to Biden, this is a less convincing explanation than partisan motivated response bias. While black Trump voters may have a motive to underreport, the fact that their views align with their experience “today,” along with the fact that black Republicans tend to be moderate on race issues, suggests that political distortion is greater among black Democrats.

The extent to which personal and political perceptions of racism are connected can be glimpsed by comparing the reported personal experience of racism among left- and right-wing African-American respondents in Qualtrics 1 and 2. First, there is a liberal-conservative difference of 15 points in black people’s perceptions of whether there is a lot of discrimination against black people in America.[ 38 ] This is an understandable relationship, given the national data reviewed in the first part of this report and the expected links between ideology and the national problems that it frames.

But it is surprising to see that ideological differences also appear in questions pertaining to personal experience. On four questions on the Qualtrics surveys mainly using wording from a 2017 NPR survey[ 39 ]—people making negative comments or assumptions about you, acting afraid of you, police treating you unfairly, and being stopped and searched—my analysis of the data shows an ideological divide within black America of 16–20 points when comparing those in the two liberal and two conservative categories on a 5-point liberal- to-conservative scale. In almost all cases, the results are statistically significant controlling for age, gender, education, and the share of African-Americans and holders of advanced degrees in a person’s zip code.

These results accord with other findings. In the 2018 ANES pilot survey, women who are white Trump voters are around 20 points less likely to say that they experience sexism than their Clinton-voting counterparts. However, white Trump voters are nearly 20 points more likely than white Clinton voters to say that they have experienced at least “a little” racial discrimination.[ 40 ]

Partisan Racial Misperception and Personal Experience of Racism

Previous research shows that partisans entertain wide misperceptions about the attitudes of the other party’s voters. Republicans overestimate Democrats’ hostility to the police, preference for open borders, and lack of patriotism by around 30 points. Democrats misperceive Republicans’ level of hostility to Muslims and immigration by a similar amount.[ 41 ] As with misperception about whether black men are more likely to be shot to death by police or killed in a traffic accident, reports of personal experiences of racism are heavily shaped by partisan perceptions of outgroup racial bias.

No wonder, therefore, that African-Americans who “strongly agree” that white Republicans are racist are far more likely to report personal discrimination than blacks who “strongly disagree” that white Republicans are racist. On all but one question, there is an attitude gap in reported personal experience of at least 20 points. On the question of whether “police have treated you unfairly for being black,” the difference between those who strongly agree and disagree that “white Republicans are racist” reaches 34 points ( Figure 12 ).

It is, of course, possible that personal experiences of racism have shaped attitudes toward Republicans and shifted personal ideology and voting behavior. However, the fact that those who feel strongly that white Republicans are racist are considerably more likely to mistakenly believe that more young black men are shot to death by police than die in traffic accidents—and that answers to the personal experience questions reflect the same pattern—suggests that attitudinally motivated reasoning is the more plausible explanation.

These results of several surveys that I conducted, as well as evidence from other sources, indicate that personal and national perceptions of racism are interrelated. This could be because those who have personally experienced racism are more likely to see it as a national problem and identify as liberal, but it is more plausibly accounted for by black liberals being more likely to perceive personal encounters as racist—or to recall them as such—than conservative blacks do.

The partisan/ideological and attitudinal differences that exist in reported personal experiences of racism (Figures 11 and 12) are consistent with beliefs about how big the problem of racism is in the U.S. (Figures 6 and 8), the probability of agreeing that discrimination makes it harder for blacks to get ahead (Figure 7), and the misperception about lethal police shootings (Figures 9 and 10). To get a sense of how important ideology and partisanship are for variation in reported racism, we can compare their effect with that of race itself. This shows that ideological effects are not much smaller than the difference in reported racism between whites and blacks.

Does Critical Race Theory Disempower African-Americans?

The correlations between ideology and perceptions of racism, whether as a national sentiment or in terms of personal experience, raise two important questions: Might the emerging ideology of critical race theory (CRT) distort perceptions of racism among both blacks and whites? If so, what might this imply for the well-being of African-Americans?

Writers such as Christopher Rufo and Coleman Hughes have drawn attention to many unfalsifiable and damaging claims of CRT. Much of this discussion focuses on CRT’s generalizations about white people and the division that this seeds among the body politic.[ 42 ]

But there is another criticism: a possibly detrimental effect of CRT narratives on the black people whom it is ostensibly designed to help. John McWhorter regularly points out that the work of CRT authors such as Ibram X. Kendi, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Robin DiAngelo tends to endow whites with the power to change themselves while portraying blacks as passive subjects whose fate is dependent on the goodwill of white people.[ 43 ]

In order to assess the possible impact of CRT on black empowerment, I had part of the survey sample in Prolific 1 and Prolific 3 first read a passage from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Letter to My Son”:[ 44 ]

Another group read no passage before answering, while a third group read a different passage that I composed:

I then asked respondents to indicate what their view was (strongly agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, strongly disagree, don’t know) of the passage that they had read and to answer several questions on what psychologists refer to as the locus of control scale, which measures whether people feel able to control their lives or whether they think that their fate is determined by forces outside their control. Higher belief in one’s ability to control one’s fate is linked to positive mental health outcomes.

The measures were:

• When I make plans, I am almost certain that I can make them work.
• No matter how much I try, I don’t receive any credit for what I do.
• It is my responsibility to make the most of my talents and abilities.

Prolific 3 measured responses to the second and third statements ( Figure 14 ). It shows that reading the Coates passage had a significant disempowering effect on blacks on all three locus of control measures.[ 47 ]

Toward Black Resilience

For John McWhorter, critical race theory diminishes black people: “In supposing that Black people have no resilience, you are saying that Black people are unusually weak. You’re saying that we are lesser. You’re saying that we, because of the circumstances of American social history, cannot be treated as adults. And in the technical sense, that’s discriminatory.”[ 48 ]

Do African-Americans share McWhorter’s selfaffirming approach, or might they prefer the extra protection promised by CRT’s program of affirmative action, linguistic penalties, and reeducation? To explore this further, I first asked the survey samples in Qualtrics 2 whether they agreed or disagreed with the following: “Blacks will never be truly equal if society doesn’t hold them to the same standards as others.” Among the 801 black respondents, 68% agreed with this statement on a 7-point scale (strongly agree, agree, somewhat agree, neither degree nor disagree, somewhat disagree, disagree, strongly disagree), with only 14% disagreeing. Only a few points separated black liberals and black conservatives. There was a statistically significant difference by age, however, with 75% of blacks aged 18–30 agreeing with the statement, compared with 57% of those over age 60. Young African-Americans appear especially keen to be treated as equally competent and responsible citizens.

Microaggressions

Even so, perhaps black Americans want to be psychologically protected from whites via stronger regulation of speech. CRT emphasizes surveillance and compliance measures to shift white people toward what they deem to be appropriately inoffensive language. The contention is that the way language constructs meaning reinforces racial power structures while offending the sensibilities of minorities.[ 49 ] In order to probe this, I posed this question in Qualtrics 1 and Qualtrics 2:[ 50 ]

Though some people may find political correctness (PC) both demeaning and necessary, a forced-choice question compels respondents to weigh which aspect is more important to them. In Qualtrics 1 (Apr. 20–June 2, 2020), 56% of African-Americans and 57% of whites said that PC was demeaning to blacks, compared with 43% of whites and 44% of blacks who said that it was necessary to protect them. In Qualtrics 2 (Nov. 20–Dec. 1, 2020), blacks also indicated that PC was demeaning rather than necessary, but by a smaller (51%–49%) margin.

Columbia University sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, among others, has commented that most minorities are not offended by many of the “micro-aggressions” set out by University of California guidelines.[ 51 ] Responses from Qualtrics 2 largely comport with al-Gharbi’s comment. When asked, “What is your feeling when a white person says, ‘I don’t notice people’s race’?” 32% of blacks replied that they were “very offended” or “somewhat offended,” 22% said that they were “somewhat pleased” or “very pleased,” and 47% said that they were “neither pleased nor offended.”

However, when they were asked, “What is your feeling when a white person says, ‘America is a colorblind society’?” a slim majority of black respondents (51%– 49%) said that they would be at least somewhat offended. Ideology figured in their responses. There was a 13-point gap between black liberals and conservatives (38%–25%) on the offensiveness of “I don’t notice people’s race” and a 21-point gap (63%–42%) on “America is a colorblind society” ( Figure 16 ). Here, education level was as strong a predictor as ideology as to whether a black person would be offended. University graduates were 12–19 points more likely to be offended than those without degrees, comparable with the 13–21- point gap between liberals and conservatives. University-educated liberals were 26–27 points more likely than conservatives without a degree to feel offended by these statements. In addition to ideology, attending college appears to have a distinct effect in sensitizing black respondents to microaggressions.

The ideological divide was, as expected, wider among whites. When Prolific 4 (Dec. 1, 2020) asked a sample of whites if they were offended “when a white person says, ‘I don’t notice people’s race’ and when a white person says, ‘America is a colorblind society,’ ” the difference between liberals (who were offended) and conservatives (who were not) was a very large 44 points on “I don’t notice people’s race” and 57 points on “America is a colorblind society.” These responses are about twice as high as the ideological split among African-Americans. Education made no significant difference in predicting white responses to the microaggression statements.

America, like other societies, may never be able to reduce the incidence of racist epithets to zero. Nonetheless, increasing the penalty for racially offensive language is likely to have at least some deterrent effect. Is it right to pursue this path even with diminishing returns? Perhaps, but an alternative avenue to explore is to emphasize African-Americans’ resilience to whatever racism still remains—as Jonathan Haidt contended, there is wisdom in the rhyme that “sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.”[ 52 ] For Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, this is the defining characteristic of the healthy dignity culture that replaced the older honor culture or today’s campus-led victimhood culture.[ 53 ]

When asked to choose between a highly punitive regime of antiracism and a world marked by minority resilience, it appears that a majority of African-Americans prefer a future marked by group resilience over one of external protection. Qualtrics 2 posed this question: “If you had to choose, which is your ideal society?”

• Minorities have grown so confident that racially offensive remarks no longer affect them.
• The price for being racist is so high that no one makes racially offensive remarks anymore.

While it is naturally the case that people may agree with both statements, the priority given to one over the other tells us something important. Overall, black respondents chose the first option (which I call resilience) over the second option (punitive antiracism) by a 53–47 margin. However, there is a 15-point difference between black conservatives and black liberals on this question: 62% of black conservatives, but just 47% of black liberals, chose resilience. There was no statistically significant difference on the ideal society question by age, gender, or education.

Coda: Sad and Anxious People Report More Racism

Throughout this report, I have emphasized two points: first, that racism has been amplified by ideological and media construction; and second, that it is partly in the eye of the beholder. While people’s general psychological dispositions are less susceptible to social construction than their ideological outlook, personal psychology is also strongly connected to reported experiences of racism and discrimination.

In order to tap respondents’ general level of depression and anxiety, I asked, “How often you would say that you feel sad or anxious?” in Qualtrics 1 and 2. Replies were provided on a scale from “never” through “always” sad or anxious. Those saying, “about half the time,” “most of the time,” or “always” made up 29% of the 1,028 white respondents and 26% of the 1,788 black respondents. These responses were then cross-tabulated with the agree/disagree responses to the statements “How often would you say that you experience racism in your daily life?” and “I have experienced a great deal of discrimination in my life.”

Unsurprisingly, Africans-Americans reported experiencing more racism and discrimination than whites. It should also be noted that men, whether white or black, report experiencing more racism and discrimination than women. But it is striking that, regardless of race or measure, those who report being sad or anxious at least half the time are far more likely to report experiencing racism and discrimination ( Figure 18 ). Controlling for age, gender, and education, the association of psychological sadness and anxiety with reported racism and discrimination is highly significant and is similar for whites and blacks. As the dotted lines show, the two lines track each other, with the saddest and most anxious whites and blacks reporting 20 points more racism. In fact, psychology is only somewhat less powerful than race in predicting reported racism. While it is not impossible that whites and blacks who experience racism report more sadness, the more likely explanation is that certain psychological states are correlated with reporting more negative experiences.

This paper began by noting the Tocquevillean paradox that concern about racism has risen even as racist attitudes and behaviors have declined. Across a range of surveys and questions, I found that ideology—and, to a lesser degree, social media exposure and university education—has heightened people’s perceptions of racism. Depression and anxiety are linked to perceiving more racism. The level of racism in society reported by whites appears to be driven more by political leaning than the level reported by blacks. Nevertheless, ideology plays an important part among African-Americans in shaping national perceptions as well as reported personal experiences of racism.

Surveys showed that liberal whites are more supportive of punitive CRT postulates than blacks, who are more likely to aspire to agency and resilience. Moreover, CRT appeared to have a detrimental effect on African- Americans’ feeling of being in control of their lives. This makes CRT a poor choice for policymakers seeking to improve outcomes in the black community.

Finally, my survey results indicate that as much as half of reported racism may be ideologically or psychologically conditioned, and the rise in the proportion of Americans claiming racism to be an important problem is largely socially constructed.

None of this means that racism has been eradicated. Nevertheless, the policy approach that follows from the findings in this paper is unlike the narrative of “systemic” racism that is increasingly prevalent in professional settings. This approach would replace the narrative common among activists and diversity administrators in elite institutions, which is based on anecdote-driven reasoning, sweeping CRT narratives, and conclusions drawn from bivariate race “gaps.” In their stead would come measurable indicators and tests to explain disparate racial outcomes that control for confounding factors such as educational qualifications, and in which claims of racism achieve validity only when alternative explanations such as qualification level fail to explain differences. Racial disparities that stem from education and class can be addressed with less contentious, race-neutral economic initiatives.

Where racial bias continues to manifest itself, mentoring, nudges such as name-blind CVs, and the use of randomized control trials to ascertain which interventions work should be favored over shaming, virtue-signaling, and quotas. The realization that all groups discriminate against all groups can also help lower the divisiveness of a debate often cast in binary “majority-minority” terms. In Britain, a recent survey shows that nonwhites, who make up only 20% of the population, accounted for over 40% of reported ethnic and racial discrimination against black Britons.[ 54 ] Policymakers should avoid unnecessarily generalizing about, and impugning the reputation of, an entire racial group such as white Americans. Targeted, evidence-led, progress on correcting unexplained racial disparities—as with the rougher treatment of black suspects by police or lesser likelihood of prescribing black people pain relief—is vital, but policymakers should interpret subjective perceptions of racism with care.[ 55 ]

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The Social Construction of Race

2015, Jacobin

Race is a social fiction imposed by the powerful on those they wish to control.

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A Qualitative Analysis of How Anthropologists Interpret the Race Construct

Jayne o. ifekwunigwe.

Center on Genomics, Race, Identity, Difference (GRID), Duke University, Durham, NC 27708; ude.ekud@ioj

Jennifer K. Wagner

Center for Translational Bioethics and Health Care Policy, Geisinger Health System, Danville, PA 17822; [email protected]

Department of Pediatrics, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98105; ude.wu@uyohnooj

Tanya M. Harrell

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA 98109; gro.prahcs@llerraht

Michael J. Bamshad

Departments of Pediatrics and Genome Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98105; ude.wu@dahsmabm

Charmaine D. Royal

Departments of African and African American Studies, Biology and Community and Family Medicine and Center on Genomics, Race, Identity, Difference Duke University, Durham, NC 27708; [email protected]

This article assesses anthropological thinking about the race concept and its applications. Drawn from a broader national survey of geneticists’ and anthropologists’ views on race, in this analysis, we provide a qualitative account of anthropologists’ perspectives. We delve deeper than simply asserting that “race is a social construct.” Instead, we explore the differential ways in which anthropologists describe and interpret how race is constructed. Utilizing the heuristic of constructors, shifters , and reconcilers , we also illustrate the ways in which anthropologists conceptualize their interpretations of race along a broad spectrum as well as what these differential approaches reveal about the ideological and biological consequences of socially defined races, such as racism in general and racialized health disparities in particular. [ race concept, social construction, racism, health disparities ]

Este artículo evalúa el pensamiento antropológico acerca del concepto de raza y sus aplicaciones. Derivado de una encuesta nacional más amplia de las opiniones de genetistas y antropólogos sobre la raza, en este análisis proveemos un reporte cualitativo, de las perspectivas de los antropólogos. Ahondamos más que simplemente afirmar que “la raza es un constructo social”. En cambio, exploramos las formas diferenciales en que los antropólogos describen e interpretan cómo la raza es construida. Utilizando la heurística de constructores, desplazadores , y reconciliadores , también ilustramos las maneras en las que los antropólogos conceptualizan sus interpretaciones de la raza a lo largo de un amplio espectro, y lo que estas aproximaciones diferenciales revelan acerca de las consecuencias ideológicas y biológicas de las razas definidas socialmente, tales como racismo, en general, y las disparidades racializadas en salud, en particular. [ concepto de raza, construcción social, racismo, disparidades de salud ]

Part of the problem stems from a lack of clarity about what anthropologists mean when they say races aren’t biologically real. Anthropologists aren’t arguing that there is no biological component in US racial categories. Biology has played a role in the cultural invention of what we call race. … And race, or rather, one’s racial designations, socially, can have enormous biological consequences, including one’s health status. But most of what we believe or have been taught about race as biology, as valid subdivisions of the human species, and an important part of human biological variation is a myth. — Carol Mukhopadhyay (2014)

INTERPRETING CONCEPTUALIZATIONS OF RACE IN ANTHROPOLOGY

In the long march of human evolution ( Haber et al. 2013 ; Henn, Cavalli-Sforza, and Feldman 2012 ; Hill, Barton, and Hurtado 2009 ; Hill et al. 2011 ), the race concept is a relatively recent idea ( Bamshad and Olson 2003 ; Keita and Kittles 1997 ; Lieberman and Jackson 1995 ). From the 1960s to the present, advances in science continue to demonstrate that there is more genetic variation within a group socially designated as a race than between so-called groups socially identified as different races ( Hunley, Healey, and Long 2009 ; Lewontin 1974 ; Livingstone and Dobzhansky 1962 ; Long, Li, and Healy 2009 ; Relethford 2009 ). Although there are small genetic differences that allow geneticists to trace the global migrations of populations, these variations should not be confused with the belief in discrete races because these variations are considered clines, which are gradients of gene frequencies from one population to another based on geography ( Brown and Armelagos 2001 ). The “no biological race” position that was derived from the fact that race is not a scientifically reliable measure of human genetic variation led to the pervasiveness of discourses that evacuated racism from critical debates on difference ( Harrison 1995 ). Mullings (2005) also highlighted the epistemological tension within anthropology between race as a socially and culturally defined category and racism as an ideology.

Since the European invention of race as a worldview ( A. Smedley 1993 ), its ideological applications have had a powerful impact on the lived experiences of individuals and societies across the globe ( Baker 1998 , 2010 ; Thomas and Clarke 2013 ). The ideology of scientific racism provided rationales for forms of structural, epistemic, and physical violence, including transatlantic slavery, colonization, eugenics, genocide, and de jure apartheid in both South Africa and the United States ( Barkan 1992 ; Fields and Fields 2012 ; Painter 2010 ). The contemporary North American worldview on race emerged from a particular set of historical, economic, and political circumstances, including the subjugation of people of African descent during and after enslavement ( A. Smedley 1993 ). This specific history explains why critical and popular US discourses on race predominantly pivot on a binary black/white axis ( Drake 1991 ). Comparative analyses of race in other geopolitical contexts, such as Latin America ( Pagano 2014 ; Wade et al. 2014 ), the Caribbean ( Castor 2013 ; Thomas 2011 ), or West Africa ( Pierre 2012 ), reveal different systems of racialization and color/caste ( A. Smedley 1993 ), social hierarchies, and patterns of racism.

At different historical junctures, anthropologists have played pivotal roles in the conceptualization, refinement, and interpretation of the race concept and its biological underpinnings ( Caspari 2003 ; Goodman, Heath, and Lindee 2003 ; Lieberman and Kirk 2008 ; Shanklin 1998 ; Visreswaran 1998 ). These subdisciplinary approaches have been both heterogeneous and at times contentious ( Blakey 1987 ; Caspari 2009 ; Livingstone and Dobzhansky 1962 ; Stocking [1968] 1982 , UNESCO 1969 ). As the first black president of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), Yolanda Moses prioritized race as a discursive theme. Her two-year term (1995–1997) functioned as an important catalyst for the proliferation of subdisciplinary and public dialogues on race ( Harrison 2012 ). During her tenure, Moses convened a group of scholars representing the various subfields of anthropology in order to discuss how race was conceptualized within their subfields. The group discovered that:

Rather than occupying conceptually different universes, we had many points of agreement … we came to our points of agreement from different intellectual histories and with different observations and data … [which] highlighted diverse aspects of the complexly protean idea of race and the dynamics of racism … we felt compelled to educate that race is powerful, but not based in genes or biology, rather [it is] a cultural and changeable concept. ( Goodman, Moses, and Jones 2012 , xi–xii; emphasis in original)

The executive board of the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) drafting and adoption of the 1998 “AAA Statement on Race” 1 and the 2007 launch of the AAA’s public education project and traveling exhibition, “RACE: Are We So Different?” (RACE), are two concrete examples of the fruits of these fertile deliberations ( Goodman, Moses, and Jones 2012 ).

As a collaboration across anthropological subdisciplines, the RACE project retreated from explicit engagement with biological race concepts in favor of social and cultural interpretations that are informed by and inform biology ( Goodman, Moses, and Jones 2012 ; Harrison 1995 ; Muhopadhyay and Moses 1997 ). In 2007, a conversation between biological anthropologist Alan Goodman (who was at the time president of the AAA and a member of the RACE project advisory group) and Robert Garfinkle (the RACE project exhibit leader at its inaugural location at the Science Museum of Minnesota) outlined the RACE project’s objectives

The idea was to develop a public education project about the intersections of race, racism and human biological and genetic variation. We wanted to change the public debates to get them beyond the simple dichotomy that race is either real or not real to consider in a more serious fashion the varieties of ways in which race sometimes is real and sometimes isn’t. (117)

The RACE project has been a hugely successful public anthropology AAA initiative, which has been traveling for almost ten years and has already been exhibited in forty-one cities, including two permanent exhibits in St. Paul, Minnesota, and San Diego, California ( www.understandingrace.org ). Exemplifying this “new anthropological synthesis,” the RACE project and the “AAA Statement on Race” convey the collective anthropological position on race as a dynamic, historically situated, culturally constructed folk concept that derives symbolic meaning from specific readings and rankings of phenotypic differences, such as skin color, hair texture, nose width, lip thickness, and body type ( Goodman, Moses, and Jones 2012 ; Mukhopadhyay, Henze, and Moses 2014 ). Real and perceived physical differences are ranked hierarchically and provide social justifications for inequalities and injustices, such as differential access to power, privilege, and opportunities ( Chase [1975] 1980 ; Hartigan 2013b ; Mukherjee 2016 ). This article incorporates the qualitative analysis of survey data to discuss the broad range of individual anthropologists’ conceptualizations and interpretations of race, and compares these responses to public and collective anthropological positions on the race concept as exemplified by both the AAA statement and the RACE project.

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, anthropologists have continued to debate and discuss the race concept ( Allison and Piot 2013 ; Blakey 1999 ; Edgar and Hunley 2009 ; Harrison 1999 ). Across the subdisciplines within anthropology, robust critical scholarship seeks to “reconcile” different views on race’s definition, conceptualization, interpretation, application, and relevance ( Allison and Piot 2013 ; Edgar and Hunley 2009 ; Hartigan 2013a ). An Anthrosource database keyword search for “the race concept” yielded a total of 8,318 results, with the majority appearing in American Anthropologist (3,099), Anthropology News (1,284), and American Ethnologist (1,183). Spanning the 1980s to 2016, of the initial one hundred articles published in anthropology journals, there was a clustering with more articles (63 percent) published from 1990 to 2010, which suggests a heightened critical engagement during this time. During the same time period, 1980 to 2016, a keyword search of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology yielded 128,645 articles on “the race concept.” There have also been lively debates on race within archaeology ( Blakey 2001 ; Leone, LaRoche, and Babiarz 2005 ; Nelson 2013 ) and forensic anthropology ( Ousley, Jantz, and Freid 2009 ; Sauer 1992 ; Smay and Armelagos 2000 ).

However, as our survey data reveal, among individual anthropologists the rejection of biological determinism and race have frequently been misconstrued to suggest that biology has no significance or consequences in any interpretations of social and cultural constructions of race ( Graves 2015a ; Gravlee 2009 ; Long and Kittles 2003 ; Roberts 2011 ). Most of the confusion about race still centers on its biological relevance and application as well as whether or not it is a reliable measure of human genetic variation ( Kitchen 2015 ). Keita et al. (2004) argue that acknowledging the salience of racism must accompany any interrogation of the “reality” of races:

The absence of ”races” does not mean the absence of racism, or the structured inequality based on operationalized prejudice used to deprive people who are deemed to be fundamentally biologically different of social and economic justice. The “no biological race” position does not exclude the idea that racism is a problem that needs to be addressed. (S18)

Current biomedicine does little to eliminate the idea of race; to the contrary, self-identified social races, phenotypic differences, and health disparities are often used to legitimize the idea of discrete genetic races ( Gravlee and Non 2015 ). When disease prevalence is addressed in research, self-reported race is at times used as a proxy for genetic explanations, instead of environmental or social factors ( Hunt, Truesdell, and Kreiner 2013 ; Lisabeth et al. 2011 ). The growing field of precision medicine highlights the pitfalls associated with using self-identified race, genetics, and social data to personalize treatment interventions: “The challenge for clinicians, however, is that self-identified race does not predict the genotype or drug response of an individual patient. Prescribing medications on the basis of race oversimplifies the complexities and interplay of ancestry, health, disease, and drug response … the translation of genomic knowledge into clinical care is not simple” ( Bonham, Callier, and Royal 2016 , 2003–2004).

Epigenetics, a fairly recent development in genetics research, has demonstrated the ways in which environmental stress can actually alter the expression of particular genes: “The fact that epigenetic marks are sensitive to environmental exposures and influence phenotypic variation implies that they may be an important mechanism for understanding the process of embodiment and could inform our understanding of why racial inequalities in health are observed both within and across societies” ( Thayer and Non 2015 , 725). The deployment of phenotypic markers by society to differentiate socially defined races and the embodied existence of health disparities among different socially defined races are two concrete instances wherein the race concept is clearly informed by and informs biology ( Hunt and Megyesi 2008 ; Kahn 2006 ). Reflecting either different or similar systems of stratification, global health disparities are influenced by embodied biological conceptualizations of race in myriad ways ( Roberts 2012 ). For example, in societies that are stratified on the basis of race/color/caste systems, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia, citizens who are racialized as nonwhite generally have poorer health outcomes than their white counterparts ( Spigner 2007 ; Williams 2012 ). That said, as illustrated in an international and comparative study of blood pressure, populations of the African diaspora were not always at a higher risk for poor health outcomes than other populations ( Cooper and Kaufman 1998 ; Cooper et al. 2005 ). Studies in Hong Kong and China found that socioeconomic status and migrant status, respectively, were associated with health outcomes for children ( Ying et al. 2015 ; Lee et al. 2015 ). These global comparisons are a reminder that differences in disease prevalence and health outcomes are largely determined by various social and structural factors, and that biological dimensions of race play a more pivotal role in some geopolitical contexts than others.

In discussions of human variation and/or disease prevalence, critics of the new molecular genetics point to occasions when conceptualizations of race reproduce either genetic essentialism or biological determinism ( Koenig, Lee, and Richardson 2008 ; Wailoo, Nelson, and Lee 2012 ). Duster (2015) suggests:

One should not be lulled into the false conclusion that the new human molecular genetics has been a battering ram undermining the idea of a biological basis of racial categories, or even a neutral bystander on matters of race. Indeed … scientists from these fields have played an important (and sometimes) unwitting role in resuscitating the idea of race as biological, even genetic. (3)

With a recognition of the existence of new and important research in human genomics, precision medicine, epigenetics ( Jackson, Niculescu, and Jackson 2013 ; Mulligan 2015 ; Non et al. 2016 ), and debates in the various subfields of anthropology as a backdrop, the purpose of this article is to assess the extent to which individual anthropologists’ interpretive views on race mirror or deviate from the public and collective AAA stances on race as illustrated by both the 1998 “AAA Statement on Race” and the RACE project. That is, are anthropologists still trying to eschew the notion of biological races while at the same time acknowledging the biological consequences of the social construction of race?

As part of a larger comparative survey involving genetics professionals, our interdisciplinary research team comprised medical anthropologists, biological anthropologists, and geneticists. We were interested in how individual anthropologists understood, interpreted, and applied the race concept. The quantitative results of this survey are published separately ( Wagner et al. 2017 ). This article discusses our qualitative findings and provides a snapshot of the ways in which anthropologists interpret, conceptualize, and apply the race concept. What we discovered was that both interpretations of how race is socially constructed and conceptualizations of race exist across a broad spectrum. We devised a heuristic to describe the range of positions. 2 At one end are the constructors, for whom race is a social construct and a historical artifact. In the middle of the spectrum are the shifters, who also describe race as a social construct but acknowledge the practices of race ( M’Charek 2013 ) and posit that race is a political tool, a lived social reality, a self-ascribed identity marker, and an ideology that has an impact as institutional, structural, and cultural racism. At the other end of the spectrum are the reconcilers, who concur that race is a social and cultural construct that, when applied, acts as a self-ascribed badge of affiliation while also having lived and ideological consequences as different forms of racism. In addition, reconcilers assert that race is informed by and informs biology, such as in the phenotypic marking and classification by society of physical differences or the embodied existence of health disparities among different socially defined races.

SURVEYING ANTHROPOLOGISTS ON THE RACE CONCEPT

Prior to completion of the draft human genome sequencing in 2001, quantitative studies surveyed physical anthropologists to assess their varied positions on the race concept ( Cartmill 1998 ; Cartmill and Brown 2003 ; Lieberman and Reynolds 1978 ; Littlefield, Lieberman, Reynolds 1982 ). Subsequently, Morning’s (2011) qualitative research, which included social scientists, identified significant differences in popular and scientific conceptualizations of race:

Scientists have not come to a consensus on the constructed nature of race, and consequently, they have not transmitted that perspective coherently or comprehensively to the public. Although constructivism is perhaps more strongly associated with anti-racism, it has not “taken” as a lens through which everyday people can make sense of racial stratification. (235)

Her study also highlighted that while the consensus view among sociologists was that race is culturally constructed, no such consensus existed among biological and cultural anthropologists. To assess similar and different individual anthropological perspectives on race, in October 2012, we generated a database of 41,231 anthropologists. The database was compiled using the software Outwit Hub to digitally capture e-mail addresses from the member and meeting-attendee pages of the AAA website between October 5 and October 12. On March 5, 2013, we sent an e-mail invitation to those in the database asking them to participate in an electronic survey. A total of 3,286 respondents completed the survey. From that sample, 2,807 also provided free-text written comments. Within the total sample of free-text respondents, which also included students and trainees, 1,154 were professional respondents, comprising both academics as well as applied anthropologists. This article’s emphasis on anthropology professionals mirrors the focus of the recently published quantitative analysis of survey data ( Wagner et al. 2017 ). 3

The survey comprised forty-nine statements divided into five sections: science (two sections), medicine, society, and common statements about race. The survey objectives are indicated in the preamble ( Table 1 ).

The survey included six free-text boxes: one at the end of each of the five survey sections and one at the very end of the survey. In the boxes, respondents were encouraged to clarify and elaborate on their responses to the statements as well as to submit more general survey feedback. The survey also collected demographic information and experience with genetic-ancestry testing both personally and in a research context. The survey was designed to enable both quantitative and qualitative analyses. As part of our survey, we collected demographic data on the gender, age, ethnicity, self-identified race, and profession of the respondents. The demographic characteristics of the free-text professional respondents appear in Tables 2 , ​ ,3, 3 , and ​ and4. 4 . The total number of some of the tables does not correspond to the total number of free-text professional respondents (1,154) because some people did not respond to all of the requested demographic questions.

There were sampling limitations to the survey, which is why we suggest that our findings provide a window into a range of possible conceptualizations of the race concept rather than purport that these views represent consensus views within the discipline or subdisciplines of anthropology. Given the methods we utilized to generate the database, it is clear that those who responded may have a vested interest in race research and therefore may have artificially skewed the results in a particular direction, such as in favor of a social constructivist perspective. For examples, in the subsample of professionals, cultural anthropologists (53 percent), women (65 percent), and whites (76 percent) are the numerical majority. We do not characterize this as a survey of anthropologists in the United States since 20 percent of the respondents reside outside of the country. We also do not generalize about the global relevance of our findings as we are mindful of the ways in which dynamic conceptions of race vary across time and geographical spaces. During the various phases of coding of free-text responses, there were views that did not fit neatly into any of the three positions, and their significance will be discussed in future publications.

What follows is our discussion of the interpretive categories generated by the coding and analysis of the free-text responses to the following six common statements ( Table 5 ) found in section five of the survey.

We relied on a combination of coding strategies: in vivo (to situate the data in the respondents’ language), descriptive (to document and categorize the breadth and depth of conceptualizations provided by multiple respondents), and values (to catalogue the range of subjective perspectives). NVivo 10 software was utilized to facilitate the qualitative analysis of 1,154 free-text responses ( Bazeley and Jackson 2013 ). After identifying emergent thematic categories, our first-level analysis entailed generating incrementally more in-depth and nuanced coding of “parent” nodes and “descent” nodes, which could be subsumed under three main nodes ( Saldaña 2013 ). The first main node concentrated on the conceptual distinction between race as a biological entity and race as a dynamic social and cultural construct. The second main node emphasized the structural and functional role of race as a mode of hierarchical categorization and as a political signifier. The third cluster of responses chose to disavow race all together and argued for alternative frames. Given its predominance, the second level of coding analysis concentrated on the first main node and sought to assess three main dynamics: (1) race is a social construct and a historical artifact; (2) applications of race serve a dual function as an identity marker as well as an ideology that has an impact as different forms of racism; and (3) conceptions and practices of race are both of the previous statements and also are informed by and inform biology. To illustrate the spectrum of responses that emerged from our analysis, we devised the following heuristic ( Table 6 ).

Our findings reflect and reproduce similar structural and conceptual problems as those uncovered in previous studies ( Morning 2011 ). In both deleterious and empowering ways, the race concept is a potent social reality that has lived implications and impacts almost every facet of everyday life, particularly health outcomes ( Abraham 1993 ; Azoulay 2006 ; Epstein 2007 ; Graves 2015b ; M’Charek 2013 ). While there appears to be general agreement in the social sciences that race is socially constructed, and a commonly held folk belief is that race has no biological basis, anthropologists represent a broad spectrum in how they interpret the relevance and consequences of genes, biology, and culture in their views on the race concept, particularly in relation to health ( Campbell et al. 2014 ; Foster and Sharp 2002 ).

INTERPRETATIONS OF RACE: CONSTRUCTORS/SHIFTERS/RECONCILERS

Racism and how people are raced needs examination … race [is] a verb, an act. —Reference #73D

There are different ways to describe how anthropologists conceptualize race. In their analysis and critique of how the race concept is applied in forensic anthropology, Smay and Armelagos (2000) propose a continuum:

These categories can be placed on a continuum ranging from complete and uncritical acceptance of race as biological reality to a wholesale rejection of the concept’s validity and utility. The two positions falling between the extremes both question the use of race, but accept it with some qualification as a useful (or vital) component of the forensic anthropologist’s toolkit. (20)

More than two decades earlier, in 1978, Lieberman and Reynolds conducted an empirical investigation into physical anthropologists’ views on race. They designed their own heuristic that differentiated between “splitters” from elite backgrounds, who believed that races existed, and “lumpers” from marginalized backgrounds, who asserted that races did not exist ( Lieberman and Reynolds 1978 ). In our quantitative analysis, we revisited this 1978 framework; in doing so, we uncovered similarities between white males and females in relation to privilege. Both groups were more likely to be categorized as splitters than nonwhite males and females ( Wagner et al. 2017 ). Our schematic ( Table 6 ) differs in three ways from the original 1978 study. First, our sample comprises anthropologists from all subdisciplines. 4 Second, we have not used social status as a primary mode of comparative analysis. Third, by deeply immersing ourselves in the qualitative data, we were able to identify a broader range of interpretations of social constructivist perspectives on race among anthropologists.

The Constructors

That “race is not biology” really means “the race concept does not fit what we know about the structure of human variation.” — Clarence Gravlee (2013)

In our analysis of free-text perspectives, the “no biological race” position, which neither addresses the social consequences of racial thinking nor the ways in which these applications of the race concept are informed by and inform biology, is a minority one. Constructors chose to engage with race’s dynamic, situational, and historical characteristics:

Clearly there are sociocultural categories, which differ widely across time and space, but have been labeled as race. And are thought to be timeless, universal and biologically based … but they aren’t. They are pretty meaningless in the context of identifying people outside of those sociocultural contexts because they are so changeable. (Reference #67C) I think race is [a] natural and unproblematic descriptive categorization that simply exists prior to socially, historically, and politically contingent worlds. Of course, race exists—because it gets to exist in our contemporary configurations, not because it always existed. (Reference #74D) The social/cultural concept of race has been a driving factor in most of human history. (Reference #157A)

Other constructors reproduced the assertion that race is not a scientifically reliable measure of human genetic variation:

Again, I am answering these as race as a socially constructed category. Of course “races” exist since they have been historically and socially created. Given this social construction and mating within racial categories, of course some differences will come to be shared, but these kinds of differences are mostly totally meaningless since there is far greater variation across “races” than within. (Reference #194A) Race as a socially constructed way of sorting humans does exist. But it has very little to do with genetics or biology. (Reference #69C) Races do exist because people have been historically categorized by them socially and politically, but they don’t exist as biogenetic categories. (Reference #8C)

By concentrating on the conceptualizations of race, the constructors echoed the public message of the 1998 “AAA Statement on Race,” but did not expand their responses to consider either the practices of racial thinking or find ways to simultaneously accommodate biological, genetic, and cultural frames of analysis. The shifters extended their approaches to incorporate political applications, social consequences, and symbolic functions of race concepts but still did not address how conceptualizations of race are informed by and inform biology.

The Shifters

Race itself is an invented political grouping. … It is a political category that has been disguised as a biological one. … The very first step of creating race, dividing human beings into these categories, is a political practice. — Dorothy Roberts (2011)

The shifters shared the “race is not biology” stance of the constructors but also recognized that simply asserting that “race is a social construct” was insufficient in explaining the existence of social inequalities. By emphasizing the ways in which the concept of race is applied, shifters engaged with the myriad ways in which the race concept is operationalized as ideology, as everyday lived experience, and as a self-ascribed identity marker. “Real,” “reality,” “lived social reality,” and “social fact” were repeated in the shifters’ comments to describe the social consequences of racial thinking:

Race exists as a social and cultural category (that lacks biological integrity). It has reality in terms of how lives are lived and experienced—I cannot tell Oprah or Nelson Mandela or my black neighbor that race doesn’t exist. Each of their lives tells narratives of its true force, and it is that force (of this human-made concept) that we can change. (Reference #160A) While the biological basis of the concept of race is meaningless, the social reality of race is very real and affects people greatly. (Reference #24B) Races exist as a social construction with consequential differing social realities. (Reference #33A)

Shifters frequently used derivatives of the word “power” to highlight the deployment of race as a political tool in everyday life in the United States and globally:

Race as a social construct has powerful predictive force. (Reference #82A) Race and races “exist” as potent discursive constructs. (Reference #93A) The concept of ”race” definitely exists, and it has shaped countless decision, interactions, and social movements. It supposedly is based in genetic ancestry, but in actuality, it is built on social constructions and negotiations of power. (Reference #72A)

Other shifters pointed to the Janus-faced nature of race as both a cultural category and a self-ascribed badge of identity:

“Race” as a cultural construct rather than a biological fact, given the plasticity in how it is ascribed to individuals and in how they choose among racial categories to express their own identity. (Reference #142A) Races don’t exist biologically, but socially they are often very real, and for those who see it as a marker of identity, it also very real. (Reference #5E) Among the strongest proponents of racial categories are black people who idealized their “race” (e.g., “Black is beautiful”) to gain the strength to stand up to discrimination and marginalization. (Reference #378C)

Shifters sought to reposition their framing of the race concept to extend beyond lived experiences to also encompass systemic, epistemic, and structural forms of racism as ideology, which have a deleterious and multigenerational impact:

Race is a socially constructed concept that has profound implications for marginalized communities. (Reference #80A) You cannot deny the reality of the last hundred years of history that have so effectively produced Western ideas about race … and produced races. Those ideas continue to affect material conditions and interactions between people. … As long as people are measured, quantified, and reproduced as races we NEED to acknowledge the power of the cultural category of race. Race-blindness is as dangerous as belief in the biological concept of race. (Reference #26D)

Shifters responded to earlier recommendations in the “AAA Statement on Race” for an assessment of the lived realities and systemic effects of racial ideologies. However, there were shifters who could also be characterized as reconcilers:

Race when under social conditions of “structural violence” places limits on people’s access to resources to fulfill basic needs, access to basic services and lack of ethical/emotional valuation needed for self-esteem. Constant conditions, for example food insecurity, stress and poverty have tremendous influence on both physical and mental health, and when the cycles are not broken generationally, challenges get compounded. (Reference #2D)

In general, shifters have yet to acknowledge the ways in which conceptualizations of race are informed by and inform biology. It is the reconcilers who are venturing in more expansive directions with their approaches.

The Reconcilers

Race … is the product of an arranged marriage between the social and biologic worlds. Although it often seems to travel back and forth between these parallel universes, it maintains a home in both. — Richard Cooper, Jay Kaufman, and Ryk Ward (2003)

The reconcilers in our study recognized the ways in which social and cultural constructions of race are informed by and inform biology, particularly as these constructions pertain to phenotypic markers to differentiate socially defined races and the embodied existence of health disparities. In health outcomes, phenotypic marking by society as a mode of classifying socially defined races and the role of endogamy, epigenetics, and self-identified race as a proxy for genetic ancestry/precision medicine, respectively, were among the examples provided to illustrate how race is informed by and informs biology. Echoing Graves’s (2015a) argument, the following reconciler was aware of the ways in which socially identified race becomes biologically meaningful at the interstices of the genotypic and the phenotypic, such as the phenotypic marking, ranking, and classification of physical differences, which in turn can influence health outcomes such as HIV risk among low-income African American women ( Davis 2014 ):

Race has a biological basis in so far as it leverages phenotype into social categories, and to that extent it also not biologically meaningless, since it is a way of making biology meaningful. I couldn’t say it has not biological influence on health, since race as social and political fact influences health, which means it works on and through biology. (Reference #33C)

Mirroring research findings on the prevalence of breast cancer ( Krieger, Jahn, and Waterman 2017 ), this particular reconciler recognized the impact of Jim Crow segregation not only on endogamous patterns of mating ( Edgar 2009 ; Fryer 2007 ) but also on access to health care and on health outcomes:

Emic categorizations of people into “races” do, however, hold powerful currency in many societies, often resulting in very real forms of discrimination, including disparities in access to health care … while many diseases have a genetic basis, these genetics should be understood as the workings of heredity. Some genes are strongly associated with particular ethnic groups, but these have been established through historically and culturally informed patterns of procreation-and not through “race.” (Reference #65C)

Like Guthman (2012) , who addresses the obesity epidemic as it is informed by somatic epigenetic processes, this reconciler highlighted the health impacts of environmental stress on genetic expression:

Race exists as a social construct that has tremendous impacts on people’s lives and health. While there is little genetic basis for race, the health disparities brought about by the existence of this social construct and its utilization to oppress and harm certain populations has made race a biological reality. It is therefore meaningless biologically in the sense that it has not real genetic or biological basis, but it has significant biological implications in that it does affect health. Race may exert a biological influence on health in cases where people of a given race experience discrimination, which leads to physiologic stress reaction, which when chronic can lead to poor health outcomes. (Reference #31D)

As previously mentioned, health disparities vary across geographical regions and within national contexts. A published study commissioned by the Institute of Medicine entitled Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care ( B. Smedley, Stith, and Nelson 2003 ) reported that racial and ethnic disparities in American health delivery were attributable, in part, to physician bias. As this reconciler observed, part of the challenge is that physicians commonly rely on race as a stand-in for genetic ancestry rather than self-identified race, which is a social construct, and recommend the eventual implementation of precision or personalized medicine based on a patient’s actual genomic profile:

Race is an admittedly crude proxy for genetic ancestry; personalized medicine should eventually rely upon sequencing the genome of each patient. For medical purposes, it is probably more useful to note when individuals self-identify with a specific race and use the prevalence of certain diseases in the racial category as a method of assessing risk in the patient. Racial categories have major cultural and economic components, many of which (dietary choices, prevalence of poverty, rates of smoking or alcohol use) have medical implications. Self-identifying with a racial category may be a better proxy for behavior than biology. (Reference #4E)

Reconcilers pointed to the significance of biomedicine, particularly health disparities, as an important interpretive domain in our understanding of the interconnectedness of biology, culture, and genetics ( Abraham 1993 ; Epstein 2007 ). For examples, three reconcilers concurred:

Race, as commonly used, as a social category has some historical basis but is a poor tool in a complex society. Race, if used carefully in biological analysis is not meaningless. If race means social category, its biological relevance is weak, but not absent (e.g., sickle cell again). Race has obvious influences on health. Some of these are caused by socioeconomic conditions, but some by inherited cultural preferences, but some by biological inheritance. (Reference #35C) If race is lived because people ascribe “blackness,” “whiteness” or “yellowness” to certain groups, then race does have a biological meaning and a big influence on health (because society divides wealth along these artificial categories), but if we take biology, genetics and race to be something outside of culture, there might be different answers to your questions. (Reference #15E) Groups who are racialized shared similar experiences that come to be embodied. (Reference #7D)

Reconcilers, including scholars within medical anthropology, the anthropology of science, biological anthropology, anthropological genetics, forensic anthropology, bioarchaeology, and biohistorical anthropology, are already leading the way toward a synthesized twenty-first-century anthropology of race that maintains a social and constructivist stance while also demonstrating the ways in which conceptions of race are informed by and also inform biology. Reconcilers are helping to elucidate the root causes of racial disparities in health delivery and outcomes, wherein a radical makeover of medical education is long overdue: “The experience of race does impact health, but race does not cause health disparities in isolation of [sic] other social, political, educational and economic factors” (Reference #16D). Advocates of medical-education reform also argue:

Socioeconomics, education, housing, employment and one’s lived environment, all of which are forcibly shaped by societal and structural facts, determine 90 percent of health outcomes while only 10 percent are determined by biomedical health care … the determinants of health are best conceptualized as biosocial phenomena, in which health and disease emerge through the interaction between biology and the social environment. ( Westerhaus et al. 2015 , 565)

Reconciler perspectives are essential when addressing the health-care needs and outcomes of socially designated and self-identified black communities in the United States ( Tweedy 2015 ), where we see stark evidence of the ways in which “race not only becomes biology” ( Gravlee 2009 ) but also determines health: “Prejudice and discrimination against people assumed/perceived to ‘belong’ to a racial group has a strong influence on health” (Reference #68D). A twenty-first century reconciled approach to the study of race that engages with social and cultural constructivism but also incorporates the social consequences and applications of biologically informed and informing racial thinking equips professionals and practitioners with the necessary conceptual and clinical tools to advance a more equitable research and health-care system, and moves us closer as a society to righting many of the social injustices that continue to plague our nation.

TOWARD A SYNTHETIC AND INCLUSIVE TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY ANTHROPOLOGY OF RACE

Continuing to endorse the nonexistence of race (and concomitant inconsequentiality of racism) makes us bedfellows with those who espouse the anti-egalitarian trends we oppose. — Eugenia Shanklin (1998)

By illustrating the differential and multiple ways in which anthropologists interpret the race construct as well as what these differential positions reveal about the ideological and biological consequences of socially defined races, such as racism in general and racialized health disparities in particular, this article provides a qualitative account of how individual anthropologists interpret and apply the race concept. We have delved deeper than simply asserting the position that race is a social construct. Utilizing the tripartite heuristic ( Table 6 ) of constructors, shifters, and reconcilers, we have also illustrated how conceptualizations and interpretations of race exist across a wide spectrum. We close our discussion with the recommendation that anthropology as a discipline and anthropologists as researchers and educators continue to take a more complex and nuanced approach to the study of race so that, to paraphrase Shanklin, “American anthropology [does not win] the battle and [lose] the war” ( 1998 , 670).

In the twentieth century, anthropologists played important roles in academic and public debates about race. In the twenty-first century, anthropologists continue to contribute to public and intellectual dialogues about the enduring significance of race, such as the ongoing RACE traveling exhibit. However, as “white public space” ( Brodkin, Morgen, and Hutchinson 2011 , 545), anthropology still has a long road to travel before the demographic composition of the discipline reflects the diversity of its constituents “at home” ( Hsu 1973 ). In our sample ( Table 3 ), 735 of the 967 professional respondents who answered the question about race and ethnicity were white. As recently as 2015, Yelvington et al. implored: “We add our voices to the growing call that we confront the disparities within our discipline, just as we seek to address them in the world” (390). In the United States, at a time when incidences of police brutality are on the rise, institutionalized racism persists on college campuses, and nativism and xenophobia have invaded the American body politic, the public and vocal presence of a critical, engaged, and integrated antiracist anthropology is imperative. Building on our existing strengths as a holistic discipline will move us one step closer to a twenty-first-century anthropology of race. Through public anthropology, we can exploit technological resources at our disposal, such as social media, which are useful mechanisms for community engagement ( Raff 2015 ). Being able to quickly, succinctly, and efficiently communicate to millennials about the enduring significance of both the biological and sociocultural dimensions of the race concept is more important now than it ever was ( Cohen 2011 ). We would then be in a much stronger position to confront another institutional challenge, which is creating a twenty-first-century discipline that is inclusive and truly representative of the multiple and varied narratives comprising both global stories and American stories. The decolonizing anthropology enterprise is still an unfinished project ( Allen and Jobson 2016 ; Harrison 1997 ).

Acknowledgments.

Many thanks to the editor-in-chief and the four anonymous reviewers for their engagement with an earlier draft of this manuscript and for their extremely insightful and constructive comments. Thanks also to Irma McClaurin for her razor-sharp editing and input as well as to both Simon Outram and Joseph Graves for their critical feedback. A special thank you to Leslie Walker, the project manager for the American Anthropological Association’s Public Education Initiatives, for his assistance with resources and data on the RACE Project. Finally, thank you to the survey participants. Funding was provided in part by the Greenwall Foundation.

1. How people have been accepted and treated within the context of a given society or culture has a direct impact on how they perform in that society. The “racial” worldview was invented to assign some groups to perpetual low status, while others were permitted access to privilege, power, and wealth. The tragedy in the United States has been that the policies and practices stemming from this worldview succeeded all too well in constructing unequal populations among Europeans, Native Americans, and peoples of African descent. Given what we know about the capacity of normal humans to achieve and function within any culture, we conclude that present-day inequalities between “racial” groups are not consequences of their biological inheritance but products of historical and contemporary social, economic, educational, and political circumstances ( AAA 1998 ).

2. This framework is a revised iteration of an earlier schematic ( squatters, shifters , and straddlers ), which is discussed in Wagner et al. (2017) . We responded to feedback from the editor-in-chief and anonymous reviewers. This new heuristic provides a more nuanced interpretation of the data.

3. In Wagner et al. (2017) , please note that the initial number of 888 free-text professional respondents was based on provisional analysis. The final statistical analysis yielded 1,154 free-text professional respondents.

4. Our focus was on the extent to which individual anthropologists’ responses either mirrored or deviated from the collective position on race as evidenced by the 1998 “AAA Statement on Race” and the RACE project. For a future publication, we are considering a comparison of subdisciplinary perspectives.

Contributor Information

Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, Center on Genomics, Race, Identity, Difference (GRID), Duke University, Durham, NC 27708; ude.ekud@ioj .

Jennifer K. Wagner, Center for Translational Bioethics and Health Care Policy, Geisinger Health System, Danville, PA 17822; [email protected] .

Joon-Ho Yu, Department of Pediatrics, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98105; ude.wu@uyohnooj .

Tanya M. Harrell, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA 98109; gro.prahcs@llerraht .

Michael J. Bamshad, Departments of Pediatrics and Genome Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98105; ude.wu@dahsmabm .

Charmaine D. Royal, Departments of African and African American Studies, Biology and Community and Family Medicine and Center on Genomics, Race, Identity, Difference Duke University, Durham, NC 27708; [email protected] .

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