Abstract
This article is targeted to faculty teaching race and ethnicity, racism, diversity, and multicultural courses. Many students equate race with skin color. The premise of this article is that to teach students about the social construction of race, teachers must first know enough science to teach students that race is not biological. This article examines the biology of race by showing how advances in DNA sequencing led to genetics research that supports arguments that race is not biological. DNA comparisons show that all human populations living today are one species that came from Africa. The article explains the migration of humans out of Africa about 60,000 years ago and how they populated Australia, then Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The article shows how recent research maps the timing of the migration and admixture of specific population groups into Europe and India. The article shows how a mutation in one nucleotide can result in a trait like blue eyes, or Hemoglobin S (which confers resistance to malaria), which can be subject to evolution through natural selection. DNA comparisons show how natural selection shaped the genetics of human skin color to adapt to less UV light in the northern latitudes of Europe and Asia. The article shows that there is no relation between skin color or other “racial” characteristics and complex traits like intelligence. The science in this article will help teachers explain that as race is not biological, race is socially constructed and culturally enacted.
Highlights
When I began teaching race and ethnicity, I discovered that many of my students believed that race was not an idea, but a fact
During the 18th century, the idea that humans could be divided into different biological races that were correlated with different traits and characteristics, such as “intelligent and hardworking” versus “unintelligent and indolent,” seems to have appeared about the same time that chattel slavery was rapidly expanding as a money-making opportunity for Europeans (Smedley & Smedley, 2005)
This suggests that the idea of race had a social genesis tied to the justification of slavery
Summary
When I began teaching race and ethnicity, I discovered that many of my students believed that race was not an idea, but a fact. This article argues that to teach students how race is socially constructed, faculty must have mastered enough science to show skeptical students that the idea of race is not biological. Most educators who teach in the areas of antiracism, cultural competence, diversity, or race and ethnicity are social scientists. The purpose of this article is to present faculty with accurate scientific information on the biology of race to share with their students. This will help students understand that race as biology is not scientifically based. In terms of background assumptions, this article examines the idea of race from the viewpoint of social scientific realism. In the United States, “there are profound and stubbornly persistent . . . differences in socioeconomic status, educational and occupational status, wealth, [and] political power” based on ascribed race (Smedley & Smedley, 2005, p. 16)
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