Using Anthropology to Make Sense of Human Diversity

Abstract

Race is not a scientifically valid biological category, and yet it remains important as a socially constructed category. Once educators grasp this concept, they can use the suggestions and resources the authors offer here to help their students make sense of race. SURELY WE'VE all heard people say there is only one - the human race. We've also heard and seen overwhelming evidence that would seem to contradict this view. After all, the U.S. Census divides us into groups based on race, and there are certainly observable physical differences among people - skin color, nose and eye shape, body type, hair color and texture, and so on. In the world of education, the message of racial differences as biological facts is reinforced when we are told that we should understand specific learning styles and behavior patterns of black, Asian, Native American, white, and Latino children and when books such as The Bell Curve make pseudoscientific claims about and learning.1 How can educators make sense of these conflicting messages about race? And why should they bother? Whether we think of all human beings as one race, or as four or five distinct or as hundreds of does anything really change? If we accept that the concept of is fundamentally flawed, does that mean that young African Americans are less likely to be followed by security guards in department stores? Are people going to stop thinking of Asians as the model minority? Will racism become a thing of the past? Many educators understandably would like to have clear information to help them teach students about human biological variability. While multicultural education materials are now widely available, they rarely address basic questions about why we look different from one another and what these biological differences do (and do not) mean. Multicultural education emphasizes respecting differences and finding ways to include all students, especially those who have been historically marginalized. Multicultural education has helped us to understand racism and has provided a rich body of literature on antiracist teaching strategies, and this has been all to the good. But it has not helped us understand the two concepts of race: the biological one and the social one. In this article, we explain what anthropologists mean when they say that don't exist (in other words, when they reject the concept of as a scientifically valid biological category) and why they argue instead that race is a socially constructed category. We'll also discuss why this is such an important understanding and what it means for educators and students who face the social reality of and racism every day. And finally, we'll offer some suggestions and resources for teachers who want to include teaching about in their classes. Why Race Isn't Biologically Real For the past several decades, biological anthropologists have been arguing that races don't really exist, or, more precisely, that the concept of has no validity as a biological category. What exactly does this mean? First, anthropologists are unraveling a deeply embedded ideology, a long-standing European and American racial world view.2 Historically, the idea of emerged in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, coinciding with the growth of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. Attempts were made to classify humans into natural, geographically distinct races, hierarchically ordered by their closeness to God's original forms. Europeans were, not surprisingly, at the top, with the most perfect form represented by a female skull from the Caucasus Mountains, near the purported location of Noah's ark and the origin of humans. Hence the origins of the racial term Caucasian or Caucasoid for those of European ancestry.3 In the late 19th century, anthropologists sought to reconstruct human prehistory and trace the evolution of human cultural institutions. …