what is race essay

RACE Writing: A Comprehensive Guide + Examples

Welcome to the ultimate guide on mastering the RACE writing method.

Whether you’re a student aiming to ace your essays, a teacher looking to boost your students’ writing skills, or simply someone who wants to write more clearly and effectively, this guide is for you. Let’s transform your writing together,

What Is RACE Writing?

Table of Contents

RACE is an acronym that stands for Restate, Answer, Cite, and Explain .

This structured approach ensures that responses are clear, complete, and well-supported by evidence.

Here’s a quick overview of what each component entails:

• Restate : Begin by restating the question or prompt to establish the context of your response.
• Answer : Directly answer the question or address the prompt.
• Cite : Provide evidence or examples to support your answer.
• Explain : Elaborate on the evidence and its relevance to your answer.

Now, let’s dive deeper into each component of the RACE strategy and see how to apply it effectively.

Restate: Setting the Context

Restating the question or prompt is the first step in the RACE strategy. This ensures that the reader knows exactly what question you are addressing. It also helps you stay focused on the topic.

Tips for Restating

• Paraphrase the Question : Don’t just repeat the question verbatim. Rephrase it in your own words.
• Keep it Brief : Your restatement should be concise and to the point.
• Include Key Terms : Make sure to use key terms from the question to maintain clarity.

Question : How does the protagonist in “To Kill a Mockingbird” demonstrate courage? Restatement : The protagonist in “To Kill a Mockingbird” demonstrates courage through various actions and decisions.

Answer: Direct and Clear Responses

Once you’ve restated the question, the next step is to answer it directly. This is your main response to the question or prompt.

Tips for Answering

• Be Direct : Clearly state your answer without beating around the bush.
• S tay Focused: Make sure your answer directly tackles the question at hand.
• Keep it Simple : Use straightforward language to convey your point.

Answer : The protagonist, Scout Finch, demonstrates courage by standing up for what she believes is right, despite the risks involved.

Cite: Supporting with Evidence

Citing evidence is crucial for backing up your answer. This involves providing quotes, data, or examples that support your response.

Tips for Citing

• Use Reliable Sources : Ensure your evidence comes from credible and relevant sources.
• Integrate Smoothly : Blend your citations into your writing seamlessly.
• Be Specific : Provide detailed and specific evidence.

Citation : For instance, in the novel, Scout stands up to a mob intent on lynching Tom Robinson, demonstrating her bravery (Lee, 1960, p. 153).

Explain: Making the Connection

The final step is to explain how your evidence supports your answer. This is where you connect the dots and show the significance of your evidence.

Tips for Explaining

• Be Thorough : Provide a detailed explanation of how the evidence supports your answer.
• Clarify Relevance : Clearly show the link between your evidence and your response.
• Avoid Assumptions : Don’t assume the reader will understand the connection without your explanation.

Explanation : This act of defiance highlights Scout’s moral courage, as she is willing to face danger to uphold justice and protect the innocent.

Watch this playlist of videos on RACE Writing:

Using RACE Writing for Yourself

Implementing the RACE strategy in your writing can significantly enhance the quality and coherence of your work.

Here are some practical steps to integrate RACE into your writing process:

1. Understand the Prompt

Before you start writing, make sure you fully understand the question or prompt.

This will help you accurately restate it in your response.

Spend time analyzing the prompt to grasp its nuances and underlying questions. This thorough understanding allows you to pinpoint exactly what is being asked, ensuring that your response remains relevant and focused.

Misinterpreting the prompt can lead to an off-topic answer, wasting both your time and effort.

Additionally, breaking down the prompt into smaller, manageable parts can be beneficial.

Identify the key terms and phrases, and consider their implications.

By doing this, you can create a mental map of your response, making it easier to restate the prompt effectively in your own words.

This step sets a strong foundation for the rest of the RACE process.

2. Outline Your Response

Create a brief outline using the RACE components.

This will help you organize your thoughts and ensure that you address each part of the strategy.

Start with your restatement, then outline your direct answer, list the evidence you will cite, and plan your explanations.

An outline serves as a roadmap, guiding you through your writing process and helping you stay on track.

An organized outline not only saves time but also enhances the coherence of your response.

It allows you to see the overall structure and flow of your argument, making it easier to identify any gaps or weaknesses.

This proactive approach helps you craft a well-rounded and compelling response, ensuring that each RACE component is effectively addressed.

3. Draft and Revise

Write a draft of your response, focusing on incorporating each element of RACE.

Afterward, revise your work to refine your restatement, answer, citations, and explanations.

Drafting allows you to put your ideas into words without worrying too much about perfection.

It’s an opportunity to explore your thoughts and see how well they translate onto the page.

Revising, on the other hand, is where the real magic happens.

Take a critical look at your draft, checking for clarity, coherence, and consistency.

Ensure that your restatement is accurate, your answer is direct, your citations are relevant, and your explanations are thorough.

This iterative process of drafting and revising helps you produce a polished and effective piece of writing.

4. Practice Regularly

Like any skill, mastering RACE takes practice.

Regularly applying the strategy in various writing contexts will help you become more proficient.

The more you practice, the more intuitive the process will become, allowing you to apply the RACE strategy effortlessly.

Experiment with different types of writing prompts and questions.

This diversity in practice will help you adapt the RACE strategy to different contexts and topics, making you a more versatile writer.

Regular practice also builds confidence, enabling you to tackle any writing task with ease and assurance.

Teaching RACE Writing to Students

As an educator, teaching the RACE writing strategy to students can significantly improve their writing abilities.

Here are some tips for effectively teaching RACE:

1. Introduce the Strategy

Start by explaining the RACE acronym and its components.

Use examples to illustrate each part of the strategy. Providing a clear and thorough introduction helps students understand the purpose and benefits of the RACE strategy.

Use engaging examples that are relevant to their interests to capture their attention and make the concept more relatable.

In addition, consider using visual aids such as charts or diagrams to break down the RACE components.

Visual representations can make it easier for students to grasp the structure and flow of the strategy.

Reinforce your explanation with real-life examples from texts they are familiar with, demonstrating how RACE can be applied in various contexts.

2. Model the Process

Demonstrate how to apply the RACE strategy by working through an example together with your students.

Show them how to restate, answer, cite, and explain cohesively.

Modeling the process provides students with a concrete example of how to effectively use RACE in their writing.

It also allows them to see the strategy in action, making it more accessible and understandable.

During the modeling process, think aloud to explain your reasoning and decision-making.

This helps students understand the thought process behind each step of the RACE strategy.

Encourage questions and provide immediate feedback to clarify any doubts. By actively engaging students in the modeling process, you foster a deeper understanding and appreciation of the strategy.

3. Practice with Guidance

Provide students with practice prompts and guide them through the RACE process.

Offer feedback to help them improve their responses.

Guided practice allows students to apply the RACE strategy in a supportive environment, where they can receive constructive feedback and make necessary adjustments.

Start with simpler prompts and gradually increase the complexity as students become more comfortable with the strategy.

Pair students up for peer practice sessions, where they can collaborate and learn from each other.

As they practice, circulate around the classroom to provide individualized feedback and address any challenges they may face.

This hands-on approach helps reinforce the RACE strategy and builds students’ confidence in their writing abilities.

4. Encourage Peer Review

Have students review each other’s work using the RACE strategy.

This peer review process can provide valuable insights and help reinforce their understanding.

Peer review fosters a collaborative learning environment, where students can share their perspectives and learn from each other.

Provide clear guidelines and criteria for peer review to ensure that the feedback is constructive and focused.

Encourage students to use the RACE framework to evaluate their peers’ responses, highlighting strengths and suggesting areas for improvement.

This process not only helps students refine their writing but also enhances their critical thinking and analytical skills.

By engaging in peer review, students gain a deeper understanding of the RACE strategy and learn to appreciate different writing styles and approaches.

5. Assess Progress

Regularly assess students’ writing to ensure they are effectively applying the RACE strategy.

Provide constructive feedback to help them continue improving.

Regular assessments allow you to track students’ progress and pinpoint areas where they might need extra help or guidance.

Use a variety of assessment methods, such as quizzes, writing assignments, and in-class exercises, to evaluate students’ understanding and application of the RACE strategy.

Provide detailed feedback that highlights both strengths and areas for improvement.

Offer specific suggestions for how they can enhance their responses.

Celebrate their successes and acknowledge their efforts to motivate and encourage continuous improvement.

By consistently assessing progress, you can ensure that students are mastering the RACE strategy and developing strong writing skills.

Examples of RACE Writing in Action

To illustrate how the RACE strategy can be effectively applied, here are three comprehensive examples.

These examples cover different contexts, showcasing the versatility of the RACE strategy in enhancing writing clarity and coherence.

Example 1: Literature Analysis

Prompt : How does the theme of friendship manifest in “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”?

Restate : The theme of friendship is a central element in “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.”

Answer : Friendship is portrayed through the strong bond between Harry, Ron, and Hermione, which helps them overcome numerous challenges.

Cite : For instance, when Ron sacrifices himself in the life-sized chess game to allow Harry and Hermione to move forward (Rowling, 1997, p. 283).

Explain : This act of selflessness exemplifies the deep trust and loyalty among the trio, highlighting how their friendship empowers them to face dangers together. Ron’s willingness to risk his life underscores the strength of their bond, illustrating the theme of friendship as a vital force in their journey.

Example 2: Scientific Report

Prompt : Explain how photosynthesis contributes to the oxygen supply on Earth.

Restate : Photosynthesis plays a crucial role in maintaining the oxygen supply on Earth.

Answer : During photosynthesis, plants convert carbon dioxide and water into glucose and oxygen, releasing oxygen as a byproduct.

Cite : According to Smith (2020), “Plants release approximately 260 billion tons of oxygen into the atmosphere each year through the process of photosynthesis” (p. 45).

Explain : This process is fundamental to sustaining life on Earth, as it replenishes the oxygen that animals and humans breathe. Without photosynthesis, the oxygen levels in the atmosphere would diminish, leading to a decline in aerobic organisms. Therefore, photosynthesis is essential for maintaining the balance of gases in our atmosphere and supporting life.

Example 3: Historical Analysis

Prompt : Discuss the impact of the Industrial Revolution on urbanization in the 19th century.

Restate : The Industrial Revolution significantly influenced urbanization in the 19th century.

Answer : The rapid industrialization led to a massive migration of people from rural areas to cities in search of employment opportunities.

Cite : Historical records indicate that the urban population in England increased from 20% to 50% between 1800 and 1850 due to industrialization (Johnson, 2015, p. 102).

Explain : This shift transformed the social and economic fabric of society, as cities grew rapidly to accommodate the influx of workers. The development of factories and the need for labor created new urban centers, leading to improved infrastructure and changes in living conditions. However, this rapid urbanization also brought challenges, such as overcrowding and poor sanitation, highlighting the complex impact of the Industrial Revolution on society.

Final Thoughts: RACE Writing

Mastering the RACE writing strategy enhances clarity, coherence, and persuasiveness in writing.

By Restating, Answering, Citing, and Explaining, you can effectively address any prompt.

Embrace RACE to elevate your writing skills and produce compelling responses.

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Race & Ethnicity—Definition and Differences [+48 Race Essay Topics]

Race and ethnicity are among the features that make people different. Unlike character traits, attitudes, and habits, race and ethnicity can’t be changed or chosen. It fully depends on the ancestry.

But why do we separate these two concepts and what are their core differences? How do people classify different races and types of ethnicity?

To find answers to these questions, keep reading the article.

Also, if you have a writing assignment on the same topic due soon and looking for inspiration, you’ll find plenty of race, racism, and ethnic group essay examples. At IvyPanda , we’ve gathered over 45 samples to help you with your writing, so you don’t have to torture yourself looking for awesome essay ideas.

Race and Ethnicity Definitions

It’s important to learn what race and ethnicity really are before trying to compare them and explore their classification.

Race is a group of people that belong to the same distinct category based on their physical and social qualities.

At the very beginning of the term usage, it only referred to people speaking a common language. Later, the term started to denote certain national affiliations. A reference to physical traits was added to the term race in the 17th century.

In a modern world, race is considered to be a social construct. In other words, it’s a distinguishable identity with a cultural meaning behind. Race is not usually seen as exclusively biological or physical quality, even though it’s partially based on common physical features among group members.

Ethnicity (also known as ethnic group) is a category of people who have similarities like common language, ancestry, history, culture, society, and nation.

Basically, people inherit ethnicity depending on the society they live in. Other factors that define a person’s ethnicity include symbolic systems like religion, cuisine, art, dressing style, and even physical appearance.

Sometimes, the term ethnicity is used as a synonym to people or nation. It’s also fair to mention that it’s sometimes possible for an individual to leave one ethnic group and shift to another. It’s usually done through acculturation, language shift, or religious conversion.

Though, most of the times, representatives of a certain ethnic group continue to speak their common language and share some other typical traits even if derived from their founder population.

Differences Between Race and Ethnicity

Now that we know what race and ethnicity are all about, let’s highlight some of the major differences between these two terms.

• It divides people into groups or populations based mainly on physical appearance
• The main accent is on genetic or biological traits
• Because of geographical isolation, racial categories were a result of a shared genealogy. In modern world, this isolation is practically nonexistent, which lead to mixing of races
• The distinguishing factors can include type of face or skin color. Other genetic differences are considered to be weak

• Members of an ethnic group identify themselves based on nationality, culture, and traditions
• The emphasis is on group history, culture, and sometimes on religion and language
• Definition of ethnicity is based on shared genealogy. It can be either actual or presumed
• Distinguishing factors of ethnic groups keep changing depending on time period. Sometimes, they get defined by stereotypes that dominant groups have

It’s also worth mentioning that the border between two terms is quite vague . As a result, the choice of using either of them can be very subjective.

In the majority of cases, race is considered to be unitary, which means that one person belongs to one race. However, ethnically, this same person can identify themselves as a member of multiple ethnic groups. And it won’t be wrong if a person have lived enough time within those groups.

Race and Ethnicity Classification

It’s time to look at possible ways to classify racial and ethnical groups.

One of the most common classifications for race into four categories: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid, and Australoid. Three of them have subcategories.

Let’s look at them more closely.

– Caucasoid. White race with light skin color. Hair ranges from brown to black. They have medium to high structure. The subcategories are as follows:

• Alpine. Live in Central Asia
• Nordic . Baltic, British, and Scandinavian inhabitants
• Mediterranean. Hail from France, Italy, Portugal, and Spain

– Mongoloid. The race’s majority is found in Asia. Characterized by black hair, yellow skin tone, and medium height.

• Asian mongol. Found in japan, China, and East-India
• Micronesian. Inhabitants of Malenesia

– Negroid. A race found in Africa. They have black skin, wooly hair, and medium to high structure.

• Negro. African inhabitants
• Far Eastern Pygmy. Found in the south Pacific islands
• Bushman and Hottentot. Live in Kala-Hari desert of Africa

– Australoid. Found in Australia. They have wavy hair, light skin, and medium to tall height.

It’s fair to mention yet again that it’s practically impossible to find pure race representatives because of how mixed they all got.

Speaking of ethnicity classification, one of the most common ways to do that is by continent. And each of continent’s ethnic groups will have their own subcategory.

So, we can roughly divide ethnic groups into following categories:

• North American
• South American

Race Essay Ideas

If all the information above was not enough and you’re looking for race essay topics, or even straight up essay examples for your writing assignment—today’s your lucky day. Because experts at IvyPanda have gathered plenty of those.

Check out the list of race and ethnic group essay samples below. Use them for inspiration, or try to develop one of the suggested topics even further.

Whatever option you’ll choose, we’re sure that you’ll end up with great results!

• The Anatomy of Scientific Racism: Racialist Responses to Black Athletic Achievement
• Race, Ethnicity and Crime
• Representation of Race in Disney Films
• What is the relationship between Race, Poverty and Prison?
• Race in a Southern Community
• African American Women and the Struggle for Racial Equality
• American Ethnic Studies
• Institutionalized Racism from John Brown Raid to Jim Crow Laws
• The Veil and Muslim
• Race and the Body: How Culture Both Shapes and Mirrors Broader Societal Attitudes Towards Race and the Body
• Latinos and African Americans: Friends or Foes?
• Historical US Relationships with Native American
• The experiences of the Aborigines
• Contemporary Racism in Australia: the Experience of Aborigines
• No Reparations for Blacks for the Injustice of Slavery
• Racism (another variant)
• Hispanic Americans
• Racism in the Penitentiary
• How the development of my racial/ethnic identity has been impacted
• My father’s black pride
• African American Ethnic Group
• Ethnic Group Conflicts
• How the Movie Crash Presents the African Americans
• Ethnic Groups and discrimination
• Race and Ethnicity
• Racial and ethnic inequality
• Ethnic Groups and Conflicts
• Ethnics Studies
• Ethnic studies and emigration
• Ethnicity Influence
• Immigration and Ethnic Relations
• A comparison Between Asian Americans and Latinos
• Analysis of the Chinese Experience in “A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America” by Ronald Takaki
• Wedding in the UAE
• Social and Cultural Diversity
• The White Dilemma in South Africa
• Ethnocentrism and its Effects on Individuals, Societies, and Multinationals
• Reduction of ethnocentrism and promotion of cultural relativism
• Racial and Ethnic Groups
• Gender and Race
• Child Marriages in Modern India
• Race and Ethnicity (another variant)
• Racial Relations and Color Blindness
• Multiculturalism and “White Anxiety”
• Cultural and racial inequality in Health Care
• The impact of colonialism on cultural transformations in North and South America
• African American Studies
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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.

Getting Real About Race Hoodies, Mascots, Model Minorities, and Other Conversations

• Stephanie M. McClure - Georgia College & State University, USA
• Cherise A. Harris - Connecticut College, USA

Wanted a realistic view of the academic concepts.

Stephanie M. McClure

Cherise a. harris.

Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Ethnicity — A Report on What Race is

A Report on What Race is

• Categories: Ethnicity

About this sample

Words: 494 |

Published: Dec 12, 2018

Words: 494 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Works Cited

• Conley, D. (2017). You May Ask Yourself: An Introduction to Thinking Like a Sociologist (6th ed.). W.W. Norton & Company.
• Freund, D. (2013). Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the United States. In R. Delgado & J. Stefancic (Eds.), Critical Race Theory : An Introduction (2nd ed., pp. 97-117). NYU Press.
• Nash, M. (1964). The Golden Road: Notes on the Anthropology of Repression in California. Social Problems, 12(3), 319-330.
• Feagin, J. R., & Cobas, J. A. (2008). Latinos, Asian Americans, and the Black-White Binary. In R. Delgado & J. Stefancic (Eds.), Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (2nd ed., pp. 117-133). NYU Press.
• Bonilla-Silva, E. (2017). Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America (5th ed.). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
• Omi, M., & Winant, H. (2014). Racial Formation in the United States (3rd ed.). Routledge.
• Goldberg, D. T. (2009). The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism. Wiley-Blackwell.
• DiAngelo, R. (2018). White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. Beacon Press.
• Dovidio, J. F., & Gaertner, S. L. (2004). Aversive Racism. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 36, pp. 1-52). Academic Press.
• Bonilla-Silva, E. (2001). White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era. Lynne Rienner Publishers.

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Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century

A collection of new essays by an interdisciplinary team of authors that gives a comprehensive introduction to race and ethnicity. Doing Race focuses on race and ethnicity in everyday life: what they are, how they work, and why they matter. Going to school and work, renting an apartment or buying a house, watching television, voting, listening to music, reading books and newspapers, attending religious services, and going to the doctor are all everyday activities that are influenced by assumptions about who counts, whom to trust, whom to care about, whom to include, and why. Race and ethnicity are powerful precisely because they organize modern society and play a large role in fueling violence around the globe. Doing Race is targeted to undergraduates; it begins with an introductory essay and includes original essays by well-known scholars. Drawing on the latest science and scholarship, the collected essays emphasize that race and ethnicity are not things that people or groups have or are , but rather sets of actions that people do . Doing Race provides compelling evidence that we are not yet in a “post-race” world and that race and ethnicity matter for everyone. Since race and ethnicity are the products of human actions, we can do them differently. Like studying the human genome or the laws of economics, understanding race and ethnicity is a necessary part of a twenty first century education.

University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

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What is Race? Four Philosophical Views

Joshua Glasgow, Sally Haslanger, Chike Jeffers, and Quayshawn Spencer, What is Race? Four Philosophical Views , Oxford University Press, 2019, 283pp., $35.00 (pbk), ISBN 9780190610180.

Reviewed by Michael O. Hardimon, University of California San Diego

In his provocative 2006 essay, “‘Race’: Normative, Not Metaphysical or Semantic,” Ron Mallon argues that much of the apparent metaphysical debate over race is an illusion. 1 There is widespread agreement that racialist race (race conceived of in essentialist and hierarchical terms) is unreal. The remaining metaphysical debate (over whether race understood in a non-racialist way is real) is mostly illusory, since the parties to the dispute operate with different understandings of the word ‘race’ and different theories of meaning. The real substantive philosophical dispute is normative; it concerns what we want our racial concepts, terms, and practices to do.

The welcome appearance of this book suggests that Mallon may have overlooked the possibility that the proper understanding of the terms is one of the points at issue in the metaphysical debate over race and that this metaphysical debate itself contains a normative dimension. The book makes clear that, in addition to being real, the metaphysical debate over race (understood as a complex dispute that includes a semantic and normative dimension) is alive and well. It brings together, in one convenient volume, the metaphysical accounts of race of four prominent philosophers of race at the cutting edge of the field.

The book divides into two parts. In part one, the authors lay out their own views. In part two, they address one another’s positions. Part one begins with Sally Haslanger’s account of race as a sociopolitical phenomenon, followed by Chike Jeffers’ cultural account. Quayshawn Spencer then presents his conception of race as a biological phenomenon. Finally, Joshua Glasgow articulates his understanding of races as visible-trait groups not legitimized by biology but which may count as real in a non-biological, non-social “basic” sense. These four positions represent four of the most important options in the metaphysics of race today. Haslanger and Jeffers offer two forms of social constructionism. Spencer represents biological realism about race. Glasgow offers an ultra-minimalist account. The discussion in the second part of the book is lively and engaging. The degree to which the four authors actually take up one another’s views is remarkable. The book is a model of philosophical discussion. Owing to limitations of space, I will concentrate on the authors’ exposition of their own views.

Haslanger approaches the question concerning what race is as a critical theorist and anti-realist about biological race. Her central purpose is to undermine the hierarchy of White Supremacy. Race for Haslanger just is sociopolitical race. Races are racialized groups, social groups that are represented as races. They are, more specifically, groups whose members are observed or imagined to exhibit bodily features thought to be evidence of ancestral links to a certain geographic region (or regions) and who occupy either subordinate or privileged social positions, depending on the bodily features they are observed or imagined to exhibit. A background ideology represents these individuals as suited to the stratified social positions they occupy, thus motivating and justifying the social hierarchy of race (pp. 25-26). This powerful account identifies one semantically permissible and politically valuable albeit non-standard use of the term ‘race’. A comprehensive specification of what-race-is must include the idea of race as a social construction. Nonetheless, Haslanger’s account needs to be supplemented in two ways.

First, Haslanger seems to think it possible fully to account for sociopolitical race without a biological concept of race. She makes use of the non-biological race-like concept of “color.” Groups whose members are observed or imagined to exhibit bodily features thought to be evidence of ancestral links to a certain geographic region (or regions) are “colors.” But the concept color is not the concept race . The background ideology to which she refers must itself deploy a biological concept of race with which to represent the sociopolitical groups it racializes as races. Racialization does not operate through the application of the benign technical concept color . It operates instead through the application of a pernicious and vacuous biological concept of race that represents social groups as biological races, endowed with “essences” or “natures” that explain why individuals are suited to the subordinate or privileged social positions they occupy. The racialist concept of race has been empirically refuted. 2 But critical theory must have this refuted concept at its disposal so that it can refer to the concept’s ideological deployment.

Second, there is reason to think that a viable practice of racialization requires the existence of groups that do in fact exhibit bodily features that are evidence of ancestral links to a certain geographic region. One of the strengths of Haslanger’s account is that it allows for the possibility of particular racialized groups that are merely imagined to have such bodily features. But if no groups exhibited bodily features of the relevant sort, could the project of racialization get off the ground? It would seem that racialization requires the existence of a number of groups that exhibit the right sort of bodily features. If everyone looked like the Dali Lama (to borrow Glasgow’s example), constructing sociopolitical races would be impossible. But groups that exhibit bodily features of the relevant sort satisfy the notion I have elsewhere dubbed the minimalist concept of race. 3 Minimalist races are defined as groups that exhibit patterns of visible physical features that correspond to geographical ancestry. What this means is that, in order for there to be sociopolitical races, minimalist races must exist. A full metaphysical account of sociopolitical race must therefore acknowledge the existence this sort of biological race. Social constructionism needs minimalist biological realism about race.

Haslanger’s account has one striking normative deficiency. As Glasgow notes, it cannot countenance the equality of races (p. 139). On her view, sociopolitical races are the only kind of race there are. Social hierarchy is a necessary feature of sociopolitical race; the end of the social hierarchy of race would mean the end of races as such. But isn’t a minimal condition of adequacy on a critical theory of race that it be able to represent racial equality as a coherent social ideal? Critical theory cannot do that unless it possesses a non-hierarchical race concept. The minimalist concept of race is such a concept; nothing in its content precludes racial equality. Indeed, there is reason to think that equality among minimalist races is what the original idea of racial equality comes to. Critical theory needs a concept like the minimalist concept of race to satisfy its own normative aspirations.

Jeffers writes as a social constructionist committed to the preservation of races. His cultural conception of race is political; it represents races as having a political origin. Races “are appearance-based groups that initially resulted from the history of Europe’s imperial encounter” (p. 65). They are characterized (a) by patterns of visible physical features that correspond to geographical ancestry (pp. 39, 40) but do not become races until (b) they are subordinated by other groups (that presumably exhibit different visible physical features) and © develop distinctive cultures in response (50). These cultures are intrinsically valuable; races should, therefore, be preserved.

Jeffers presents his account as a characterization of the metaphysics of race. This commits him to the claim that the features it ascribes to races are necessary — features a group must have in order to be a race. So, on Jeffers’ view, a group must have distinctive cultures to be a race. But is this correct? Why isn’t possession of patterns of visible physical features that correspond to geographical ancestry sufficient for racehood? Surely it is more parsimonious to define races without bringing in the notion of culture. Is it not plausible to say that a group that retained its pattern of visible physical features from t 1 to t 2 but ceased at t 2 to retain the culture it possessed at t 1 would remain the same race at t 2 ? Were Blacks to become fully assimilated to “White culture” while retaining their distinctive pattern of visible physical characteristics, they would remain Black. However abhorrent this eventuality may be, its unattractiveness does not constitute a philosophical reason for rejecting the metaphysical point.

Jeffers could abandon his metaphysical claim that groups must exhibit distinctive cultures to be races and defend the notion that the distinctive culture that races possess should be preserved as a purely normative thesis. But this presupposes, dubiously, that each race — including in particular each continental-level race — has a single distinctive culture. As Haslanger points out, “it is not clear how to define a ‘way of life’ that is shared by all Asians, or all Blacks, or all Whites, or all Native Americans” (p. 167). Without the idea that each race has a single distinctive culture, however, the idea that each race should be preserved for the sake of its distinctive culture has no punch.

It is to culture that Jeffers primarily appeals in advancing the ideal of preserving race (p. 58). But, given his specification of what-a-race-is, the preservation of race requires more than the preservation of cultures. It also requires the preservation of patterns of visible physical features. 4 But is the long-term preservation of these patterns an attractive goal? I’m not so sure. I do not think we should aim at their elimination. The notion that the only way to eliminate racism is through the literal elimination of race is deeply mistaken. And it is vitally important that members of minimalist races be able to celebrate and affirm their pattern of visible physical features. But Jeffers does not convincingly establish the claim that the long-term preservation of these patterns is something at which we should necessarily aim. It has taken philosophers a very long time to separate the idea of race from the idea of culture. We should be wary of attempts to think them together again.

Spencer approaches the metaphysics of race as a philosopher of science. His basic goal is to show that race, properly understood, is biologically real. More specifically, he wants to show that race, as understood in one specific form of ordinary US “race talk,” namely, “ OMB race talk,” has this status. OMB race talk is the racial discourse used by the US Office of Management and Budget. The meaning of ‘race’ in OMB race talk, Spencer contends, is just the set of OMB races: the set of groups to which the race terms used in OMB race talk refer {Blacks, Asians, Whites, American Indians, and Pacific Islanders} (p. 93). The set of OMB races, however, is identical to the set of “human continental populations”, i.e., {Africans, East Asians, Eurasians, Native Americans, and Oceanians} (p. 100). This latter set is a “biologically real entity” (p. 95). It counts as such because it is an epistemically useful and justified entity in a well-ordered research program in biology, namely, population genetics (p. 99), and thus is on a par with other entities that are used in empirically successful biology such as the monophyletic group, the TYRP1 gene, and the hypothalamus (p. 77). Because the set of OMB races is identical to set of human continental populations, it is a biologically real entity. This is the sense in which ‘race’ is real.

The basic idea that the races picked out by OMB race talk are biologically real is well-taken. A full account of “race” must include an account of race as a biological phenomenon. The specific claim that Pacific Islanders are a race can be doubted, since this group includes two subgroups (Melanesians and Polynesians) that exhibit different patterns of visible physical features. But this is a quibble. 5 More serious is the worry that Spencer’ account falls prey to a radical form of revisionism.

Spencer makes two main revisionary claims. The first is that is that ‘race’ as used by the OMB does not purport to refer to a kind or category (p. 93). If one thing is clear about the term ‘race’, as it is ordinarily used, it is that it purports to refer to a kind. The concept of race has generality; it reaches beyond particulars. Blacks, Asians, Whites, and so forth are putative instances of the kind. Race is the kind of which Blacks, Asians, Whites and so forth are putative instances. The set {Blacks, Asians, Whites, American Indians, and Pacific Islanders} may — as a matter of empirical fact — exhaustively specify all the races. But then again it may not. Take Hispanics. The OMB contends they are an ethnicity rather than a race. Arguments can be given for and against this claim. But if the meaning of ‘race’ just is the set {Blacks, Asians, Whites, American Indians, and Pacific Islanders}, the answer to this empirical question is settled by the term’s meaning. The fact that it isn’t, is a reason for thinking that this set cannot be the meaning of ‘race’. Another reason for thinking race is a kind is that doing so makes it possible to countenance the possibility that races other than the ones that exist now may have existed in the distant past.

Spencer’s second revisionary claim is that the sense of ‘race’ with which the OMB operates is one on which it is possible that no race is visibly distinguishable from any other (p. 93). This is revisionary because the way ‘race’ is used in American English requires that races be visibly distinguishable. It is essential not to misunderstand the visible distinguishability claim. It does not say that every race is visibly distinguishable from every other race. It allows that Blacks and Melanesians, say, might turn out to be visibly indistinguishable races. (The pattern of visible features they exhibit are very similar. Whether this similarity actually amounts to identity, however, is another matter.) The force of the visible distinguishability claim is that if R 1 is a race, there is at least one other race R 2 from which R1 is visibly distinguished.

There is no good objection to Spencer’s idea that races are ancestry groups. The problem is with his revisionary contention that they are ancestry-groups-that-may-be visibly-indistinguishable. Spencer is fully aware that his position is counterintuitive (p. 207). But the feature that makes his position counterintuitive is not its biological realism. It is its radically revisionary understanding of ‘race’. Also questionable is the decision to focus so narrowly on the OMB’s use of ‘race’ in the first place.

Glasgow’s account seeks to articulate the ordinary concept of race. The ordinary meaning of ‘race’, on his view, is something like: “Races, by definition, are relatively large groups of people who are distinguished from other groups of people by having certain visible biological traits (such as skin color) to a disproportionate extent” (p. 117). This characterization contains a very important truth but may be importantly incomplete. It leaves out the idea that races are ancestry groups that have distinctive geographical origins. This omission is no mistake. Glasgow elsewhere explicitly rejects the idea that the ordinary concept of race includes these two further conditions. 6 Can the ideas of ancestry and geographical origin be jettisoned from the ordinary concept of race?

Maybe not. The matter turns on how the “certain visible biological traits” that races are said to have to a disproportionate extent are to be specified. Some specification is needed lest men and women be counted as races. They are, after all, distinguished by certain familiar visible biological traits to a disproportionate extent. Why don’t they count as races? Glasgow uses the example of skin color to indicate the sort of visible physical traits he wants to capture. But what explains why skin color goes on the list and Adam’s apples do not? Don’t say skin color is racial and Adam’s apples are not. The question is why the one is racial and the other is not. The answer may be that the “relevant kind” of visible physical features are visible physical features that vary with geographical ancestry. What makes a visible physical feature “racial” is the fact that it is part of a pattern of visible physical features that varies in this way. The visible physical traits that Glasgow takes to fix the content of the ordinary concept of race cannot be given a full metaphysical specification without reference to the concepts of ancestry and geography. And, if this is true, these concepts cannot be jettisoned from the ordinary concept of race. Ancestry and geography are built into race ab inito.

Glasgow contends that race, as he understands it, is neither biologically nor socially real. He initially concluded that races don’t exist in any sense and opted for racial anti-realism. But then a student of his, Jonathan Woodward, asked the question, “Granted that race is not a biological or social thing, why does that mean that it couldn’t exist?” (p. 139) Reflection led to the idea they call basic racial realism: “rather than being biologically real, socially real, or illusory . . . race is real in a way that is more ‘basic’ than what science aspires to” (p. 139).

This idea faces two difficulties. One is that it provides no indication of the kind of reality that entities that exhibit basic reality are supposed to enjoy. If you maintain that something is real, it is incumbent on you to specify where it falls on the “ontological map.” To be sure, there are real things that are neither biological or social. Physical things for one. Chemical things for another. But presumably race isn’t a physical or chemical thing. So what kind of “thing” is it? The predicate ‘basicness’ does not fix a kind of thing or domain of reality. But unless we know what kind of thing race is supposed to be or to what domain of reality it is supposed to belong, we are not in a position to assess the claim that it enjoys basic reality. Basicness is presumably not a matter of metaphysical fundamentality. It would be odd to claim that race has that standing. It is just not clear what the predication of basicness to reality comes to. Nor is it clear what sort of reality “basic reality” is supposed to be.

The second difficulty is prompted by an example Glasgow gives to illustrate what it is for something to be basically real. The example is sundog. Sundogs, he contends, enjoy basic reality (p. 139). Sundogs are defined as things that are either suns or dog. Science doesn’t care about sundogs; the category plays no role in its theories. So, sundog doesn’t enjoy scientific reality. But that doesn’t mean that it enjoys no reality. There are things that are either suns or dogs. Fido is a sundog because Fido is a dog. It is therefore plausible, Glasgow claims, to say that sundogs are real. But is this inference plausible? Are we really willing to count sundog as a real entity or kind? One doesn’t have to be an “elitist” to find a metaphysics that allows the generation of a real thing by disjunctively pairing any two existing things problematic. 7 Glasgow’s “basic realism” looks like nominalism disguised as realism, the distinction being that nominalism knows that it is not realism. Glasgow’s idea of assigning a minimalist form of reality to race is welcome, but it is by no means clear that the idea of race as a “basic reality” advances the discussion.

These criticisms notwithstanding, the book provides a wonderful snapshot of the current state the metaphysics of race. It will be of interest to philosophers unfamiliar with that debate who would like to know what is going on in the field. It will also be of interest to philosophers familiar with the work of Glasgow, Haslanger, Jeffers, and Spencer who would like to see the latest presentations of their views. This volume could serve as the centerpiece of graduate seminars on race or as a text in upper-level undergraduate philosophy classes. It is a book well worth having.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Lucy Allais and Mary Devereaux for helpful comments.

1 Ron Mallon, 2006, ‘Race’: Normative, Not Metaphysical or Semantic," Ethics , 116 n.3, pp. 525-551.

2 Michael O. Hardimon, 2017, Rethinking Race: The Case for Deflationary Realism , Harvard University Press, pp. 12-26

3 Ibid., pp. 27-64.

4 Note, however, that Jeffers says at one point that he believes that “a future in which race is merely cultural is possible” and speaks of the “eventual achievement of a world in which races exist only as cultural groups” (p. 58).

This idea is in tension with the metaphysical status he appears to assign to patterns of visible physical features.

5 I owe this point about Polynesians to Spencer, 2015, “Philosophy of Race Meets Population Genetics,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences , 52, p. 50.

6 Joshua Glasgow, 2009, A Theory of Race, Routledge.

7 Joshua Glasgow, 2015, “Basic Racial Realism,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association. 1 n.3, 452.

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The dictionary's definition of race

Each of the major groupings into which humankind is considered (in various theories or contexts) to be divided on the basis of physical characteristics or shared ancestry.

The notion of race is a social construct designed to divide people into groups ranked as superior and inferior. The scientific consensus is that race, in this sense, has no biological basis – we are all one race, the human race. Racial identity , however, is very real. And, in a racialized society like the United States, everyone is assigned a racial identity whether they are aware of it or not.

Race as Social Construction

​The dictionary’s definition of race is incomplete and misses the complexity of impact on lived experiences. It is important to acknowledge race is a social fabrication, created to classify people on the arbitrary basis of skin color and other physical features. Although race has no genetic or scientific basis, the concept of race is important and consequential. Societies use race to establish and justify systems of power, privilege, disenfranchisement, and oppression.

American Anthropological Association  states that "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." To understand more about race as a social construct in the United States, read the AAPA  statement on race and racism .

Learn more about race as it relates to human genetics In the Teaching Tolerance report, “Race Does Not Equal DNA” 

What is Racial identity?

• Racial identity is externally imposed: “ How do others perceive me? ”
• Racial identity is also internally constructed: “ How do I identify myself? ”

Understanding how our identities and experiences have been shaped by race is vital. We are all awarded certain privileges and or disadvantages because of our race whether or not we are conscious of it.

Race matters. Race matters … because of persistent racial inequality in society - inequality that cannot be ignored. Justice Sonya Sotomayor United States Supreme Court

Developmental models of racial identity

Many sociologists and psychologists have identified that there are similar patterns every individual goes through when recognizing their racial identity. While these patterns help us understand the link between race and identity, creating one’s racial identity is a fluid and nonlinear process that varies for every person and group.

Think of these categories of Racial Identity Development [PDF] as stations along a journey of the continual evolution of your racial identity. Your personal experiences, family, community, workplaces, the aging process, and political and social events – all play a role in understanding our own racial identity. During this process, people move between a desire to "fit in" to dominant norms, to a questioning of one's own identity and that of others. It includes feelings of confusion and often introspection, as well as moments of celebration of self and others. You may begin at any point on this chart and move in any direction – sometimes on the same day! Recognizing the station you are in helps you understand who you are.

What is ideology?

Ideology is a system of ideas, ideals, and manner of thinking that form the basis for decision making, often regarding economic or political theory and policy

No One is Colorblind to Race

The concept of race is intimately connected to our lives and has serious implications. It operates in real and definitive ways that confer benefits and privileges to some and withholds them from others.  Ignoring race means ignoring the establishment of racial hierarchies in society and the injustices these hierarchies have created and continue to reinforce.

• READ: “ Children Are Not Colorblind: How Young Children Learn Race ,” by Erin N. Winkler, Ph.D.

Understand More About the Dangers of Ignoring Race

Read this article, “ When you say you 'don't see race,' you’re ignoring racism, not helping to solve it. ”

Reflection:

• What are some experiences or identities that are central to who you are? How do you feel when they are ignored or “not seen”?

• The author in this article points out how people often use nonvisual cues to determine race. What does this reveal to us about the validity of pretending not to see race?

Either America will destroy ignorance, or ignorance will destroy the United States W.E.B. DuBois

RACISM = Racial Prejudice (Unfounded Beliefs + Irrational Fear) + Institutional Power 

Racism, like smog, swirls around us and permeates American society. It can be intentional, clear and direct or it can be expressed in more subtle ways that the perpetrator might not even be aware of.

Racism is a system of advantage based on race that involves systems and institutions, not just individual mindsets and actions. The critical variable in racism is the impact (outcomes) not the intent and operates at multiple levels including individual racism, interpersonal racism, institutional racism, and structural racism. 

• Interpersonal racism ​ occurs between individuals and includes public expressions of racism, often involving slurs, biases, hateful words or actions, or exclusion.

Source: Adapted from Terry Keleher, Applied Research Center, and Racial Equity Tools by OneTILT

Breaking the Silence Silence on issues of race hurts everyone. Reluctance to directly address the impact of race can result in a lack of connection between people, a loss of our society’s potential and progress, and an escalation of fear and violence. Silence around other issues of identity can also have the same negative impact on society. Silence on race keeps us all from understanding and learning. We can break the silence by being proactive - by learning, reflecting and having courageous conversations with ourselves and others.

VIDEO: Watch below as Franchesca Ramsey discusses racism on MTV’s Decoded (warning: adult language):

Take a moment to reflect

Let's Think

• How are you thinking about your own racialized identity after learning more about race?

• Ask a friend who has a different racial identity than yours to discuss how cultivating a positive sense of racial identity about yourself and others can interrupt racism at every level (personally, socially, and institutionally)?

For concerned citizens:

• Try this exercise to recognize the everyday opportunities you may have that can promote racial equity: Exercise on Choice Points .
• Activity: Try this group activity for talking about race effectively

For Families and Educators: Here are some ways to address race and racism in your classroom:

• Teaching young children about race: a guide for families and teachers
• Tipsfor talking to children about race

Why Us, Why Now?

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The Opinion Pages

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.

Join Opinion on Facebook and follow updates on twitter.com/roomfordebate .

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How to Use the RACE Writing Strategy with Students

• For Teachers , Literacy , Tips & Tricks

It doesn’t matter how many teachers I talk to, there is always a common thread: our students struggle with writing. Whether it’s mastering complete sentences or writing an essay, writing seems to always be a tough skill for students to master. In particular, I’ve heard from many teachers (and seen it myself) that students struggle to use evidence to support their claims. Luckily, that can change with the RACE writing strategy.

What is the RACE Writing Strategy?

This strategy is commonly referred to as RACE or RACES, and it’s an acronym that stands for restate the question, answer the question, cite evidence from the text, explain how the evidence proves your answer, and (optional) summarize.

Essentially, it’s an outline and scaffold our students can use as they get better at writing short answer responses. When it comes to writing, I say there you can never have too many scaffolds because we already know it’s a challenging skill.

When using the RACE writing strategy, students are essentially “checking off” that they have each element needed in a written response. And after a while, the process will become a natural part of writing.

How to Teach the RACE Writing Strategy

Getting students to use the RACE writing strategy isn’t too challenging, but you can’t expect them to figure it out alone. If you just hand them a worksheet or graphic organizer, you’ll probably be bombarded with questions and get some interesting writing samples back. That’s stressful for you and your students.

Instead, take it slow and gradually ease into the RACE writing strategy. Here is what I’d recommend –

#1 Model RACE . Start by completing some whole class exercises and model for students exactly what RACE looks like. 

You can read a text together as a class, and then write the response on the projector or whiteboard. I liked to have students write along with me as well, and then glue the example into their journals.

#2 Get clear on vocabulary . If students don’t know what cite or evidence means, they’ll never be able to independently use the RACE writing strategy. 

Make sure you directly teach the key vocabulary and provide examples of each. You can add these words to your Word Wall or make an anchor chart. I also have a RACE bulletin board resource that you can use for displaying the process.

#3 Chunk the assignment. Before you turn students loose to write an entire RACE paragraph, break it down step by step. 

The first time students work independently, have them just restate the question. Then the next time, have them restate the question and answer the question. Continue building on the next element over time.

#4 Provide feedback to students . You don’t need to grade every single RACE writing sample, but students should be getting feedback as they learn.

You can do this in a few ways. You can walk around the classroom during writing time and stop at each desk to check-in. You can call students over to your desk and provide quick feedback on their writing. Or you can call students for a small group where you review the writing pieces and assist.

Done-for-You RACE Resource

Hopefully, by this point, you’ve figured out why I love the RACE writing strategy so much. It made a significant difference in my students’ writing abilities, and I want your students to experience that same level of mastery.

I created a done-for-you RACE resource that guides students through the process and makes it easy for you to plan, prep, and implement the RACE writing strategy.

This resource is perfect for students who are beginners to RACE or who need some extra help reviewing. Here’s a peek inside the resource –

• There are ten practice pages to help students master RACE (five fiction and five informational)
• Each passage comes with a graphic organizer and checklist to provide writing support and scaffolding to students
• Each passage comes with a writing page , so students can turn their graphic organizer into a paragraph
• There are teacher examples for each passage , so you can model for students and provide examples

I hope this blog helped you brainstorm some ideas for teaching the RACE writing strategy to students. Don’t worry if it takes some time for your students to master it. Text support and evidence are tricky skills! RACE will help.

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Article contents

Race, ethnicity, and nation.

• Polly Rizova Polly Rizova Center for Governance and Public Policy Research, Willamette University
• , and  John Stone John Stone Department of Sociology, Boston University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.470
• Published in print: 01 March 2010
• Published online: 11 January 2018
• This version: 26 April 2021
• Previous version

The term “race” refers to groups of people who have differences and similarities in biological traits deemed by society to be socially significant, meaning that people treat other people differently because of them. Meanwhile, ethnicity refers to shared cultural practices, perspectives, and distinctions that set apart one group of people from another. Ethnic differences are not inherited; they are learned. When racial or ethnic groups merge in a political movement as a form of establishing a distinct political unit, then such groups can be termed nations that may be seen as representing beliefs in nationalism. Race and ethnicity are linked with nationality particularly in cases involving transnational migration or colonial expansion. Anthropologists and historians, following the modernist understanding of ethnicity, see nations and nationalism as developing with the rise of the modern state system. This culminated in the rise of “nation-states,” in which the presumptive boundaries of the nation coincided with state borders. Thus, the notion of ethnicity, like race and nation, developed in the context of European colonial expansion, when mercantilism and capitalism were promoting global movements of populations at the same time that state boundaries were being more clearly and rigidly defined. Theories about the relation between race, ethnicity, and nationality are also linked to more general ideas concerning globalization and populist nationalism.

• nationalism
• transnational migration
• colonial expansion
• globalization
• populist nationalism

Updated in this version

Updated references, enhanced discussions of globalization and populist nationalism.

Introduction: Three Variations on a Theme

The three terms—race, ethnicity, and nation—represent forms of group identification that may be the result of internal choice, external categorization, or some combination of the two perspectives. “Race” is the most controversial term since it is based on a false biological premise that there are distinct groups of genetically similar human populations and that these “races” share unique social and cultural characteristics. This assumption was common among many thinkers during the 19th and much of the 20th centuries and still has a considerable following in folk theories and everyday discourse, but it has been completely discredited by scientific knowledge in biology and genetics. The popularity of such racist thinking is linked to its utility in justifying all types of group oppression and exploitation, exemplified by slavery, imperialism, genocide, apartheid, and other systems of stratification and segregation. Ethnicity, or the sense of belonging to a community based on a common history, language, religion, and other cultural characteristics, is a central concept that has been used to understand an important basis of identity in most societies around the world and throughout human history. When ethnic or “racial” groups combine in a political movement in order to create or maintain a distinct political unit, or state, then such groups can be termed nations and such movements may be seen as embodying ideologies or beliefs in nationalism.

In reality, there is a considerable overlap between racism, ethnicity, and nationalism. Extreme forms of nationalism often have a racial ideology associated with them, as was the case with German nationalism during the Nazi period ( 1933–1945 ) or Afrikaner nationalism in the era of apartheid ( 1948–1990 ). While some scholars use the term “ethnonationalism” (Connor, 1993 ) to merge the forces of ethnicity and nationalism, others draw a distinction between ethnic and civic forms of nationalism. The former comprises a sense of belonging based on common ancestry, while the latter focuses on membership in a shared political unit that can include citizens from diverse ethnic origins. However, the types of identity associated with these two variants of nationalism are rarely clear-cut and empirical cases usually consist of a mixture of features drawn from both phenomena (Brubaker, 2004 , pp. 132–146). Academic studies of racism, ethnicity, and nationalism reveal the same imprecise boundaries between them, which suggests they should be treated as variations on similar social and political themes.

Historians have argued at length concerning the legitimate application of the terms to different forms of social relationships and intergroup attitudes. While slavery has existed in many societies throughout human history, a question remains as to whether it is reasonable to regard the position of Greek slaves in the Roman Empire as on a par with that of African slaves in North America, the Caribbean, or Latin America. If the specific form of “racism” in the United States was a product of a particularly vicious system of chattel slavery, to what extent then can we make generalizations about this term m to cover other historical cases of group domination? Many of the same problems arise in the case of nationalism, but here the arguments have centered on the issue of the origins of the phenomenon. When can we say that a sense of national identity first arose: in the Ancient World, during the 16th century in England (Greenfeld, 1992 ), or as an outcome of the American and French revolutions? Was nationalism a deeply rooted and continuous force in human history, or a relatively recent “invention” that acts as a convenient cover for other, more fundamental changes (Gellner, 1983 ; Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1983 ; Smith, 1986 , 2008 )? Volumes have been written attempting to date the origins of nationalism and the types of forces that can be seen as central to its emergence as a major factor in the modern world. Like so many academic debates, much depends on one’s definition of nationalism—whether, for example, it is viewed as a mass or an elite phenomenon—and what combination of causal variables one chooses to include in its formation.

It is partly the association with difficult-to-change biological properties that has made racism so controversial and yet so attractive for dominant groups. In the middle of the 19th century , Gobineau’s ( 1853–1855 ) Essay on the Inequality of Human Races set out an analysis of human society and history using a racist model, and its popularity and widespread adoption by other thinkers served to reinforce the political realities of group domination for almost a century. It was cited approvingly by several influential American sociologists and historians in order to justify Southern slavery in the United States and acted as a precursor to the influential theory of an “Aryan” master race destined to rule or exterminate “inferior” racial groups, which underpinned the cultural and political thinking of such figures as Richard Wagner, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Adolf Hitler. Similar conclusions developed along parallel tracks in Anglo-American intellectual circles that employed a distortion of Darwin’s ideas of natural selection introduced by an influential group of thinkers, the Social Darwinists. Perhaps the best refutation of Gobineau’s assumptions was found in the critique by his friend and colleague Alexis de Tocqueville, the author of Democracy in America ( 1835–1840 ) and The Ancien Regime and the Revolution ( 1856 ). Tocqueville pointed to the historical tendency of all-powerful groups to assume the permanent nature of their superiority over those whom they had conquered and continued to dominate. A simple understanding of the rise and fall of empires and nations showed how improbable the assumption was that any particular system of group domination would last indefinitely. This implicit power model of race relations, while by no means the only system of thought designed to account for racial hierarchies in nonracial terms found among scholars, nevertheless recurred in the writings of social scientists and historians during the latter half of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th centuries . Despite their often less than progressive ideas on many issues affecting the society of their day, prominent thinkers such as Herbert Spencer and Vilfredo Pareto understood the political basis of imperialism and colonialism and were very much opposed to both of them. Thus, the former referred to European imperialist policies as “social cannibalism,” and the latter attacked the hypocrisy of the so-called civilizing mission of the colonial powers as nothing more than an excuse for exploiting their superior force (Stone & Rizova, 2014 ).

One of the clearest developments of this type of explanation of race, ethnicity, and nation can be seen in the writings of the influential German sociologist Max Weber (see Stone & Dennis, 2003 ). In keeping with his general framework that stressed the analogies between economic and social life, Weber conceived of these three types of group formation as another manifestation of the general tendency toward monopolization frequently found in economic life as well as in society as a whole. Such a formulation helped to explain the variety and often quite arbitrary nature of group boundaries—in one situation it would be religion, in another it would be language, or in a third it could be “race”—which happened to be used as the markers defining membership or exclusion from the group. Sometimes all three factors might be superimposed on each other to create the boundaries separating the dominant from the subordinate groups; on other occasions these characteristics appeared to cut across group membership in one or another combination. Nevertheless, the defining feature of this historical process was to establish increasingly strict criteria for membership and exclusion that, once set in motion, became a self-reinforcing process. Just as economic competition in the long run often results in monopolies under market capitalism, so too do groups seek to monopolize the life chances and other benefits of social hierarchy within multiethnic and multiracial states, or between states in the international arena.

In the middle of the 20th century , the defeat of the Axis powers of Germany and Japan, and the unraveling of colonialism, combined with powerful protest movements such as the civil rights struggle in the United States and the antiapartheid campaign in South Africa, were some of the forces diminishing the crude divisions between racially defined groups on a global scale. That said, the importance of ethnicity and the persistence of nationalism have proved to be surprisingly resilient. Premature declarations that modernity and globalization would inevitably undermine peoples’ allegiance to ethnic attachments, or spell the end of national sentiment, have turned out to be unfounded. This is not to claim that in certain spheres the influence of ethnicity and nationalism has become relatively less powerful, or indeed that racism has been abolished, but rather to point to the protean character of these basic types of identity and their ability to adapt, mutate, and reemerge as historical conditions unfold. Thus, the end of the Cold War reduced the ability of ideological rivalries to mask and submerge all manner of ethnic and national divisions in a wider global struggle. As a result, toward the final decades of the 20th century , a Pandora’s box of previously muted national sentiments burst open in the Balkans (Rizova, 2007 ) to provide a counterexample to the surprisingly peaceful transition from apartheid to nonracial democracy in South Africa.

Race: Biology as Destiny

In spite of the intellectual demolition of the genetic basis of racial theorizing since the second half of the 20th century , the legacy of racism lives on. This is hardly surprising given the coalescence of European colonialism, the slave trade, and the imbalances of global power over the past 500 years. All of this began to unravel during the 20th century in a way that first questioned and then started to undermine the customary hierarchies of half a millennium. The intellectual evolution of human biology initially provided what appeared to be a simple explanation for the apparent correlation between power and race. In the 19th century , biology rivaled theology as the perfect way to legitimize group domination. Subordinate groups no longer had to be damned by the Almighty to perpetual inferiority when they could be damned by their genes. In some ways the utility of biological excommunication was rather less than that justified by faith since the former was always subject to empirical refutation. As knowledge in the biological sciences progressed, greater evidence supported the view that all human population groups shared an overwhelmingly common genetic heritage and what was even more compelling was the fact that variations within so-called races were far more significant than any variations between these categories. As biological explanations seemed harder to sustain, a new consensus started to emerge in academic circles that races were social constructions and therefore that differences were the product of cultural traditions and historical circumstance that could, and no doubt would, change with time. The biological explanations of racial differences were thus false and so other factors needed to be used to explain the social reality behind group differences.

What Alexis de Tocqueville understood as a result of his historical perspective, and Max Weber appreciated by his comparative research, was increasingly supported by the scientific advances in the field of human biology. Not that this was a smooth transition from a paradigm of racial theorizing to an understanding of human difference in terms of resources and power. The elegance of justifying inequality as a consequence of scientific inevitability continually reoccurred in one form after another. Often the proponents were not “racist” in a direct sense of the term, and some had strongly antiracist credentials, but the result of this form of theorizing was almost indistinguishable from earlier biological arguments. Thus sociobiology, based on the twin concepts of kin selection and inclusive fitness, might be seen as entirely divorced from vulgar racial thinking. However, by elevating the “selfish gene” to the master explanation of all human activity and creation, this argument had the potential to offer an approach uncomfortably close in its implications to the theory that Gobineau had proposed a hundred years earlier. It is no surprise that the experience of biological theorizing and its consequences throughout the 20th century have subjected such ideas to a far more skeptical appraisal and caused their proponents to be rather more cautious in linking genetic characteristics to cultural and social outcomes.

Nevertheless, racism has been a persistent and powerful influence on social life for much of the 20th century . The frequently quoted prediction of W. E. B. Du Bois ( 1903 ) in The Souls of Black Folk , that the color line would be a defining division in human society for the following hundred years and that it would be not merely an American conflict but global in its reach, has been more than fulfilled by the passage of time. Against the backdrop of the history of the 20th century , which witnessed the decline of European domination over much of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the struggle for civil rights in the United States and South Africa, and a succession of genocidal massacres that stretched from the gas chambers of Auschwitz to the killing fields of Rwanda and Darfur, it is often hard to imagine why racist ideas have not been totally discredited. Although some people, perhaps those coming from societies less conscious of the civil rights and liberation struggles of the 20th century , may still believe in the fallacy of racial difference, among the educated populations of the world these beliefs appear to be of diminishing significance. That said, it would be completely wrong to regard racism, and antagonism based on racial divisions, to be no longer a significant element in the conflicts that continue to tear apart much of the fabric of contemporary global society. This paradox, of greater understanding of the nature of “racial” conflict on the one hand, and yet the continuing persistence of race on the other hand, requires a careful dissection of the meaning of “race” in contemporary society. The complexity of the topic and the manner in which such thinking has subtly shifted has led some social scientists to write about “racism without racists” (Bonilla-Silva, 2006 ) and still others to devote much scrutiny to a related, counterintuitive phenomenon, “ethnicity without groups” (Brubaker, 2004 ) and the “slippery nature” of contemporary racisms (Solomos, 2020 ).

It is already generally accepted that race is a social construct, an idea—in this case a scientifically erroneous one—that is in the minds of people. The enormous variability of racial systems from one society to another, and in different historical periods, demonstrates that racial background has little intrinsic importance, and that racial identity is rather a powerful legacy of cultural tradition and social inertia. Nevertheless, the changes that still need to take place in order for all white Americans to accept their black fellow citizens not only as governors, leading officials, and even as their President, but also as residential neighbors, remain to be realized. Despite the two-term Obama presidency ( 2008–2016 ) and the premature use of the term “post-racialism” to describe it, such unexpected progress has been quickly put to rest by the arrival of the explicitly racist language and actions of the Trump administration (Stone & Rizova, 2020 ). The Black Lives Matter movement (Dennis & Dennis, 2020 ), along with the rise of white nationalism, part of a global trend toward populist nationalism, provide widespread evidence of the continuing significance of race throughout the world.

The long-term difficulty in overcoming this legacy can be explained in part by what Charles Tilly and Thomas Shapiro have termed “opportunity hoarding,” the passing on of assets between generations that favors whites over blacks at a ratio of 10 to one (Shapiro, 2004 ; Tilly, 1998 ). Another historical perspective that helps to explain the entrenchment of racial privilege is the manner in which the discussion about “affirmative action” has been framed. Increasingly, scholars are linking dominant “affirmative action” to the New Deal and to those policies designed to assist white veterans, notably the GI Bill, after World War II (Katznelson, 2006 ). A parallel discussion is to view the implementation of apartheid in South Africa, between 1948 and 1990 , as another type of affirmative action for the benefit of the dominant (white) political group. Its demonstrated effectiveness in raising the lower class of Afrikaners—the bywoners —out of poverty helps to explain some of the subsequent levels of racial inequality in postapartheid South Africa.

Returning to the American case, one only needs to drive through the heart of major, or for that matter minor, American cities, examine the student populations of so many of the worst American public schools, or simply consider the statistics describing the inmates of the American penal system (Alexander, 2010 ), and the reality of the continuing significance of race is hard to deny. Furthermore, the health disparities exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 revealed the heavily disproportionate numbers of black and brown casualties among the infection and death rates in America. These figures, together with the often lethal police violence exposed, yet again, by the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis, show how black and white lives are by no means subject to the same opportunities and risks in contemporary America.

To focus on the American case is to survey only part of the problem. However, because of its high ideals—crafted by the slave-owning proponents of democracy for a “civilized” elite that did not include either women or minorities—the United States has been at the center of a storm of ethical debates about who should be granted full membership of, and who should be excluded from, the rights and privileges of freedom. The problematic nature of this debate can be seen in the preference of so many black slaves to join and fight with the British colonial forces in the 1770s against the advocates of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Given the bias toward white property-owning males, this decision was based on a rational calculation that London was more likely to end the “peculiar institution” than the slave-owning “democrats” meeting in Philadelphia (Schama, 2006 ). This is not to glamorize the motives of the British who, no sooner had they lost the fight in North America, went on to pillage Africa, Asia, and other exploitable parts of the globe as they scrambled to “civilize” the rest of humanity.

But racism is certainly not confined to the Anglo-American world. The evolution of rather different patterns of racial hierarchy and group conflicts can be seen in Latin America, Africa, and Europe. As Edward Telles ( 2004 ) has argued in Race in Another America , Brazil has been plagued by powerful traditions of racial distinction, but the dynamics of race relations follow a different logic from that underlying the pattern found in the United States. Despite the ideology of “racial democracy,” formulated in its classical manner by Gilberto Freyre’s ( 1933 ) The Masters and the Slaves , few social scientists or historians would seriously deny that Brazilian society is permeated by considerations of color (Bailey, 2020 ; Fritz, 2011 ). The fundamental difference is, in some cruel paradox, that individuals, under the rules of the Brazilian system, can, so to speak, “change their race,” while blacks in America, conforming to the pressures of the one drop rule, cannot.

Individualism in the United States may be characterized the philosophy of social mobility, but it does not breach the color line. The very fluidity of the Brazilian system has made it in the past a more subtle and complex problem to solve, although the election of President Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 —the “Trump of the Tropics”—revealed a new, and hardly nuanced, slant on racial democracy. The Brazilian case can be seen as a cautionary tale concerning the strengths and weaknesses of a comparative perspective. On the one hand, viewing the patterns in one society in isolation from a wider lens invites a form of myopia that greatly diminishes the value of the exercise; on the other hand, embarking on elaborate comparative analyses without a close understanding of the complexities of each situation invites another type of bias. Nevertheless, trying to place rather different systems within a wider framework has become increasingly necessary as the forces of globalization continue to foster closer links between virtually all societies as they are bound together by the ties of an interlinked global system. The exercise becomes even more challenging when one recognizes that there are “many globalizations” (Berger & Huntington, 2003 ) and that no society is ever static as far as its intergroup relationships, or indeed most other aspects of its structure and culture, are concerned. In many of the classic attempts to formulate such broadly comparative models of racial conflict—Pierre van den Berghe ( 1967 ) and Anthony Marx ( 1998 ), for example—the United States, Brazil, and South Africa are often the key reference points. But the shifting nature of race relations in all three of these societies reveals how difficult it is to predict the future direction of multiracial societies.

From being the bastion of racial oppression under the apartheid regime, South Africa has been regenerated as a society where nonracial democracy is the dominant political consensus.

The full implications of this profound and, in many respects, surprising transformation of a rigid racial hierarchy raised enormous hopes for the future direction of the country. However, understanding the nature of social change and how far it has affected the lives of most citizens of the new South Africa is an important illustration of the dynamic nature of most racial systems over time. It is also an excellent way to develop insights into the generation of racial conflict by analyzing those situations where, despite the presence of so many of the characteristics that are often associated with violence, it simply did not take place on anything like the scale that most experts, politicians, and ordinary people predicted. Nevertheless, a quarter of a century later, we have a more realistic assessment of the degree to which “Mandela’s miracle” has transformed South African society or rather has replaced one elite, which was racially defined, with another system of privilege, but one less loosely linked to racial divisions. A succession of disastrous political leaders following Mandela, from Thabo Mbeki, with his tragic refusal to address the AIDS crisis, to the rampant corruption of Jacob Zuma, has squandered much of the promise of a democratic South Africa (Moodley & Adam, 2020 ).

Ethnicity: Group Divisions Rooted in Culture

The power of race as a boundary marker has been continuously demonstrated for the past two centuries in many societies throughout the globe. Its persistence, despite the intellectual bankruptcy of its genetic rationalization, cannot be attributed solely to ignorance, and this explains why education alone is often an insufficient antidote to racial thinking and hierarchies built on racial divisions. Economic, social, and political changes are all part of the process by which racial stratification is challenged, modified, and in some cases overturned. Claims about the relative significance of race or class, and whether strategies emphasizing political mobilization or economic self-sufficiency and advancement hold the key to transforming racial disadvantage and oppression, have been at the core of racial debates throughout the 20th century . Another complication is the overlap between racial markers and ethnic boundaries that often exacerbates such conflicts. Ethnic divisions can be just as deep-seated and ethnic conflicts just as violent as those linked to a racial divide. Language, religion, history, and culture merge and intersect in varying degrees in many of these conflicts. Which factors prove to be salient in any one situation largely depends on the particular historical circumstances that frame the subsequent patterns of ethnic relations.

Among the critical events that influence ethnogenesis and ethnic conflict are patterns of global migration and the related forces of conquest, genocide, settlement, and types of assimilation, integration, and pluralism. Migration has been an endemic force in most societies and in recent centuries has even been incorporated into the founding myths of states that view themselves as based on migration, rather than being derived from some claim of indigenous ownership of a specific land. Such migrant societies include not simply the United States—a self-proclaimed “Society of Immigrants”—but also Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, and Canada. In reality, most societies over time have experienced considerable influxes of new peoples and large outflows of population groups motivated by a variety of factors including the search for economic opportunities, flight from political persecution or military destruction, and the quest for freedom of religious practice and expression, to mention just a few. Some societies encounter inflows and outflows simultaneously, while others include migrants and settlers of varying lengths of time—seasonal migrants, “guest workers” ( gastarbeiter ), transnational communities, nomadic peoples, diasporas, “global cosmopolitans,” undocumented workers, and refugees—and most change the composition and scale of migrant flows and influence over time. Thus, Italy and Ireland were major sources of global migration, particularly the transatlantic movements to North and South America, for much of the 19th and most of the 20th centuries . However, by the turn of the 21st century , it was the impact of migrants trying to enter these two parts of the prosperous European Union (EU), as opposed to the previous tradition of sympathizing with poor migrants escaping famine and rural poverty, that became the salient issue in both societies (O’Dowd, 2005 ). A similar dramatic reversal in perception could be seen in the opposition and violence directed at refugees and economic migrants from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and other sub-Saharan African states living in urban townships around Johannesburg in 2008 .

Different societies have different mechanisms for accommodating ethnic diversity. Some seek to assimilate newcomers as rapidly as possible, while others have more fluid systems of differential incorporation—segmented assimilation, to use one of the common terms employed in the North American literature—with a variety of possible forms. Not all migrant groups wish to become completely integrated into the mainstream of the dominant society; many do but are not accepted without a long period of acculturation and a fierce struggle for structural inclusion. The constant interaction between racism and ethnicity can also be seen in the manner in which some ethnic groups are more readily accepted than others and, in certain cases, migrant groups of one ethnic background may receive advantages denied to oppressed indigenous minorities. In the United States, many of the white ethnic groups, in order to achieve greater acceptance by the core society, quite specifically distanced themselves from blacks and Native Americans, who had been living as stigmatized sectors in the society for centuries prior to their arrival. How the Irish “became white” (Ignatiev, 1995 ; Roediger, 2007 ) was a pattern repeated by many other immigrants, such as the Italians, Poles, and Eastern European Jews, who arrived toward the end of the 19th and in the first two decades of the 20th centuries . Other ethnic groups were also assimilated in patterns that reflected the particular set of characteristics that they possessed, in terms of human and social capital, as well as the economic, social, and political conditions prevailing during the period of their arrival. Thus, Cubans fleeing the Castro revolution in 1959 , and for the duration of the Cold War, benefited greatly from the ideological struggles of the period. Haitians, arriving in Florida at much the same time and escaping the murderous regimes of the Duvaliers, received far less support. Although color may have been part of the equation, the political advantage of being fervent anticommunists was probably an even more important factor.

While North America and Western Europe shared many similar patterns of migration and assimilation during the first two decades of the 21st century —unlikely parallels between Mexican and Muslims having been raised by social scientists on both continents (Huntington, 2004 ; Zolberg & Woon, 1999 )—even societies with a strong ideology of ethnic homogeneity were forced to confront their actual diversity. Germany’s powerful ethnic nationalist tradition (Alba & Foner, 2015 ; Alba et al., 2003 ) has had to be modified by the increasing integration of the European Union, so that second- and third-generation Germans of Turkish ethnic background could no longer be regarded as permanent aliens. Much the same is true of Japan, and not only Ainu and Burakumin, but also Koreans, Chinese, and Okinawans are increasingly self-conscious minorities that have started to challenge the monoethnic ideology of post-World War II Japan (Lie & Weng, 2020 ; Tarumoto, 2020 ). In China, with its enormous population of 1.3 billion, relatively small numbers of ethnic and religious minorities nevertheless constitute a group of approximately 100 million people, and the situation of the Uighurs, Tibetans, and Hui have started to receive greater scholarly and political attention (Hou & Stone, 2008 ). This is hardly surprising given the monumental transformation of Chinese society as the workshop of the modern world, and the types of pressures that such an economic transition creates for all peoples involved in this historic process. Not only are there massive internal migratory movements linked to rapid industrialization and urbanization (Luo, 2020 ), but the adaptation of minorities to these forces almost inevitably results in language change and perceived threats to traditional ways of life. As for the Tibetan case, China’s vast population has allowed a pattern of outside migration of Han Chinese that for the nationalist critics is seen as tantamount to “ethnic swamping,” a variant on ethnic cleansing with a veneer of democratic legitimacy. Contemporary China is facing yet another policy dilemma between playing an increasing global role on the one hand, and using the forces of rising nationalism on the other hand (Hou, 2020 ).

In Africa, ethnic divisions have been a continuing legacy of imperialism that has followed on into the postcolonial era and resulted in much conflict and bloodshed. Even decades after independence, many African states are still permeated by political systems closely linked to ethnic (tribal) loyalties, making a winner-takes-all electoral system unsuited to resolving the problems of state-building and economic development. Nigeria’s war to prevent the Biafran secession ( 1967–1970 ), the genocidal massacres in Rwanda ( 1994 ), and the killings in the Darfur region of Sudan ( 2003 –) are some prominent examples of independent Africa’s struggles with the impact of ethnic conflict. The South African situation was another case where a society that was deeply divided by racial and ethnic boundaries managed to resolve these conflicts in a remarkably peaceful form of negotiation. The society simply redefined the racial and ethnic boundaries to include all groups on the basis of full citizenship for everyone. Whether the South African model, with its distinctive use of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission and many other unique features, can be a successful long-term experiment in nonracialism remains to be seen. However, some of the lessons learned from the South African case have been applied to other conflict-torn areas of the world, such as Northern Ireland and the Basque region of Spain.

The last two cases illustrate the diverse boundary markers that can be found in regions plagued by ethnic conflicts. In Northern Ireland, “religion” was the ostensible ground for group solidarity and division, the centuries-old difference between the Protestant ruling group and the Catholic minority being the manner in which the conflict was framed. However, the underlying struggle appeared to most analysts to have little or nothing to do with doctrinal matters and much more to be based on those who regarded themselves as part of Britain (the “Protestants”) and those who identified with Ireland and being Irish (the “Catholics”). In the Basque case, language and cultural divisions, closely tied in with feelings of historical separation, represented the ethnic glue behind a strong sense of Basque identity and the movement for separation from Spain (Conversi, 1997 ). For both situations, however, many social scientists interpret the struggle as one between groups divided on the basis of nationalism. Once an ethnic group moves toward mobilization with the goal of creating a separate state, or joining a different state from the one that it is currently a part, then ethnicity is transformed into nationalism.

The nature of these movements has been explored by scholars who emphasize a variety of different factors to account for the changing salience of ethnic and national struggles over time (Fearson & Laitin, 2003 , 2005 ). Most of these factors are related to the relative power of ethnonationalist movements compared with the state structures they are fighting against. The components of the power equation can include many influences, including the legitimacy of the groups’ claims for national independence; whether such movements are united or consist of a coalition of conflicting parties; the extent to which ethnic groups and nationalist movements are spread across multiple state boundaries and are geographically concentrated or dispersed; the strength and resilience of the states that oppose them; and the geopolitical context in which the conflict is taking place. The situation of the Kurds illustrates several of these elements, such as the opposition to statehood from Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, and the opportunities for greater autonomy presented by the collapse of centralized political control that emerged as a consequence of the 2003 Iraq war (O’Leary et al., 2005 ). While the Kurds played a significant military role in the defeat of ISIS during the Syrian civil war ( 2011 –) after the Russian support for President Bashar al-Assad proved decisive, the Kurdish forces were rapidly abandoned by their former allies, reflecting the number of states opposed to any idea of an independent Kurdish state.

The Continuing Significance of the Nation

Thus, ethnicity and nationalism form different stages along a continuum. Some ethnic groups, particularly those living in explicitly multinational states, are content to remain as part of a wider political unit. In certain cases, such as Switzerland, the state is fundamentally based on these separate group components, coexisting in various types of federal structures. The Swiss canton system is a long-established version of federalism that has been able to contain at least three major linguistic groups—German, French, and Italian speakers—in a united state structure.

However, the Swiss example is in many respects exceptional. The clear recognition that these types of arrangements may combine a high degree of autonomy for each national group while retaining the cohesiveness of the overarching political unit is but one way to manage ethnic diversity. Much depends on the perceptions of equal treatment and a just division of power and resources, which explains why these federal solutions are often difficult to maintain. Conflicts between Canada and Quebec, between Flemings and Walloons in Belgium, between Muslims and Christians in Lebanon, and between Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds in post-Saddam Iraq all point to the complexities of trying to contain the aspirations of diverse ethnonational groups within a single political structure. Lebanon was once regarded as the “Switzerland of the Middle East” before it descended into religious divisions amid corruption and outside interference.

Europe in the postcommunist period provides some interesting examples of failed federalism and federalist expansion taking place simultaneously. The collapse of Yugoslavia, which under Josip Broz Tito had been one of the most genuinely devolved, ethnically diverse states in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, demonstrates how rapidly such arrangements can disintegrate in the aftermath of political change (Sekulic, 2020 ). With the initial breakaway of Slovenia, followed by the wars between Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, what had once been a unified power-sharing arrangement rapidly degenerated into a power struggle articulated in nationalist terms. The split with Montenegro, and the declaration of independence by Kosovo in 2008 , finally left Serbia on its own, thus completing the total disintegration of what had been a unified state since 1918 . While Yugoslavia was falling apart, much of the rest of Eastern Europe, having emerged from the political control of the Soviet system, was involved in a scramble to join the European Union. Just as one part of the continent was fragmenting into an increasing number of units defined by their dominant ethnic population, other parts, comprising firmly established states, were voluntarily surrendering some of their sovereignty in order to enjoy the benefits of an enlarged economic and political community. Thus, a continuing dialectic of national fission and fusion demonstrates that there is nothing inevitable about the strength and direction of nationalist sentiment, which can wax and wane depending on a range of economic, social, and political factors. The component parts of the former Yugoslavia would also join the scramble for EU membership in the early decades of the 21st century .

While European consolidation during and after the 1990s was a remarkable transition from centuries of rivalry and warfare, even this has to be seen as an ever-changing development. After having narrowly defeated the Scottish independence referendum in September 2014 , the United Kingdom was locked in a struggle to leave the EU in June 2016 , after almost half a century of membership. While this was in part a political miscalculation by Prime Minister David Cameron designed to silence critics within his party, the surprising outcome and the protracted negotiations to work out an exit from the EU—Brexit—came to a head with the electoral victory of Boris Johnson in 2019 . This outcome resonated with other global trends, including the unexpected electoral victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 American presidential election together with a string of parallel political movements from Turkey to Brazil, from India to Indonesia, and including Russia and China. This revival of populist nationalism can be seen in part as a massive reaction to the uneven outcome of accelerated globalization (Brubaker, 2017 ; Stone & Rizova, 2020 ).

Furthermore, the expansion and internal dynamics of Europe were also influencing the types of internal “national” conflicts taking place between member states. Thus, the gradual solution of the centuries-old Northern Ireland struggle can in part be attributed to the lower salience of national boundaries resulting from the increasing influence of Brussels and Strasbourg. While many Unionists (Protestants) and Nationalists (Catholics) had a visceral dislike of dealing with Dublin and London respectively, the prospect of a fundamental shift in the European political center of gravity meant that both groups could increasingly bargain with a third party. This was the politically neutral European Parliament and Commission (bureaucracy), which rendered their traditional foes much less important and prevented compromise from looking like capitulation. No one would suggest that this was the only factor involved in the lessening of tensions and facilitating the historic power-sharing arrangement. The phenomenal growth of the Irish economy—the emergence of the Celtic Tiger—and the changed attitude of the American public toward “terrorism” (and hence financial support for the Irish Republican Army) in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon were also critical developments pushing the parties in Northern Ireland toward completing the negotiations. However, given the earlier emphasis on the ever-changing nature of these group relationships, the arrival of Brexit raised a totally new obstacle to sustained peace in Northern Ireland. Whether peaceful cooperation can withstand the complex border issues resulting from the United Kingdom’s exit from the EU remains to be seen.

The academic scholarship on nationalism has involved a series of debates about the fundamental nature of the phenomenon that is being analyzed. Proponents of primordialism, ethnosymbolism, and modernism, the three most influential perspectives in the literature, have argued extensively about the content and origin of nationalism. Some maintain that this form of identity is rooted in a long and continuous association of specific peoples, whether it is tied to a perceived cultural history often stretching back over centuries, if not millennia, or whether it is, in fact, a relatively recent form of identity. Others date nationalism to the Industrial Revolution and/or the political revolutions in America and France in the late 18th century and claim it was largely “invented” by modernizing elites in an attempt to unify political structures. There are a large number of permutations and combinations of these basic perspectives. Most primordialists avoid the genetic mechanisms associated with sociobiological arguments—Pierre van den Berghe being a notable exception—for the same reason that the overwhelming majority of scholars analyzing “race” are careful to emphasize that they are describing a fictitious construction based on a poor understanding of biological processes. Thus, sociologists such as Edward Shils and Steven Grosby stress cultural and social mechanisms that bond human groups together on the basis of family, culture, and territory. While not biologically programmed, these cultural affiliations are deeply felt and are often experienced with great intensity, which helps to explain the power and resilience of nationalist sentiments. A related emphasis on the strong psychological basis of much nationalism can be found in Walker Connor’s analysis of what he calls ethnonationalism (Connor, 1993 ). Connor draws a firm distinction between two closely related, but he would insist distinct, sources of identification: nationalism, which refers to loyalty to an ethnic group or nation; and patriotism, which is defined as political identification with the state.

The fact that the nation-state, a perfect overlap between one specific ethnic group and a given political unit, only exists in a few cases, and even then is only an approximation to reality, explains the nature of so many types of nationalist conflict. States often seek to incorporate minority ethnic groups into the structures and culture of the dominant group, and this can often result in reactive resistance by the minority group(s): subordinate nationalism to counter dominant nationalism. A related distinction that is frequently made is between ethnic and civic nationalism, a difference between those states that explicitly attempt to fuse the nation and the state and those that try to maintain an ethnically neutral political organization. In practice, this too is an analytical dichotomy that was initially developed to contrast the types of nationalism found in Eastern Europe and those typically prevailing in the Western states of the continent. Once again, no matter how much the civic ideal-type is professed, it is rarely pure in form, and many of the cultural characteristics of the dominant group are subtly, or often less than subtly, incorporated into the basic assumptions of the state.

Other theorists of nationalism tend to emphasize the modern nature of the phenomenon, insisting that none of the forms of identity that characterized society for long periods of human history share the vital ingredients of the modern understanding of the term. There are several variations on this perspective, some coming out of the Marxist tradition that dismisses nationalism, like religion, as yet another form of false consciousness, and others that view the emergence of nationalism as an integral element of modernity. The former perspective regards nationalism as an ideological smokescreen hiding the “true” interests of the working classes so that the owners of the means of capitalist production can better exploit them. It is a variant on the divide and rule strategy that promotes ideological confusion and pits worker against worker on the basis of a totally irrelevant set of distinctions. Modernity theorists, meanwhile, do not link the rise of nationalism with the growth of capitalism alone but see it as stemming from a combination of political, social, and economic forces generated by the Enlightenment. One result of the economic and political revolutions of the 18th and early 19th centuries , and the scientific and technological advances associated with these historical transformations, is the need for mass education to build a culturally homogeneous platform to sustain these developments (Gellner, 1983 ). Central to these changes, and resulting as an unintended consequence of the functional requirements of a modern lifestyle, are conditions that encourage and sustain nationalism.

The ethnosymbolists, exemplified by the writings of Anthony Smith ( 1986 , 2008 ) and John Hutchinson ( 2005 , 2017 ), take a middle position between modernist social construction and the sense of historical continuity. While Smith and his colleagues are fully aware of the cultural foundations of nations, they are also equally cognizant of the role of myths, symbols, and the frequently distorted collective memory that underpins all the major forms of nationalist movements. This middle path between the extremes of construction and continuity provides a valuable balance that helps us to understand a wider range of nationalist movements, from those with a pedigree stretching back millennia to the nationalisms of the postimperial era during the 19th and 20th centuries . With the emergence of a variety of interpretations of how and when nationalism developed in modern society, much of the current debate concerns an assessment of the impact of such forces as globalization, religious fundamentalism, and international nonstate terrorism as factors that may shape the continuing importance, growing salience, or declining significance of nationalism in the future.

Globalization and Populist Nationalism

Is it possible that racism, ethnicity, and nationalism will become much less salient in the coming decades? If so, what would be the explanation for such trends? Social scientists do not have a particularly good record in predicting far into the future. While W. E. B. DuBois was remarkably prescient in seeing the power of the color line throughout the 20th century , other predictions have proved to be far less accurate. For example, a claim that the advance of science and technology, as a crucial component of the “rationality” of modernization, would make religion obsolete in the latter half of the 20th century has not turned out to be correct. The particular forms of identity that are likely to be salient or, in contradistinction, may quite probably diminish in significance in the decades to come remains an enduring question.

Of the three elements, racism seemed, until the arrival of Trump, to be the least likely candidate for a rapid revival as a basis of group categorization. There are several forces that could strengthen a general antiracist trend in modern global society. Olzak ( 2006 ) has stressed the need to integrate the changing nature of international organizations and processes into the analysis, particularly the complex ramifications of globalization with its impact on migration, transnational communities, suprastate institutions, and transnational corporations. Increased diversity in all the major societies as a result of the global transformation of the world economy, and the interconnections of capital and labor, can be expected to increase during the successive decades of the century. This will apply not only to the postindustrial societies of the First World, but also to the intermediate developing economies and to the Third World. The sheer diversity of migration patterns, internal flows within regional free trade areas, transnational communities whose dynamics will be enhanced by accelerated innovations in communication technologies and transportation, growing groups of highly skilled global migrants, and the unpredictable flows of refugees from political persecution, famines, and genocidal massacres, will all combine to increase the multiracial complexion of states and federations throughout the world. No one would expect these trends to be entirely in one direction, or to be without the potential for strong backlashes or reactive political movements against the type of social changes that such developments represent.

Ethnicity and nationalism, meanwhile, will probably be rather more persistent markers of group boundaries. There are several reasons for this conclusion. While the United Nations, as a global organization for political governance, has a role to play in trying to respond to crises and catastrophes that cut across state boundaries or involve multiple state conflicts, its structure is fundamentally state-bound. The Security Council’s veto power means that a coordinated response is extremely difficult when a particular state, or power bloc, deems such action to be a threat to their “national interests” or to set a precedent that can be viewed as “interference in the internal affairs of a member state.” Thus, on issues such as genocide, torture, brutal ethnic repression, and the blatant disregard for human rights, UN conventions are invariably ignored when geopolitical interests are involved.

If one overarching political structure is unlikely to reduce ethnic and nationalist sentiments, what about the impact of intermediate-scale organizations that bunch together clusters of states in regional groupings? What will be the net effect of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the African Union, the EU, NAFTA, and related supranational, but not global, institutions and treaties? Will they, on balance, help to diminish the types of ethnic and national mobilization as increased cooperation and mutual dependency in economic, social, and political ties start to extend the traditional boundaries of group interaction? Or will they lead to strong opposition, with political parties appealing to xenophobic solidarity, to setting up “Fortress Europe,” or building fences to try to curtail the increasing flows of illegal economic migrants that are a direct outcome of the trade and economic policies forcing capital and labor to seek out a new equilibrium? If we add the factors of international terrorism, environmental pressure resulting from global climate change, the worldwide implications of drug policies, and the competitive rivalries of major religious faiths, a volatile mix of influences will undoubtedly be unleashed.

Some sociologists such as Richard Alba ( 2008 ) point to demographic factors that could exert pressure on societies such as the United States to move toward greater economic and social justice for ethnic minorities. Given the differential fertility rates of dominant whites and those of minorities, particularly minorities of color, Alba suggests these trends will have a tendency toward minority inclusion in the upper levels of the U.S. stratification system. While in the past immigration from Europe was one mechanism that provided an alternative reservoir of talent to fill a range of positions in the economic hierarchy, since the 1960s the shortfall in the supply of scientific, technical, and managerial talent has often been filled by foreigners, either those directly recruited by U.S. corporations or American-trained aliens who choose to remain in the country and work after completing their higher education. Alba argues that this pool of talented individuals will be subject to increasing competition from many other growing economies and that, combined with the domestic demographic shortfall, the result will be the incorporation of more American minorities into professional, managerial, and technical positions. What is true of the United States is likely to be repeated in Europe with its even lower demographic rates of reproduction and similar patterns of migration both within the enlarged economic community and from the peripheral regions surrounding it.

None of these macro sociopolitical trends necessarily diminish the tensions that arise from increasing globalization that can be channeled along ethnic and nationalist grooves. In fact, the very success of the integrative economic forces may exacerbate ethnonational mobilization as a way to maintain meaningful identity in a world subject to mounting anomic strains associated with rapid and discontinuous social change. What Mann ( 2005 ) has characterized as “the dark side of democracy” is simply a further elaboration of the argument about the dual-edged sword of modernity, which has its intellectual roots in Weber’s pessimistic analysis of “rationality.” From the “banality of evil,” to cite Hannah Arendt’s classic formulation, genocide and ethnic cleansing are not so much a reversion to primitive violence as a logical outcome of many of the forces inherent in modern society. While it is true that there may also be a “banality of good” that can, on occasions, help to counter such threats (Casiro, 2006 ), it is unlikely that this will be the dominant outcome. “Rational” bureaucratic techniques tend to be harnessed to the goals of modern states, multistate alliances, and nonstate global actors such as multinational corporations. These modern methods can combine the destructiveness of scientific means with the tenacity of group identity to attain highly particularistic ends. Regrettably, there is nothing intrinsically benign in the forces underpinning the societal changes that have taken place during the first two decades of the 21st century . The precise balance between racism, ethnicity, and nationalism remains unclear but their possible eradication from future social, economic, and political conflicts seems highly unlikely.

Further Reading

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The concept of race has historically signified the division of humanity into a small number of groups based upon five criteria: (1) Races reflect some type of biological foundation, be it Aristotelian essences or modern genes; (2) This biological foundation generates discrete racial groupings, such that all and only all members of one race share a set of biological characteristics that are not shared by members of other races; (3) This biological foundation is inherited from generation to generation, allowing observers to identify an individual’s race through her ancestry or genealogy; (4) Genealogical investigation should identify each race’s geographic origin, typically in Africa, Europe, Asia, or North and South America; and (5) This inherited racial biological foundation manifests itself primarily in physical phenotypes, such as skin color, eye shape, hair texture, and bone structure, and perhaps also behavioral phenotypes, such as intelligence or delinquency.

This historical concept of race has faced substantial scientific and philosophical challenge, with some important thinkers denying both the logical coherence of the concept and the very existence of races. Others defend the concept of race, albeit with substantial changes to the foundations of racial identity, which they depict as either socially constructed or, if biologically grounded, neither discrete nor essentialist, as the historical concept would have it.

Both in the past and today, determining the boundaries of discrete races has proven to be most vexing and has led to great variations in the number of human races believed to be in existence. Thus, some thinkers categorized humans into only four distinct races (typically white or Caucasian, Black or African, yellow or Asian, and red or Native American), and downplayed any biological or phenotypical distinctions within racial groups (such as those between Scandinavians and Spaniards within the white or Caucasian race). Other thinkers classified humans into many more racial categories, for instance arguing that those humans “indigenous” to Europe could be distinguished into discrete Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean races.

The ambiguities and confusion associated with determining the boundaries of racial categories have led to the widespread position that discrete or essentialist races are socially constructed, not biologically real. However, significant scholarly debate persists regarding whether reproductive isolation, either during human evolution or through modern practices barring miscegenation, may have generated sufficient genetic isolation as to justify using the term race to signify the existence of non-discrete human groups that share not only physical phenotypes but also clusters of genetic material. In addition, scholarly debate exists concerning the formation and character of socially constructed, discrete racial categories. For instance, some scholars suggest that race is inconceivable without racialized social hierarchies, while others argue that egalitarian race relations are possible. Finally, substantial controversy surrounds the moral status of racial identity and solidarity and the justice and legitimacy of policies or institutions aimed at undermining racial inequality.

This entry focuses primarily on contemporary scholarship regarding the conceptual, ontological, epistemological, and normative questions pertaining to race, with an introductory section on the history of the concept of race in the West and in Western philosophy. Aside from some discussion in Section 5, it does not focus in depth on authors such as Frederick Douglass , W.E.B. Du Bois , or Frantz Fanon , or movements, such as Négritude , Critical Philosophy of Race , or Philosophy of Liberation . Interested readers should consult these relevant entries for insight into these and other topics important to the study of race in philosophy.

In Section 1, we trace the historical origins and development of the concept of race. Section 2 covers contemporary philosophical debates over whether races actually exist. Thereafter, in Section 3 we examine the differences between race and ethnicity. Section 4 surveys debates among moral, political and legal philosophers over the validity of racial identity, racial solidarity, and race-specific policies such as affirmative action and race-based representation. Section 5 outlines engagement with the concept of race within Continental philosophy.

1. History of the Concept of Race

2. do races exist contemporary philosophical debates, 3. race versus ethnicity, 4. race in moral, political and legal philosophy, 5. race in continental philosophy, other internet resources, related entries.

The dominant scholarly position is that the concept of race is a modern phenomenon, at least in Europe and the Americas. However, there is less agreement regarding whether racism , even absent a developed race concept, may have existed in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. The influential work of classicist Frank Snowden (1970; 1983), who emphasized the lack of antiblack prejudice in the ancient world, led many scholars of race to conclude that racism did not exist in that epoch. However, later classicists have responded that Snowden’s work unnecessarily reduced all forms of racism to its peculiarly American version based on skin color and other markers of non-white identity. Benjamin Isaac (2004) and Denise McCoskey (2012) contend that the ancient Greeks and Romans did hold proto-racist views that applied to other groups which today might be considered white. Isaac persuasively argues that these views must be considered proto-racist : although they were formed without the aid of a modern race concept grounded in ideas of deterministic biology (2004, 5), they nevertheless resembled modern racism by attributing “to groups of people common characteristics considered to be unalterable because they are determined by external factors or heredity” (2004, 38). More importantly, both Isaac and McCoskey contend that ancient proto-racism influenced the development of modern racism.

Perhaps the first, unconscious stirrings of the concept of race arose within the Iberian Peninsula. Following the Moorish conquest of Andalusia in the eighth century C.E., the Iberian Peninsula became the site of the greatest intermingling between Jewish, Christian, and Muslim believers. During and after their reconquista (reconquest) of the Muslim principalities in the peninsula, the Catholic Monarchs Isabel and Ferdinand sought to establish a uniformly Christian state by expelling first the Jews (in 1492) and then the Muslims (in 1502). But because large numbers of both groups converted to Christianity to avoid expulsion (and before this to avoid persecution), the monarchs distrusted the authenticity of these Jewish and Muslim conversos (converts). To ensure that only truly faithful Christians remained within the realm, the grand inquisitor Torquemada reformulated the Inquisition to inquire not just into defendants’ religious faith and practices but into their lineage. Only those who could demonstrate their ancestry to those Christians who resisted the Moorish invasion were secure in their status in the realm. Thus, the idea of purity of blood was born ( limpieza de sangre ), not fully the biological concept of race but perhaps the first occidental use of blood heritage as a category of religio-political membership (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, vii; Hannaford 1996, 122–126; Frederickson 2002, 31–35).

The Iberian Peninsula may also have witnessed the first stirrings of antiblack and anti-Native-American racism. Since this region was the first in Europe to utilize African slavery while gradually rejecting the enslavement of fellow European Christians, Iberian Christians may have come to associate Black people as physically and mentally suitable only for menial labor. In this they were influenced by Arab slave merchants, who assigned the worst tasks to their dark-skinned slaves while assigning more complex labor to light or tawny-skinned slaves (Frederickson 2002, 29). The “discovery” of the New World by Iberian explorers also brought European Christians into contact with indigenous Americans for the first time. This resulted in the heated debate in Valladolid in 1550 between Bartolomé Las Casas and Gines de Sepúlveda over whether the Indians were by nature inferior and thus worthy of enslavement and conquest. Whether due to Las Casas’ victory over Sepúlveda, or due to the hierarchical character of Spanish Catholicism which did not require the dehumanization of other races in order to justify slavery, the Spanish empire did avoid the racialization of its conquered peoples and African slaves. Indeed, arguably it was the conflict between the Enlightenment ideals of universal freedom and equality versus the fact of the European enslavement of Africans and indigenous Americans that fostered the development of the idea of race (Blum 2002, 111–112; Hannaford 1996, 149–150).

While events in the Iberian Peninsula may have provided the initial stirrings of modern racial sentiments, the concept of race, with its close links to ideas of deterministic biology, emerged with the rise of modern natural philosophy and its concern with taxonomy (Smith 2015). The first important articulation of the race concept came with the 1684 publication of “A New Division of the Earth” by Francois Bernier (1625–1688) (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, viii; Hannaford 1996, 191, 203). Based on his travels through Egypt, India, and Persia, this essay presented a division of humanity into “four or five species or races of men in particular whose difference is so remarkable that it may be properly made use of as the foundation for a new division of the earth” (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 1–2). First were the peoples inhabiting most of Europe and North Africa, extending eastward through Persia, northern and central India, and right up to parts of contemporary Indonesia. Despite their differing skin tones, these peoples nevertheless shared common physical characteristics, such as hair texture and bone structure. The second race was constituted by the people of Africa south of the Sahara Desert, who notably possessed smooth Black skin, thick noses and lips, thin beards, and wooly hair. The peoples inhabiting lands from east Asia, through China, today’s central Asian states such as Uzbekistan, and westward into Siberia and eastern Russia represented the third race, marked by their “truly white” skin, broad shoulders, flat faces, flat noses, thin beards, and long, thin eyes, while the short and squat Lapps of northern Scandinavia constituted the fourth race. Bernier considered whether the indigenous peoples of the Americas were a fifth race, but he ultimately assigned them to the first (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 2–3).

But while Bernier initiated the use of the term “race” to distinguish different groups of humans based on physical traits, his failure to reflect on the relationship between racial division and the human race in general mitigated the scientific rigor of his definition (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, viii). Central to a scientific concept of race would be a resolution of the question of monogenesis versus polygenesis. Monogenesis adhered to the Biblical creation story in asserting that all humans descended from a common ancestor, perhaps Adam of the Book of Genesis; polygenesis, on the other hand, asserted that different human races descended from different ancestral roots. Thus, the former position contended that all races are nevertheless members of a common human species, whereas the latter saw races as distinct species.

David Hume’s position on the debate between polygenesis versus monogenesis is the subject of some scholarly debate. The bone of contention is his essay “Of National Characters,” where he contends that differences among European nations are attributable not to natural differences but to cultural and political influences. Amidst this argument against crude naturalism, Hume inserts a footnote in the 1754 edition, wherein he writes: “I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation” (Zack 2002, 15; emphasis added). Whereas even the most barbarous white nations such as the Germans “have something eminent about them,” the “uniform and constant difference” in accomplishment between whites and non-whites could not occur “if nature had not made an original distinction betwixt these breeds of men” (Zack 2002, 15). Responding to criticism, he softens this position in the 1776 edition, restricting his claims to natural inferiority only to “negroes,” stating that “ scarcely ever was a civilized nation of that complexion, not even of individual eminent in action or speculation” (Zack 2002, 17; Hume 1776 [1987], 208; emphasis added). Richard Popkin (1977) and Naomi Zack (2002, 13–18) contend that the 1754 version of the essay assumes, without demonstration, an original, polygenetic difference between white and non-white races. Andrew Valls (2005, 132) denies that either version of the footnote espouses polygenesis.

A strong and clear defense of monogenesis was provided by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) in his essay “Of the Different Human Races,” first published in 1775 and revised in 1777. Kant argued that all humans descend from a common human “lineal root genus” in Europe, which contained the biological “seeds” and “dispositions” that can generate the distinct physical traits of race when triggered by divergent environmental factors, especially combinations of heat and humidity. This, combined with patterns of migration, geographic isolation, and in-breeding, led to the differentiation of four distinct, pure races: the “noble blond” of northern Europe; the “copper red” of America (and east Asia); the “black” of Senegambia in Africa; and the “olive-yellow” of Asian-India. Once these discrete racial groups were developed over many generations, further climatic changes will not alter racial phenotypes (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 8–22).

Yet despite the distinction generated between different races, Kant’s monogenetic account led him to maintain that the different races were part of a common human species. As evidence, he adduced the fact that individuals from different races were able to breed together, and their offspring tended to exhibit blended physical traits inherited from both parents. Not only did blending indicate that the parents were part of a common species; it also indicated that they are of distinct races. For the physical traits of parents of the same race are not blended but often passed on exclusively: a blond white man and a brunette white woman may have four blond children, without any blending of this physical trait; whereas a Black man and a white woman will bear children who blend white and Black traits (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 9–10). Such inter-racial mixtures accounted for the existence of liminal individuals, whose physical traits seem to lie between the discrete boundaries of one of the four races; peoples who do not fit neatly into one or another race are explained away as groups whose seeds have not been fully triggered by the appropriate environmental stimuli (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 11).

The “science” of race was furthered by the man sometimes considered to be the father of modern anthropology, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840). In his doctoral dissertation, “On the Natural Variety of Mankind,” first published in 1775, Blumenbach identified four “varieties” of mankind: the peoples of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. His essay was revised and republished both in 1781, wherein he introduced a fifth variety of mankind, that inhabiting the South Pacific islands, and in 1795, wherein he first coined the term “Caucasian” to describe the variety of people inhabiting Europe, West Asia, and Northern India. This term reflected his claim that this variety originated in the Caucuses mountains, in Georgia, justifying this etiology through reference to the superior beauty of the Georgians. The 1795 version also included the terms Mongolian to describe the non-Caucasian peoples of Asia, Ethiopian to signify Black Africans, American to denote the indigenous peoples of the New World, and Malay to identify the South Pacific Islanders (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 27–33; Hannaford 1996, 207).

While noting differences in skin tone, he based his varieties upon the structures of the cranium, which supposedly gave his distinctions a stronger scientific foundation than the more superficial characteristic of color (Hannaford 1996, 206). In addition, he strongly denied polygenetic accounts of racial difference, noting the ability of members of different varieties to breed with each other, something that humans were incapable of doing with other species. Indeed, he took great pains to dismiss as spurious accounts of Africans mating with apes or of monstrous creatures formed through the union of humans with other animals (Hannaford 1996, 208–209). In final support of his more scientific, monogenist approach, Blumenbach posited the internal, biological force which generated racial difference, the “nisus formativus,” which when triggered by specific environmental stimuli generated the variations found within the varieties of humans (Hannaford 1996, 212).

Despite the strong monogenist arguments provided by Kant and Blumenbach, polygenesis remained a viable intellectual strain within race theory, particularly in the “American School of Anthropology,” embodied by Louis Agassiz, Robins Gliddon, and Josiah Clark Nott. Agassiz was born in Switzerland, received an M.D. in Munich and later studied zoology, geology, and paleontology in various German universities under the influence of Romantic scientific theories. His orthodox Christian background initially imbued him with a strong monogenist commitment, but upon visiting America and seeing an African American for the first time, Agassiz experienced a type of conversion experience, which led him to question whether these remarkably different people could share the same blood as Europeans. Eventually staying on and making his career in America, and continually struck by the physical character of African Americans, Agassiz officially announced his turn to polygenesis at the 1850 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Charleston, South Carolina. Nott, a South Carolina physician, attended the same AAAS meeting and, along with Gliddon, joined Agassiz in the promulgation of the American School’s defense of polygenesis (Brace 2005, 93–103).

Along with Agassiz, Nott was also influenced by the French romantic race theorist Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882), whose “Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races” (1853–1855) Nott partially translated into English and published for the American audience. Although the Catholic Gobineau initially espoused monogenesis, he later leaned towards polygenesis and ended up ambivalent on this issue (Hannaford 1996, 268–269). Nevertheless, Gobineau lent credence to the white racial supremacy that Nott supported (Brace 2005, 120–121). Gobineau posited two impulses among humans, that of attraction and repulsion. Civilization emerges when humans obey the law of attraction and intermingle with peoples of different racial stocks. According the Gobineau, the white race was created through such intermingling, which allowed it alone to generate civilization, unlike the other races, which were governed only by the law of repulsion. Once civilization is established, however, further race mixing leads to the degeneration of the race through a decline in the quality of its blood. Consequently, when the white race conquers other Black or yellow races, any further intermingling will lead it to decline. Thus, Gobineau claimed that the white race would never die so long as its blood remains composed of its initial mixture of peoples. Notably, Nott strategically excised those sections discussing the law of attraction when translating Gobineau’s essay for an American audience (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 45–51).

Eventually, polygenesis declined through the intellectual success of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution (Brace 2005, 124). Darwin himself weighed in on this debate in the chapter “On the Races of Man” in his book The Descent of Man (1871), arguing that as the theory of evolution gains wider acceptance, “the dispute between the monogenists and the polygenists will die a silent and unobserved death” (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 68), with the former winning out. The rest of the essay entertained both sides of the debate regarding whether or not different races constitute different species or sub-species of humans. Although Darwin did not explicitly take sides in this debate, the preponderance of his argument gives little support to the idea of races being different species. For instance, he noted that couples from different races produce fertile offspring, and that individuals from different races seem to share many mental similarities. That said, while Darwinian evolution may have killed off polygenesis and the related idea that the races constituted distinct species, it hardly killed off race itself. Darwin himself did not think natural selection would by itself generate racial distinctions, since the physical traits associated with racial differences did not seem sufficiently beneficial to favor their retention; he did, however, leave open a role for sexual selection in the creation of races, through repeated mating among individuals with similar traits (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 77–78). Consequently, later race thinkers would replace polygenesis with natural selection and sexual selection as scientific mechanisms whereby racial differentiation could slowly, unintentionally, but nevertheless inevitably proceed (Hannaford 1996, 273).

Sexual selection became a central focus for race-thinking with the introduction of the term “eugenics” in 1883 by Francis Galton (1822–1911) in his essay “Inquiries into Human Faculty and Development” (Hannaford 1996, 290). Focusing on physical as opposed to “moral” qualities, Galton advocated selective breeding to improve the “health, energy, ability, manliness, and courteous disposition” of the human species in his later essay “Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope, and Aims” (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 80). Following the same currents of “Social Darwinism” that advocated the evolutionary improvement of the human condition through active human intervention, Galton proposed making eugenics not only an element in popular culture or “a new religion” (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 82) but even a policy enforced by the American government. While positive eugenics, or the enforced breeding of higher types, never became law, negative eugenics, or the sterilization of the feebleminded or infirm, did become public policy enforced by a number of American states and upheld by the United States Supreme Court in an eight-to-one decision in Buck v. Bell (274 U.S. 200, 1927). The widespread acceptance of negative eugenics can be inferred by the fact that the Court Opinion justifying the decision was authored by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a figure usually associated with progressive and civil libertarian positions, and whose doctrine of “clear and present danger” sought to expand the protection of free speech.

The apogee of post-Darwinian race-thinking was arguably reached in the book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century by Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), the son-in-law of German opera composer Richard Wagner. Chamberlain argued in the evolutionary terms of sexual selection that distinct races emerged through geographical and historical conditions which create inbreeding among certain individuals with similar traits (Hannaford 1996, 351). Moving from this initial specification, Chamberlain then argued that the key strands of western civilization—Christianity and ancient Greek philosophy and art—emerged from the Aryan race. Jesus, for instance, was held to be of Aryan stock, despite his Jewish religion, since the territory of Galilee was populated by peoples descended from Aryan Phonecians as well as by Semitic Jews. Similarly, Aristotle’s distinction between Greeks and Barbarians was reinterpreted as a racial distinction between Aryans and non-Aryans. These Greek and Christian strands became united in Europe, particularly during the Reformation, which allowed the highest, Teutonic strain of the Aryan race to be freed from constraining Roman Catholic cultural fetters. But while Roman institutions and practices may have constrained the Teutonic Germans, their diametric opposite was the Jew, the highest manifestation of the Semitic Race. The European religious tensions between Christian and Jew were thus transformed into racial conflicts, for which conversion or ecumenical tolerance would have no healing effect. Chamberlain’s writings, not surprisingly, have come to be seen as some of the key intellectual foundations for twentieth century German anti-Semitism, of which Adolf Hitler was simply its most extreme manifestation.

If Chamberlain’s writings served as intellectual fodder for German racial prejudice, Madison Grant (1865–1937) provided similar foundations for American race prejudice against Black people and Native Americans in his popular book The Passing of the Great Race (1916). Rejecting political or educational means of ameliorating the destitution of the subordinate racial groups in America, Grant instead advocated strict segregation and the prohibition of miscegenation, or the interbreeding of members of different races (Hannaford 1996, 358). Like Galton, Grant had similar success in influencing American public policy, both through the imposition of racist restrictions on immigration at the federal level and through the enforcement of anti-miscegenation laws in thirty states, until such prohibitions were finally overturned by the United States Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia (388 U.S. 1 [1967]).

If the apogee of biological race was reached in the early twentieth century, its decline began at about the same time. While writers such as Chamberlain and Grant popularized and politicized biological conceptions of race hierarchy, academic anthropologists since Blumenbach gave the concept of race its scientific validity. But academic anthropology also provided the first challenge to biological race in the person of Columbia University professor Franz Boas (1858–1942), a German-born Jewish immigrant to the United States. Boas challenged the fixed character of racial groups by taking on one of the key fundaments to racial typology, cranium size. Boas showed that this characteristic was profoundly affected by environmental factors, noting that American-born members of various “racial” types, such as Semitic Jews, tended to have larger crania than their European-born parents, a result of differences in nourishment. From this he concluded that claims about racially differential mental capacities could similarly be reduced to such environmental factors. In so doing, Boas undermined one measure of racial distinction, and although he did not go so far as to reject entirely the concept of biological race itself, he strongly influenced anthropologists to shift their focus from putatively fixed biological characteristics to apparently mutable cultural factors in order to understand differences among human groups (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 84–88; Brace 2005, 167–169; Cornell and Hartmann 1998, 42–43).

A stronger anthropological rejection of the biological conception of race was leveled by Ashley Montagu (1905–1999). Drawing on insights from modern, experimental genetics, Montagu forcefully argued that the anthropological conception of race relied on grouping together various perceptible physical characteristics, whereas the real building blocks of evolution were genes, which dictated biological changes among populations at a much finer level. The morphological traits associated with race, thus, were gross aggregates of a variety of genetic changes, some of which resulted in physically perceptible characteristics, many others of which resulted in imperceptible changes. Moreover, since genetic evolution can occur through both the mixture of different genes and the mutation of the same gene over generations, the traits associated with races cannot be attributed to discrete lines of genetic descent, since the dark skin and curly hair of one individual may result from genetic mixture while the same traits in another individual may result from genetic mutation (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 100–107). Montagu’s efforts eventually resulted in the publication of an official statement denying the biological foundations of race by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1950, although it would take until 1996 for the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA) to publish a similar document (Brace 2005, 239).

Ron Mallon (2004, 2006, 2007) provides a nice sketch of the contemporary philosophical terrain regarding the status of the concept of race, dividing it into three valid competing schools of thought regarding the ontological status of race, along with the discarded biological conception. Racial naturalism signifies the old, biological conception of race, which depicts races as bearing “biobehavioral essences: underlying natural (and perhaps genetic) properties that (1) are heritable, biological features, (2) are shared by all and only the members of a race, and (3) explain behavioral, characterological, and cultural predispositions of individual persons and racial groups” (2006, 528–529). While philosophers and scientists have reached the consensus against racial naturalism, philosophers nevertheless disagree on the possible ontological status of a different conception of race. Mallon divides such disagreements into three metaphysical camps ( racial skepticism , racial constructivism , and racial population naturalism ) and two normative camps ( eliminativism and conservationism ). We have used ‘constructivism’ throughout for the sake of consistency but it should be read as interchangeable with ‘constructionism.’

Racial skepticism holds that because racial naturalism is false, races of any type do not exist. Racial skeptics, such as Anthony Appiah (1995, 1996) and Naomi Zack (1993, 2002) contend that the term race cannot refer to anything real in the world, since the one thing in the world to which the term could uniquely refer—discrete, essentialist, biological races—have been proven not to exist. Zack (2002, 87–88) provides an accessible summary of the racial skeptic’s argument against the biological foundations for race, sequentially summarizing the scientific rejection of essences, geography, phenotypes, post-Mendelian transmission genetics, and genealogies as possible foundations for races. Aristotelian essences , thought to ground the common characteristics of distinct species, were correctly rejected by early modern philosophers. If essences cannot even ground differences among species, then they clearly cannot ground the differences among races, which even nineteenth century racial science still understood as members of the same species. Whereas folk theories rely on geography to divide humanity into African, European, Asian, and Amerindian races, contemporary population genetics reveal the vacuity of this foundation for two reasons. First, geographically based environmental stimuli lead to continuous physical adaptations in skin, hair and bone rather than the discrete differences associated with race; and second, although mitochondrial DNA mutations provide evidence of the geographical origins of populations, these mutations do not correlate with the physical traits associated with racial groups. Similarly, phenotypes cannot ground folk theories of race: for instance, differences in skin tone are gradual, not discrete; and blood-type variations occur independently of the more visible phenotypes associated with race, such as skin color and hair texture. Race cannot be founded upon transmission genetics , since the genes transmitted from one generation to the next lead to very specific physical traits, not general racial characteristics shared by all members of a putatively racial group. And finally, genealogy cannot ground race, since clades (populations descended from a common ancestor) may have common genetic characteristics, but these need not correlate with the visible traits associated with races. Zack concludes: “Essences, geography, phenotypes, genotypes, and genealogy are the only known candidates for physical scientific bases of race. Each fails. Therefore, there is no physical scientific basis for the social racial taxonomy” (Zack 2002, 88).

Racial skeptics like Appiah and Zack adopt normative racial eliminativism , which recommends discarding the concept of race entirely, according to the following argument. Because of its historical genealogy, the term race can only refer to one or more discrete groups of people who alone share biologically significant genetic features. Such a monopoly on certain genetic features could only emerge within a group that practices such a high level of inbreeding that it is effectively genetically isolated. Such genetic isolation might refer to the Amish in America (Appiah 1996, 73) or to Irish Protestants (Zack 2002, 69), but they clearly cannot refer to those groupings of people presently subsumed under American racial census categories. Because the concept “race” can only apply to groups not typically deemed races (Amish, Irish Protestants), and because this concept cannot apply to groups typically deemed races (African Americans, Whites, Asians, Native Americans), a mismatch occurs between the concept and its typical referent. Thus, the concept of race must be eliminated due to its logical incoherence (Mallon 2006, 526, 533).

Appiah has since modified his skepticism in such a way that softens the eliminitivist element of his position. Appiah has come to argue for racial nominalism by admitting the importance of “human folk races,” namely, that they are forms of social identity that do in fact exist (2006, 367). The way in which they are social identities, however, is a problem because we treat them as if there were some biological underpinning to them (2006, 367). The folk theory of race, then, is false because it is based on mistaken beliefs, yet it is nonetheless true that we continue to categorize people along its lines. Appiah’s nominalist view of race aims to reveal how these social identities work by analyzing the labels we use for them. According to Appiah there are three ways that we categorize using folk racial labels: ascription, identification, and treatment, and it takes all three for a given label to be a functioning social identity (2006, 368–370). As a result, we come to live as these identities and look to them as a central resource for constructing our lives. Furthermore, norms of identification and authenticity arise around them (2006, 372). Since there is no biological story that can be told to ground these labels then race is not real (2006, 372). For a critique of Appiah’s modified view that focuses on Appiah (1996) see Ronald R. Sundstrom (2002).

Racial constructivism refers to the argument that, even if biological race is false, races have come into existence and continue to exist through “human culture and human decisions” (Mallon 2007, 94). Race constructivists accept the skeptics’ dismissal of biological race but argue that the term still meaningfully refers to the widespread grouping of individuals into certain categories by society, indeed often by the very members of such racial ascriptions. Normatively, race constructivists argue that since society labels people according to racial categories, and since such labeling often leads to race-based differences in resources, opportunities, and well-being, the concept of race must be conserved, in order to facilitate race-based social movements or policies, such as affirmative action, that compensate for socially constructed but socially relevant racial differences. While sharing this normative commitment to race conservationism , racial constructivists can be subdivided into three groups with slightly different accounts of the ontology of race. As we will see below, however, Sally Haslanger’s eliminitivist constructivism illustrates how these commitments can come apart.

Thin constructivism depicts race as a grouping of humans according to ancestry and genetically insignificant, “superficial properties that are prototypically linked with race,” such as skin tone, hair color and hair texture (Mallon 2006, 534). In this way, thin constructivists such as Robert Gooding-Williams (1998), Lucius Outlaw (1990, 1996) and Charles Mills (1998) rely on the widespread folk theory of race while rejecting its scientific foundation upon racial naturalism. Interactive kind constructivism goes further, in arguing that being ascribed to a certain racial category causes the individuals so labeled to have certain common experiences (Mallon 2006, 535; Piper 1992). For instance, if society ascribes you as black, you are likely to experience difficulty hailing cabs in New York or are more likely to be apprehended without cause by the police (James 2004, 17). Finally, institutional constructivism emphasizes race as a social institution, whose character is specific to the society in which it is embedded and thus cannot be applied across cultures or historical epochs (Mallon 2006, 536). Michael Root (2000, 632) notes that a person ascribed as Black in the United States would likely not be considered Black in Brazil, since each country has very different social institutions regarding the division of humanity into distinct races. Similarly, Paul Taylor (2000) responds to Appiah’s racial skepticism by holding that races, even if biologically unreal, remain real social objects (Mallon 2006, 536–537). Indeed, in a later work Taylor (2004) argues that the term “race” has a perfectly clear referent, that being those people socially ascribed to certain racial categories within the United States, regardless of the widespread social rejection of biological racial naturalism.

Sally Haslanger’s constructivism (2000, 2010, 2019) is not, however, conservationist. She understands races as racialized groups, whose membership requires three criteria. One, members are those who are “observed or imagined” to have certain bodily features that are evidence of certain ancestry from certain geographical locations; two, “having (or being imagined to have)” those features marks members as occupying either a subordinate or privileged social position, thereby justifying that position; and three, the satisfaction of the first two criteria plays a role in members’ systemic subordination or privilege (2019, 25–26). Racial identity in such contexts need not focus exclusively on subordination or privilege, as “many forms of racial identity are important, valuable, and in some cases even inevitable responses to racial hierarchy” (2019, 29–30). She worries, however, that even though we should embrace “cultural groups marked by ancestry and appearance” in the short term to fight for justice, she worries about embracing them for the long term (2019, 30).

Constructivism also cleaves along political and cultural dimensions, a distinction owed to Chike Jeffers (Jeffers, 2013, 2019). Haslanger’s view is paradigmatic of political constructivism by understanding the meaning of race as determined by hierarchical relations of power by definition : “race is made real wholly or most importantly by hierarchical relations of power” (Jeffers 2019, 48). Jeffers’ cultural constructivism corrects for political constructivism’s inability to account for race existing after racism, including the idea of racial equality (2013, 421; 2019, 71). Cultural constructivism rejects “the idea that cultural difference is less important than differences in power relations for understanding racial phenomena in the present” (2019, 65). At the extreme, political constructivism argues for, one, differential power relations bring racial difference into existence; two, differential power relations are fundamental for understanding the present reality of race; and three, differential power relations are essential to race, so race will cease to exist in an egalitarian society where appearance and ancestry do not correlate to certain hierarchical positions (2019, 56–57). Jeffers concedes race’s political origin while rejecting the two other ways that power relations define race (2013, 419; 2019, 57–58). The cultural significance of race can be seen in three ways. First, even the emergence of racial categories counts as a cultural shift, insofar as new social contexts are created in which those viewed as being of different races are also viewed as having different cultures. Second, there are “novel forms of cultural difference” that emerge in the wake of racial difference. And third, racial groups are shaped culturally by happenings prior to racial formation (2019, 62–63). Jeffers thus writes of Blackness, “What it means to be a Black person, for many of us, including myself, can never be exhausted through reference to problems of stigmatization, discrimination, marginalization, and disadvantage, as real and as large-looming as these factors are in the racial landscape as we know it. There is also joy in blackness, a joy shaped by culturally distinctive situations” (2013, 422).

There are also views that challenge the broad strokes of constructivism while avoiding racial skepticism: Lionel K. McPherson’s deflationary pluralism (2015), Joshua Glasgow’s basic racial realism (2015, with Jonathan M. Woodward, 2019), and Michael O. Hardimon’s deflationary realism (2003, 2014, 2017). McPherson argues that “race” should be replaced with his concept of socioancestry, since “‘race’ talk overall is too ambiguous and contested to be salvaged in the search for a dominant understanding” (2015, 676). He aims to sidestep Appiah’s eliminativism by claiming that deflationary pluralism “does not maintain that ‘race’ talk is necessarily an error and does not take a hard line about whether races exist” (2015, 675). Socioancestry retains the possibility of “color-conscious social identity” without the burdens of assumptions or confusions about race and racial nature (2015, 686). This is because it is “visible continental ancestry,” rather than race, which is the root of color-consciousness (2015, 690). Socioancestry, then, focuses on visible continental ancestry alone to explain social group formation. Accordingly, socioancestral identities develop “when persons accept (or are ascribed) a social identity because they share a component of continental ancestry that distinctively shapes color-conscious social reality” (2015, 690).

Glasgow’s basic racial realism aims to capture our operative meaning of race: “the meaning that governs our use of the term, even when we are unaware of it” (2019, 115). Glasgow defines his position in the following way: “Races, by definition, are relatively large groups of people who are distinguished from other groups of people by having certain visible biological traits (such as skin color) to a disproportionate extent.” The position is therefore anti-realist, since it claims that races are neither biologically nor socially real (2019, 117). Glasgow’s position is grounded in judgments about our commitments, believing that we are more willing to give up on the biological basis for race than we are to give up on the idea that there are certain “core features and identities” connected to the idea of race” (2019, 127). In other words, disbelieving in the biological reality of race doesn’t lead to eliminativism. Glasgow holds, however, that it also doesn’t lead to social constructivism. Race is not socially made because, “no matter which social facts we attend to, we can always imagine them disappearing while race stays. And if race is conceptually able to persist across all social practices, then by definition it is not a social phenomenon” (2019, 133). This intuition is based in his focus on our ordinary usage of the term “race,” which is fully captured by visible traits.

Hardimon’s deflationary realism argues that we need four interrelated race concepts to coherently answer the question of what race is to human beings: the racialist concept of race, the minimalist concept of race, the populationist concept of race, and the concept of socialrace (2017, 2–3, 7). The racialist concept of race is the view that there are fixed patterns of race-based moral, intellectual, and cultural characteristics that are heritable, based in an underlying biological essence, correlate to physical characteristics, and form a distinct racial hierarchy (2017, 15–16). Minimalist race “says that people differ in shape and color in ways that correspond to differences in their geographical ancestry. Essentially that is all it says” (2017, 6; see also 2003). It aims to capture in “a nonmalefic way” what the racialist concept of race says that it captures. In other words, it admits of the nonsocial and biological reality of race but in a value-neutral way (2017, 7). Populationist race aims to do the same thing in a more robust and specific way by giving a genetic underpinning to the minimalist conception based on a “geographically separated and reproductively isolated founding population” (2017, 99). This concept is distinguished from cladistic race because it does not require monophyly (2017, 110). Finally, socialrace captures race in terms of its social relations and practices. It refers to “the social groups in racist societies that appear to be racialist races as social groups that falsely appear to be biological groups” (2017, 10; see also 2014). Hardimon argues that it is only through using all four concepts, with the rejection of the first being the basis for the construction of the latter three, that we can actually understand our concept of race.

The third school of thought regarding the ontology of race is racial population naturalism . This camp suggests that, although racial naturalism falsely attributed cultural, mental, and physical characters to discrete racial groups, it is possible that genetically significant biological groupings could exist that would merit the term races. Importantly, these biological racial groupings would not be essentialist or discrete: there is no set of genetic or other biological traits that all and only all members of a racial group share that would then provide a natural biological boundary between racial groups. Thus, these thinkers confirm the strong scientific consensus that discrete, essentialist races do not exist. However, the criteria of discreteness and essentialism would also invalidate distinctions between non-human species, such as lions and tigers. As Philip Kitcher puts it, “there is no…genetic feature…that separates one species of mosquito or mushroom from another” (Kitcher 2007, 294–296; Cf. Mallon 2007, 146–168). Rather, biological species are differentiated by reproductive isolation, which is relative, not absolute (since hybrids sometimes appear in nature); which may have non-genetic causes (e.g., geographic separation and incompatible reproduction periods or rituals); which may generate statistically significant if not uniform genetic differences; and which may express distinct phenotypes. In effect, if the failure to satisfy the condition of discreteness and essentialism requires jettisoning the concept of race, then it also requires jettisoning the concept of biological species. But because the biological species concept remains epistemologically useful, some biologists and philosophers use it to defend a racial ontology that is “biologically informed but non-essentialist,” one that is vague, non-discrete, and related to genetics, genealogy, geography, and phenotype (Sesardic 2010, 146).

There are three versions of racial population naturalism: cladistic race; socially isolated race; and genetically clustered race. Cladistic races are “ancestor-descendant sequences of breeding populations that share a common origin” (Andreasen 2004, 425). They emerged during human evolution, as different groups of humans became geographically isolated from each other, and may be dying out, if they have not already, due to more recent human reproductive intermingling (Andreasen 1998, 214–216; Cf. Andreasen 2000, S653–S666). Socially isolated race refers to the fact that legal sanctions against miscegenation might have created a genetically isolated African American race in the USA (Kitcher 1999). Finally, defenders of genetically clustered race argue that although only 7% of the differences between any two individuals regarding any one specific gene can be attributed to their membership in one of the commonly recognized racial categories, the aggregation of several genes is statistically related to a small number of racial categories associated with major geographic regions and phenotypes (Sesardic 2010; Kitcher 2007, 304).

The question is whether these new biological ontologies of race avoid the conceptual mismatches that ground eliminativism. The short answer is that they can, but only through human intervention. Socially isolated race faces no mismatch when applied to African Americans, defined as the descendants of African slaves brought to the United States. However, this racial category would not encompass Black Africans. Moreover, because African American race originated in legally enforced sexual segregation, it is “both biologically real and socially constructed” (Kitcher 2007, 298). Genetic clustering would seem to provide an objective, biological foundation for a broader racial taxonomy, but differences in clustered genes are continuous, not discrete, and thus scientists must decide where to draw the line between one genetically clustered race and another. If they program their computers to distinguish four genetic clusters, then European, Asian, Amerindian, and African groups will emerge; if only two clusters are sought, then only the African and Amerindian “races” remain (Kitcher 2007, 304). Thus, genetic clustering avoids racial mismatch only through the decisions of the scientist analyzing the data. The same problem also confronts cladistic race, since the number of races will vary from nine, at the most recent period of evolutionary reproductive isolation, to just one, if we go back to the very beginning, since all humans were originally Africans. But in addition, cladistic race faces a stronger mismatch by “cross-classifying” groups that we typically think of as part of the same race, for example by linking northeast Asians more closely with Europeans than with more phenotypically similar southeast Asians. Robin Andreasen defends the cladistic race concept by correctly arguing that folk theories of race have themselves generated counter-intuitive cross-classifications, particularly with respect to the Census’ Asian category, which previously excluded Asian Indians and now excludes native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders. (Andreasen 2005, 100–101; Andreasen 2004, 430–431; Cf. Glasgow 2003, 456–474; Glasgow 2009, 91–108). But this hardly saves her argument, since the US Census’s history of shifting racial categories and past use of ethnic and religious terms (e.g., Filipino, Hindu, and Korean) to signify races is typically taken as evidence of the social , rather than biological, foundations of race (Espiritu 1992, Chapter 5).

Quayshawn Spencer (2012, 2014, 2019) is resistant to arguments that cladistic subspecies are a viable biological candidate for race (2012, 203). Instead, he defends a version of biological racial realism that understands “biologically real” as capturing “all of the entities that are used in empirically successful biology…and that adequately rules out all of the entities that are not” (2019, 77; see also 95). Spencer argues that such an entity exists and can be found in the US government’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and its racial classifications. The basis for this claim is that population genetics has identified five distinctive “human continental populations” that satisfy the criteria for biological reality (2019, 98; 95). The OMB classifications map onto these continental populations. The importance of the OMB is that its ubiquity in our lives means that one of the primary ways that we talk about race is through its categories. Spencer highlights this centrality when he points out the ways that Americans self-report their races correspond to the parameters of the OMB classifications (2019, 83–85). Spencer is pluralist about race talk, however, meaning that OMB race is just one dominant meaning of race, while there is no single dominant meaning among users of the term (2019, 213).

In each case, racial population naturalism encounters problems in trying to demarcate discrete boundaries between different biological populations. If discreteness is indispensable to a human racial taxonomy, then mismatches can only be avoided, if at all, through human intervention. But as noted above, biological species are also not genetically discrete, and thus boundaries between non-human species must also be imposed through human intervention. And just as the demarcation of non-human species is justified through its scientific usefulness, so too are human racial categories justified. For instance, Andreason contends that a cladistic race concept that divides northeastern from southeastern Asians is scientifically useful for evolutionary research, even if it conflicts with the folk concept of a unified Asian race. In turn, the concepts of genetically clustered and socially isolated race may remain useful for detecting and treating some health problems. Ian Hacking provides a careful argument in favor of the provisional use of American racial categories in medicine. Noting that racial categories do not reflect essentialist, uniform differences, he reiterates the finding that there are statistically significant genetic differences among different racial groups. As a result, an African American is more likely to find a bone marrow match from a pool of African American donors than from a pool of white donors. Thus, he defends the practice of soliciting African American bone marrow donors, even though this may provide fodder to racist groups who defend an essentialist and hierarchical conception of biological race (Hacking 2005, 102–116; Cf. Kitcher 2007, 312–316). Conversely, Dorothy Roberts emphasizes the dangers of using racial categories within medicine, suggesting that it not only validates egregious ideas of biological racial hierarchy but also contributes to conservative justifications for limiting race-based affirmative action and even social welfare funding, which supposedly would be wasted on genetically inferior minority populations. In effect, race-based medicine raises the specter of a new political synthesis of colorblind conservatism with biological racialism (Roberts 2008, 537–545). However, Roberts’ critique fails to engage the literature on the statistical significance of racial categories for genetic differences. Moreover, she herself acknowledges that many versions of colorblind conservatism do not rely at all on biological justifications.

Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartmann (1998) provide a helpful discussion of the differences between the concepts of race and ethnicity. Relying on social constructivism, they define race as “a human group defined by itself or others as distinct by virtue of perceived common physical characteristics that are held to be inherent…Determining which characteristics constitute the race…is a choice human beings make. Neither markers nor categories are predetermined by any biological factors” (Cornell and Hartmann 1998, 24). Ethnicity, conversely, is defined as a sense of common ancestry based on cultural attachments, past linguistic heritage, religious affiliations, claimed kinship, or some physical traits (1998, 19). Racial identities are typically thought of as encompassing multiple ethnic identities (Cornell and Hartmann 1998, 26). Thus, people who are racially categorized as black may possess a variety of ethnic identities based either on African national or cultural markers (e.g., Kenyan, Igbo, Zulu) or the newer national, sub-national, or trans-national identities created through the mixing of enslaved populations in the Americas (e.g., African American, Haitian, West Indian).

Cornell and Hartmann outline five additional characteristics that distinguish race from ethnicity: racial identity is typically externally imposed by outsiders, as when whites created the Negro race to homogenize the multiple ethnic groups they conquered in Africa or brought as slaves to America; race is a result of early globalization, when European explorers “discovered” and then conquered peoples with radically different phenotypical traits; race typically involves power relations, from the basic power to define the race of others to the more expansive power to deprive certain racial groups of social, economic, or political benefits; racial identities are typically hierarchical, with certain races being perceived as superior to others; and racial identity is perceived as inherent, something individuals are born with (1998, 27–29).

Race and ethnicity differ strongly in the level of agency that individuals exercise in choosing their identity. Individuals rarely have any choice over their racial identity, due to the immediate visual impact of the physical traits associated with race. Individuals are thought to exercise more choice over ethnic identification, since the physical differences between ethnic groups are typically less striking, and since individuals can choose whether or not to express the cultural practices associated with ethnicity. So an individual who phenotypically appears white with ancestors from Ireland can more readily choose whether to assert their Irish identity (by celebrating St. Patrick’s Day) than whether to choose their white identity (Cornell and Hartmann 1998, 29–30). Moreover, Mary Waters (1990) argues that the high level of intermarriage among white Americans from various national ancestries grants their children significant “ethnic options” in choosing with which of their multiple heritages to identify. Waters (1999) and Philip Kasinitz (1992) document how phenotypically black West Indian immigrants exercise agency in asserting their ethnic identity in order to differentiate themselves from native-born African Americans, but discrimination and violence aimed at all Black people, regardless of ethnicity, strongly constrains such agency.The greater constraints on racial identity stem from the role of informal perceptions, discriminatory social action, and formal laws imposing racial identity, such as Census categorization (Nobles 2000), the infamous “hypodescent” laws, which defined people as black if they had one drop of African blood (Davis 1991), and judicial decisions such as the “prerequisite cases,” which determined whether specific immigrants could be classified as white and thus eligible for naturalized citizenship (Lopez 1996).

The line between race and ethnicity gets blurred in the case of Asians and Latinos in the United States. Yen Le Espiritu (1992) notes that Asian American racial identity, which of course encompasses a remarkable level of ethnic diversity, results from a combination of external assignment and agency, as when Asians actively respond to anti-Asian discrimination or violence through political action and a sense of shared fate. Consequently, Espiritu uses the term “panethnicity” to describe Asian American identity, a concept which has racial connotations, given the role of “racial lumping” together of members of diverse Asian ethnicities into a single racial group defined by phenotypical traits. Thus, she declares that “African Americans [are] the earliest and most developed pan-ethnic group in the United States” (1992, 174). Hispanic or Latino identity exhibits traits similar to pan-ethnicity. Indeed, unlike Asian identity, Hispanic identity is not even a formal racial identity under the Census. However, informal perceptions, formal laws, and discrimination based on physical appearance nevertheless tend to lump together various nationalities and ethnicities that share some connection to Latin America (Rodriquez 2000). Moreover, scholars have noted that Jews (Brodkin 1998) and the Irish (Ignatiev 1995) were once were considered distinct, non-white races but are now considered to be racially white ethnic groups, partly by exercising agency in distancing themselves from African Americans exercising political power. Thus, it is conceivable that groups today considered to be sociological racial groups could transform into something more like an ethnic group. For this reason, Blum describes Hispanics and Asians as incompletely racialized groups (Blum 2002, 149–155).

A robust philosophical debate has emerged regarding the status of Hispanic or Latino identity. Jorge Gracia (2000) defends the utility of Hispanic ethnic identity as grounded primarily in the shared, linguistic culture that can be traced to the Iberian Peninsula. Jorge Garcia (2001, 2006) challenges this approach, arguing that the diversity of individual experiences undermines the use of Hispanic ethnicity as a meaningful form of collective identity. Linda Martin Alcoff (2006) develops a “realist” defense of Latino identity against charges of essentialism and views it as a category of solidarity that develops in reaction to white privilege. Christina Beltran (2010), on the other hand, does not try to paper over the diversity within Latinidad , which she instead portrays as a pluralistic, fragmented, and agonistic form of political action.

Two strands in moral, political, and legal philosophy are pertinent to the concept of race. One strand examines the broader conceptual and methodological questions regarding the moral status of race and how to theorize racial justice; the other strand normatively assesses specific policies or institutional forms that seek to redress racial inequality, such as affirmative action, racially descriptive representation, the general question of colorblindness in law and policy, residential racial segregation, and racism in the criminal justice system and policing.

Lawrence Blum, Anthony Appiah, and Tommie Shelby articulate indispensable positions in addressing the moral status of the concept of race. Blum (2002) examines both the concept of race and the problem of racism. He argues that “racism” be restricted to two referents: inferiorization , or the denigration of a group due to its putative biological inferiority; and antipathy , or the “bigotry, hostility, and hatred” towards another group defined by its putatively inherited physical traits (2002, 8). These two moral sins deserve this heightened level of condemnation associated with the term racism, because they violate moral norms of “respect, equality, and dignity” and because they are historically connected to extreme and overt forms of racial oppression (2002, 27). But because these connections make “racism” so morally loaded a term, it should not be applied to “lesser racial ills and infractions” that suggest mere ignorance, insensitivity or discomfort regarding members of different groups (28), since doing so will apply a disproportionate judgment against the person so named, closing off possible avenues for fruitful moral dialogue.

Due to the historical connection between racism and extreme oppression, Blum argues against using the term race, since he rejects its biological foundation. Instead, he advocates using the term “racialized group” to denote those socially constructed identities whose supposedly inherited common physical traits are used to impose social, political, and economic costs. To Blum, “racialized group” creates distance from the biological conception of race and it admits of degrees, as in the case of Latinos, whom Blum describes as an “incompletely racialized group” (2002, 151). This terminological shift, and its supposed revelation of the socially constructed character of physiognomically defined identities, need not require the rejection of group-specific policies such as affirmative action. Members of sociologically constructed racialized identities suffer real harms, and laws might have to distinguish individuals according to their racialized identities in order to compensate for such harms. Nevertheless, Blum remains ambivalent about such measures, arguing that even when necessary they remain morally suspect (2002, 97).

Similar ambivalence is also expressed by Anthony Appiah, earlier discussed regarding the metaphysics of race. While his metaphysical racial skepticism was cited as grounding his normative position of eliminativism , Appiah is “against races” but “for racial identities” (1996). Because of a wide social consensus that races exist, individuals are ascribed to races regardless of their individual choices or desires. Moreover, racial identity remains far more salient and costly than ethnic identity (1996, 80–81). As a result, mobilization along racial lines is justifiable, in order to combat racism. But even at this point, Appiah still fears that racial identification may constrain individual autonomy by requiring members of racial groups to behave according to certain cultural norms or “scripts” that have become dominant within a specific racial group. Appiah thus concludes, “Racial identity can be the basis of resistance to racism; but even as we struggle against racism…let us not let our racial identities subject us to new tyrannies” (1996, 104). This residual ambivalence, to recall the metaphysical discussions of the last section, perhaps ground Mallon’s contention that Appiah remains an eliminativist rather than a racial constructivist , since ideally Appiah would prefer to be free of all residual constraints entailed by even socially constructed races.

Tommie Shelby responds to the ambivalence of Appiah and Blum by distinguishing classical black nationalism , which rested upon an organic black identity, with pragmatic black nationalism , based on an instrumental concern with combating antiblack racism (2005, 38–52; 2003, 666–668). Pragmatic nationalism allows Black people to generate solidarity across class or cultural lines, not just through the modus vivendi of shared interests but upon a principled commitment to racial equality and justice (2005, 150–154). As a result, black solidarity is grounded upon a principled response to common oppression, rather than some putative shared identity (2002), thus mitigating the dangers of biological essentialism and tyrannical cultural conformity that Appiah associates with race and racial identities. Anna Stubblefield (2005) provides an alternative defense of Black solidarity by comparing it to familial commitments.

Shelby (2005, 7) briefly mentions that his pragmatic, political version of black solidarity is compatible with John Rawls’s Political Liberalism , but his more detailed defense of the ideal social contract method of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice for theorizing racial justice has drawn substantial controversy (Shelby 2004). Elizabeth Anderson eschews ideal theory for analyzing racial justice because it assumes motivational and cognitive capacities beyond those of ordinary humans; it risks promoting ideal norms (like colorblindness) under unjust conditions that require race-specific policies; and its idealizing assumptions, like an original position in which parties do not know relevant personal and social racial facts, precludes recognition of historical and present racial injustice. She instead uses a normative framework of democratic equality to ground her moral imperative of integration.

Charles Mills, extending his critique of how early modern social contract thinking obfuscates racial injustice (1997), fears that Rawls’s ideal theory can similarly serve as an ideology that whitewashes non-white oppression (Mills 2013). But rather than jettisoning a contractarian approach entirely, Mills instead develops a model of a non-ideal contract, in which the parties do not know their own racial identities but are aware of their society’s history of racial exploitation and its effects. Because the parties know of racial hierarchy but do not know if they will be its beneficiaries or victims, Mills hypothesizes that they will rationally agree to racial reparations as a form of corrective or rectificatory justice (Pateman and Mills 2007, Chapters 3, 4, 8).

Shelby responds that, while Rawls’s ideal theory of justice excludes a theory of rectification because it is not comprehensive, rectificatory justice is not only complementary but in fact presupposes an ideal theory that can clarify when injustices have occurred and need to be rectified. More importantly, Shelby suggests that complying with rectificatory justice through racial reparations could well leave Black people living in a society that nevertheless remains racially unjust in other ways. For this reason, Shelby concludes that ideal theory remains indispensable (2013).

Christopher Lebron (2013, 28–42) also suggests that the approaches of Rawls and Mills are complementary, but in a very different way. He argues that Rawls’s focus on the basic structure of society provides explanatory mechanisms through which white supremacy persists, something unspecified in earlier work by Mills (2003). And in sharp contrast to Shelby (2013), Lebron criticizes Mills for rehabilitating Rawlsian contract thinking, since even a non-ideal form eliminates the epistemological advantage of a non-white perspective on white supremacy. Instead of reformulating contractarian thinking to fit the needs of racial justice, Lebron instead focuses on analyzing how “historically evolved power” and “socially embedded power” perpetuate racial injustice.

Turning to the second strand of practical philosophy devoted to race, various scholars have addressed policies such as affirmative action, race-conscious electoral districting, and colorblindness in policy and law. The literature on affirmative action is immense, and may be divided into approaches that focus on compensatory justice, distributive justice, critiques of the concept of merit, and diversity of perspective. Alan Goldman (1979) generally argues against affirmative action, since jobs or educational opportunities as a rule should go to those most qualified. Only when a specific individual has been victimized by racial or other discrimination can the otherwise irrelevant factor of race be used as a compensatory measure to award a position or a seat at a university. Ronald Fiscus (1992) rejects the compensatory scheme in favor of a distributive justice argument. He claims that absent the insidious and invidious effects of a racist society, success in achieving admissions to selective universities or attractive jobs would be randomly distributed across racial lines. Thus, he concludes that distributive justice requires the racially proportional distribution of jobs and university seats. Of course, Fiscus’s argument displaces the role of merit in the awarding of jobs or university admissions, but this point is addressed by Iris Young (1990, Chapter 7), who argues that contemporary criteria of merit, such as standardized testing and educational achievement, are biased against disadvantaged racial and other groups, and rarely are functionally related to job performance or academic potential. Finally, Michel Rosenfeld (1991) turns away from substantive theories of justice in favor of a conception of justice as reversibility, a position influenced by the “Discourse Ethics” of Jürgen Habermas (1990), which defines justice not by the proper substantive awarding of goods but as the result of a fair discursive procedure that includes all relevant viewpoints and is free of coercive power relations. Thus, affirmative action is justified as an attempt to include racially diverse viewpoints. All of these positions are summarily discussed in a useful debate format in Cohen and Sterba (2003).

The issues of race-conscious electoral districting and descriptive racial representation have also garnered substantial attention. Race-conscious districting is the practice of drawing geographically based electoral districts in which the majority of voters are Black. Descriptive racial representation holds that Black populations are best represented by Black politicians. Iris Marion Young (1990, 183–191) provides a spirited defense of descriptive representation for racial minorities, grounded in their experiences of “oppression, the institutional constraint on self-determination”, and domination “the institutional constraint on self-determination” (1990, 37). Anne Phillips (1995) furthers this position, arguing that representatives who are members of minority racial groups can enhance legislative deliberation. Melissa Williams (1998) also defends the deliberative contribution of descriptive racial representation, but adds that minority constituents are more likely to trust minority representatives, since both will be affected by laws that overtly or covertly discriminate against minority racial groups. Finally, Jane Mansbridge (1999) carefully demonstrates why a critical mass of minority representatives is needed, in order to adequately advocate for common minority interests as well as to convey the internal diversity within the group. In a later work, Young (2000) addresses critics who argue that descriptive representation relies upon group essentialism, since members of a racial group need not all share the same interests or opinions. In response, Young suggests that members of the same racial group do share the same “social perspective” grounded in common experiences, similar to the interactive kind variant of racial constructivism discussed earlier. But because it is unclear that Black individuals are more likely to share common experiences than common interests or opinions, Michael James prioritizes using race-conscious districting to create Black racial constituencies which can hold Black or non-Black representatives accountable to Black interests (James 2011). Abigail Thernstrom (1987) condemns race-conscious districting for violating the original principles behind the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 15 th Amendment, by promoting the election of black representatives rather than simply guaranteeing black voters the right to cast ballots. J. Morgan Kousser (1999) responds that race-conscious districting simply reflects the right to cast a “meaningful” vote, as implied by the 15 th Amendment protection against not only the denial but also the “abridgment” of the right to vote. Lani Guinier (1994) compellingly suggests that instead of drawing majority black districts, we should adopt more proportional electoral system that facilitate the electoral strength of racial and other minorities. Michael James (2004) suggests that alternative electoral systems facilitate not only descriptive racial representation but also democratic deliberation across racial lines.

A general advantage of using alternative electoral systems to enhance minority racial representation is that they are technically colorblind, not requiring lawmakers or judges to group citizens according to their racial identities. The general value of colorblindness is an ongoing topic of debate within legal philosophy. Drawing on Justice John Marshall Harlan’s famous dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson , and a not-uncontroversial interpretation of the origins of the equal protection clause, Andrew Kull (1992) argues that contemporary American statutory and constitutional law should strive to be colorblind and combat racial inequality without dividing citizens into different racial groups. Ian Haney Lopez (2006, 143–162), on the other hand, fears “colorblind white dominance,” whereby facially race-neutral laws leave untouched the race-based inequality that operates within American political, legal, and economic structures. Elizabeth Anderson (2010) provides a trenchant critique of colorblindness as a normative standard for law, policy, or ethics. Racial segregation and the potential for integration have garnered much less philosophical attention than affirmative action and racially descriptive representation. Bernard Boxill (1992) offers a treatment of busing and self-segregation, while Howard McGary (1999) offers a clarification of integration and separation. Iris Young (2002, chapter 6) treats residential segregation in the context of regional democracy, while Owen Fiss (2003) analyzes it in the context of the legacy of racism. Anderson herself (2010) argues for the moral imperative of integration, with Tommie Shelby (2014) and Ronald Sundstrom (2013) offering critical responses to Anderson’s argument. More recently, Andrew Valls (2018, chapter 6) has written on the subject.

In recent years, the problem of racism within policing and criminal justice in the United States has attracted intense popular and scholarly attention. Mathias Risse and Richard Zeckhauser (2004) offer a qualified defense of racial profiling that engages both utilitarian and non-consequentialist reasoning. Annabelle Lever’s (2005) objection and response prompted a subsequent round of debate (Risse 2007, Lever 2007). Michelle Alexander (2010) famously depicted the contemporary American criminal justice system as the “New Jim Crow,” for its intense racial disparities. Naomi Zack (2015) provides a trenchant critique of racial profiling and police homicide. David Boonin (2011), on the other hand, reluctantly defends racial profiling on pragmatic grounds. Finally, Adam Hosein (2018) argues against it for reasons of political equality. Shelby (2016) offers a justification of Black resistance based in the unjust legacy of racial segregation while deepening his earlier critique of Anderson’s view.

While the debates in contemporary philosophy of race within the analytic tradition have largely revolved around whether or not races exist along with criteria for determining realness or existence, philosophers working in the Continental traditions have taken up the concept of race along other dimensions (see Bernasconi and Cook 2003 for an overview). First, those working within the traditions of Existentialism and Phenomenology have called on Fanon, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, among others, to understand how race and functions within our lived, bodily experiences of everyday life. This strand of scholarship focuses on the materiality of race. As Emily S. Lee puts it, “both the social structural and the individual subconscious levels of analysis rely on perceiving the embodiment of race” (2014, 1). Second, philosophers building on the work of Michel Foucault have articulated genealogical understandings of race that focus on its historical emergence as a concept and the ways that it has functioned within discourses of knowledge and power.

Frantz Fanon has been the primary influence for those understanding race and racism within Existentialism and Phenomenology. In Black Skin, White Masks Fanon writes, “I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul desirous to be at the origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects” (2008/1952, 89). Furthermore, this “inferiority is determined by the Other,” by the “white gaze” (2008/1952, 90). Such a position is understood through the schema of the body: “In a white world, the man of color encounters difficulties in elaborating his body schema. The image of one’s body is solely negating. It’s an image in the third person” (2008/1952, 90). Rather than being at home in his own body, and moving “out of habit,” Fanon understands his body as existing primarily as an object for others, requiring him to move “by implicit knowledge” of the rules and norms of that white world (2008/1952, 91).

Fanon critiques Sartre’s understanding of race and racism by pointing out that Sartre understands antiracism as a negative movement that will be overcome (2008/1952, 111–112). Sartre treats antiracism as the transition toward something else and not as an end in itself. Against this view Fanon writes, “ Sartre forgets that the Black man suffers in his body quite differently from the white man” (2008/1952, 117). He is trapped by his body schema, “a toy in the hands of the white man” (2008/1952, 119).

Lewis Gordon draws on both Fanon and Sartre in articulating his Africana existentialism. He distinguishes between Existentialism as a specific historical European movement and philosophies of existence, or existential philosophies, which are preoccupied with “freedom, anguish, responsibility, embodied agency, sociality, and liberation.” These concerns yield a focus on the “lived context of concern” (2000, 10). For Gordon, due to the history of racial oppression of Black peoples, an Africana existential philosophy revolves around the questions, “what does it mean to be a problem, and what is to be understood by Black suffering?” (2000, 8).

According to Gordon, what is sometimes referred to as the “race question” is really a question about the status of Blackness, for “race has emerged, throughout its history, as the question fundamentally of ‘the blacks’ as it has for no other group” (2000, 12). Rather than a denial that other groups have been racialized, the claim instead is that such other racializations have been conditioned on a scale of European personhood to Black subpersonhood (see also Mills 1998, 6–10). Blackness itself has been characterized as “the breakdown of reason” and “an existential enigma” in such a way that to ask after race and racialization is to ask after Blackness in the first instance.

Both Gordon and Zack use Sartre’s notion of bad faith to understand race. We can understand bad faith as the evasion of responsibility and fidelity to human freedom, and an understanding of the human being as a for-itself. Bad faith falsely turns the human being into an object without agency, into an in-itself. For Gordon, antiblack racism conceives of Blackness itself as a problem so as to avoid having to understand Black problems. As a result, actual Black people disappear along with any responsibility to them (1997, 74). Gordon gives the example of The Philadelphia Negro , Du Bois’ sociological study of the residents of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward. Gordon recounts how those commissioning the study set Du Bois up to fail so that he would only perpetuate the pathologizing of the Black population, presenting Blackness itself as a problem rather than attempt to understand the problems of Black people and communities (2000, 69).

Whereas Gordon uses bad faith to understand antiblack racism, Zack does so to deepen her eliminativism. For Sartre, authenticity is the antidote to bad faith – to live authentically is to understand and embrace human freedom rather than evade it. Zack’s eliminativism attributes bad faith to those who affirm that racial designations describe human beings when in fact they do not (1993, 3–4). If racial identifications lack adequate support because races do not exist, then identification as mixed race is also done in bad faith. Instead, Zack understands her position of “anti-race” as true authenticity that looks to the future in the name of freedom and resistance to oppression in the name of racelessness (1993, 164).

Embodiment and visibility are central to these views. Gordon understands the body as “our perspective in the world,” which occurs along (at least) three matrices: seeing, being seen, and being conscious of being seen (1997, 71). In an antiblack world this means that the Black body is a form of absence, going unseen in the same manner as Ralph Ellison’s protagonist in Invisible Man (1997, 72–3). George Yancy tells us that he writes from his “lived embodied experience,” which is a “site of exposure” (2008, 65). Black embodiment here is the lens used to critique whiteness and its normative gaze. For Yancy, Black resistance itself decodes and recodes Black embodied existence, affirming the value of the Black body in the face of centuries of white denial (2008, 112–3).

Linda Martín Alcoff offers a phenomenological account of race that highlights a “visual registry,” which is socially and historically constructed and that is “determinant over individual experience” (2006, 194). Like Yancy, Alcoff locates race in embodied lived experience. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work, Alcoff notes how the way that our perceptual practices are organized affects the way we come to know the world (2006, 188). When race operates through visibility, these ways of normalized perceptual knowing become racialized. As she notes, “racial consciousness works through learned practices and habits of visual discrimination and visual marks on the body…race exists there on the body itself” (2006, 196).

Lee argues that racial meaning fits squarely within the space that a phenomenological framework seeks to explore, namely, the space between the natural and the cultural, the objective and the subjective, and thinking and nonthinking (Lee 2014, 8). Furthermore, a phenomenological approach can illuminate how, even when race is understood as a social construction, it can nonetheless become naturalized through “the sedimentation of racial meaning into the very structures and practices of society” (Lee 2019, xi).

A second line of thought runs through the work of Michel Foucault. In his 1975–1976 lectures at the Collège de France , published as Society Must Be Defended , Foucault details the emergence of a discourse on race beginning in early 17th Century England. According to Foucault, race war discourse emerges through claims of illegitimacy against the Stuart monarchy. These claims were couched in the language of injustice as well as foreign invasion, in which an indigenous race is pitted against in invading outsider (2003, 60). Race, at this point, is not a biological concept, instead referring to lineage, custom, and tradition (2003, 77). Only later does this cultural notion of race transform into the scientific notion of race.

Cornel West employs a Foucaultian methodology to produce a genealogy of modern racism (1982). West analyzes how the discourse of modernity came into being to show how central white supremacy is to its practices of knowledge and meaning making (47). By modern discourse he means, “The controlling metaphors, notions, categories, and norms that shape the predominant conception of truth and knowledge in the modern West,” which are driven by the scientific revolution, the Cartesian transformation of philosophy, and the classical revival (50). It is a discourse comprising certain forms of rationality, scientificity, objectivity, and aesthetic and cultural ideals, the parameters of which exclude Black equality from the outset, marking it as unintelligible and illegitimate within the prevailing norms of discourse and knowledge (47–48). Notions of truth and knowledge produced by these three forces are governed by a value-free subject that observes, compares, orders, and measures in order to obtain evidence and make inferences that verify the true representations of reality.

Ladelle McWhorter uses Foucault’s lectures to conduct a genealogy of racism and sexual oppression of a more proximate time and place. According to McWhorter, “racism in twentieth-century Anglo-America [has] to be understood in light of Foucault’s work on normalization,” where racism exists as a crusade against deviance, abnormality, and pathology (2009, 12). Building on Foucault’s analysis of race war discourse McWhorter carries out a genealogy of race, ultimately arguing that race and sexuality “are historically codependent and mutually determinative” (2009, 14). Anglo-American discourse on race is therefore linked to discourses on eugenics, the family, sexual predation, normality, and population management, all of which function within the networks of power that Foucault referred to biopower (2009, 15). Ann Laura Stoler (1995) offers an extended reconstruction and critique of Foucault’s treatment of race in light of colonialism and empire. Joy James goes even further, arguing that Foucault is not useful for thinking about race at all (1996, chapter 1).

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• –––, 2002, Inclusion and Democracy , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Zack, N., 1993, Race and Mixed Race , Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
• –––, 2002, Philosophy of Science and Race , New York: Routledge.
• –––, 2011, The Ethics and Mores of Race: Equality after the History of Philosophy , Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
• –––, 2015, White Privilege and Black Rights: The Injustice of U.S. Police Racial Profiling and Homicide , Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Race: Are we so different? , educational website project of the American Anthropological Association
• Race: The Power of an Illusion , PBS website associated with the California Newsreel documentary
• Facts about Race/Color Discrimination , from the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
• Race, Racism, and the Law , edited by Vernellia Randall at the University of Dayton Law School

affirmative action | critical philosophy of race | Douglass, Frederick | Du Bois, W.E.B. | Fanon, Frantz | -->feminist philosophy, approaches: Black feminist philosophy --> | feminist philosophy, interventions: metaphysics | heritability | identity politics | Kant, Immanuel: social and political philosophy | liberation, philosophy of | Négritude | -->race: and Black identity -->

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Using the RACE Strategy for Text Evidence

How to Teach Constructed Response Using the RACE Strategy

Constructed response questions can be scary at first. Scary to teach and scary to write! Using the RACE Strategy will help ensure students get this skill right, every time!

I mean, when you compare writing a constructed response to answering a multiple-choice question, well, there really is  no  contest.

Constructed Response makes multiple-choice questions seem so simple to complete.

Since we know that students need to be able to write constructed responses, I was so happy when I was introduced to the RACE strategy.

It took the fright out of teaching constructed responses for text evidence.

The RACE Strategy gave me a step-by-step template to teach my students precisely what to do.

Even though writing constructed responses are still challenging, when you teach your students the RACE strategy and give them lots of opportunities for practice, your students will master it!

What is the RACE Strategy? So, just what is the RACE strategy? RACE is an acronym that helps students remember which steps and in which order to write a constructed response.

R = Restate the Question

The first step is to change the question into a statement.

This is also known as restating the question.

Students need to remove the question word like who, what, when, where, or why and then restate the keywords.

For example, if the question was, “Why did Jill decide to give her mother a jewelry box?” the answer would start this way, “Jill decided to give her mother a jewelry box because.”

A = Answer the Question After restating the question, the second step is to finish the sentence and answer the question.

Students may use their knowledge and inferences from the text to identify the answer.

Here are a few tips for this. 

1) Students must answer the specific question being asked.

2) Students also need to answer every part of the question.  Sometimes questions have more than one part. 3) T hey need to list the character’s name before using a pronoun like he/she/they.

C = Cite Text Evidence Citing evidence is the tricky part.

First, kids need to find relevant evidence to support their answer.

Then, they must write it correctly using a sentence stem

According to the text…

• The author stated…
• In the second paragraph…
• The author mentioned…
• On the third page…
• The text stated…
• Based on the text…

To teach this skill, I make an anchor chart with the question stems and put them up when we start to work on citing evidence.

Once kids memorize a few question stems, this part of the RACE strategy goes much more smoothly.

I make sure students know to quote the text  exactly as it is written  and use quotation marks correctly too.

E = Explain What it Means

The last part of the Constructed Response is where kids tell how their text evidence proves their point.

Again, some simple sentence starters help kids stay on track here.

Here are a few examples of sentence starters that help students begin to Explain: 

• This proves
• This is a good example of
• This means that

When I teach the RACE strategy, I give the kids an overview of a completed constructed response example, so they can see where we’re going.

Then, I break it down into separate parts and teach each one before putting it all together.

By the time kids reach my fourth or fifth-grade class, most students at my school have had teachers who have required them to answer a question using a restatement.

Students aren’t doing constructed responses yet, but most are fairly comfortable with restating a question.

Because of this, I might spend a few days teaching or reviewing the restating and answering part.

I teach the  Restating  and  Answering  together since they usually form one sentence.

Then, I move to  Citing  text evidence, which takes much longer to teach.

The  Explaining  part goes pretty quickly after that.

Once I’ve taught all of the components, it’s time for students to practice putting it all together.

To do this, we read a short text as a class.

It might be a Scholastic News article, a page from  Chicken Soup for the Soul,  or a passage I’ve created.

Finally, I model (with their input) a Constructed Response using a RACE template from The Teacher Next Door’s Text Evidence Differentiated Unit

I project it on the smartboard so everyone can see it.

The next day, we repeat this with a different passage in pairs.

When students are finished, we go over it together to compare notes when they’re finished. After that, it is time to work on it independently.

A few notes…

• Make sure to start teaching the RACE strategy early in the year, so there’s plenty of time to practice.  If you teach this strategy right before standardized testing, it will not be very effective.
• Start with short passages. One page is ideal. Giving students practice with shorter texts will help them gain confidence for the longer texts in the future.  Baby steps, right?
• You’ll want students to write constructed responses repeatedly, but NOT for every passage they read.
• Constructed responses are somewhat of a chore, even with an excellent strategy like RACE.
• I try not to burn kids out on any one thing so that they dread it. It would be like asking them to write a five-paragraph essay each day. No one wants to do that. So, my advice is to give them a good foundation for how to write them and then sprinkle them in now and then throughout the year. Spiral practice is key!

You can apply the RACE Strategy to any set of materials that you have on hand. However, The Teacher Next Door knows how time consuming it can be to search for standards-aligned and grade level appropriate materials.

To save you time, The Teacher Next Door has created a Text Evidence Differentiated Unit with everything you need for students to master this skill!

The Text Evidence Differentiated Unit contains:

• 10 color coding passages
• 8 practice passages
• 3 sets of text evidence games (with 32 task cards in each set)
• Posters for the entire RACE Strategy

The entire unit is differentiated for you! Each passage comes in  three  different levels, and the three games are differentiated too!

Click here to check this unit out! 

Want to give this Text Evidence Differentiated Passage a spin for FREE? 

If you’d like to read more about how to teach text evidence, we have another post you may want to read :

Citing Text Evidence in 6 Steps.

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• RACES Writing Strategy

The RACES writing strategy is an acronym that stands for the following components:

This refers to restating or rephrasing the question or prompt in your own words to ensure that you understand it correctly.

Provide a clear and concise answer to the question or prompt. This is the main part of your response and should directly address what is being asked.

Support your answer with evidence or examples. This could involve referencing specific facts, data, quotations, or other sources of information that support your response. Citing your sources helps to strengthen your argument and provide credibility to your writing.

Elaborate on your answer and provide further clarification or reasoning. Explain how your evidence or examples support your answer and demonstrate your understanding of the topic.

Summarize your response by restating your main points and bringing your writing to a conclusion. This helps to reinforce your main argument and leave a lasting impression on the reader.

Google Doc of the student graphic

The strategy provides a simple and structured framework for students to follow when responding to questions or prompts. It helps them develop their writing skills by encouraging them to restate the question, provide a clear answer, support their answer with evidence, explain their reasoning, and summarize their response.

By introducing the RACES strategy to students, teachers can help them organize their thoughts, express their ideas more effectively, and develop critical thinking skills. The strategy can be applied to various types of writing tasks, including short responses, paragraph writing, or longer compositions.

However, it's important to adapt the strategy to the age and abilities of the students. For younger elementary students, the concept of citing sources may be simplified to using examples from the text or personal experiences. Teachers can provide guidance and support as students learn to apply the different components of the RACES strategy in their writing.

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April 21, 2021

RACE Writing Strategy Examples: Student Guide and Grading Guide

RACE Writing Strategy responses are quite easy to grade. Teachers have asked me for tips and example responses. Today I’ll be sharing everything I have learned about grading RACE strategy responses quickly and efficiently!

Don’t know about teaching the RACE Writing Strategy? Read all you need to know about it here!

Tip 1: Use the Checklist

Just like you teach your students to write with the checklist, it is also helpful to grade with the checklist. As you read each response, make a small check mark beside each letter. This gives your students visual feedback about which parts of the assignment they have successfully completed. Additionally, it gives you a quick and easy reference for assigning a score.

Tip 2: Easy Scoring

There are four parts to the RACE Strategy, so scoring a response is easy.

Each step in the RACE strategy=25%, with successful use of all parts of the RACE strategy equaling 100%.

For example: if a student re-states the question, answers it, provides one citation, and explains, that would be 100%. If they did RAC, but did not explain the importance of their quotations, then they will score a 75%.

Tip 3: Answers will Vary

There is almost always more than one way to successfully respond to a question. As long as students are getting the fundamentals of responding in a paragraph and citing the text, consider it a win!

Tip 4: Save and Share Exemplar Responses

I have found that students love to share their responses when they’ve really nailed the assignment. The more your students can see examples of well-written paragraphs, the more they’ll understand how to write one on their own. Take some time to ask for volunteers to share their responses with the class. Praise students for making progress, and model well-written examples.

Tip 5: Feedback for Improvement

While providing scores and checkmarks is essential, offering constructive feedback is equally important for student growth. Take a moment to jot down specific comments about what the student did well and areas where they can improve. Encourage them to focus on enhancing certain aspects of their response, such as providing more in-depth explanations, strengthening their citations, or refining their restatement of the question. Constructive feedback not only guides students towards improvement but also reinforces the importance of continuous learning and refinement of their writing skills.

Consider scheduling brief one-on-one conferences with students to discuss their graded responses, addressing any questions they may have and offering personalized tips for enhancement. This individualized attention can foster a deeper understanding of the RACE Strategy and help students take ownership of their writing progress.

Paired Passages

If you are grading a response to paired passages , the RACE strategy can be modified to RACCE (since students should cite BOTH texts). In this case, each part of the response is worth 20%. If students complete each part, they will score 100%.

The predictable routine of writing using the RACE Strategy is one of the reasons I love it so much. Kids become very familiar with it, and before long, they’re using it on their own without being prompted. I’ve seen some of my most struggling writers find success with this method. With repeated practice, your students will be writing evidence-based passages like pros!

Get resources for teaching the RACE Writing Strategy here!

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Hear Something, Say Something: Navigating The World Of Racial Awkwardness

Listen to this week's episode.

We've all been there — having fun relaxing with friends and family, when someone says something a little racially off. Sometimes it's subtle, like the friend who calls Thai food "exotic." Other times it's more overt, like that in-law who's always going on about "the illegals."

In any case, it can be hard to know how to respond. Even the most level-headed among us have faltered trying to navigate the fraught world of racial awkwardness.

So what exactly do you do? We delve into the issue on this week's episode of the Code Switch podcast, featuring writer Nicole Chung and Code Switch's Shereen Marisol Meraji, Gene Demby and Karen Grigsby Bates.

We also asked some folks to write about what runs through their minds during these tense moments, and how they've responded (or not). Their reactions ran the gamut from righteous indignation to total passivity, but in the wake of these uncomfortable comments, everyone seemed to walk away wishing they'd done something else.

Aaron E. Sanchez

It was the first time my dad visited me at college, and he had just dropped me off at my dorm. My suitemate walked in and sneered.

"Was that your dad?" he asked. "He looks sooo Mexican."

Aaron E. Sanchez is a Texas-based writer who focuses on issues of race, politics and popular culture from a Latino perspective. Courtesy of Aaron Sanchez hide caption

He kept laughing about it as he left my room.

I was caught off-guard. Instantly, I grew self-conscious, not because I was ashamed of my father, but because my respectability politics ran deep. My appearance was supposed to be impeccable and my manners unimpeachable to protect against stereotypes and slights. I felt exposed.

To be sure, when my dad walked into restaurants and stores, people almost always spoke to him in Spanish. He didn't mind. The fluidity of his bilingualism rarely failed him. He was unassuming. He wore his working-class past on his frame and in his actions. He enjoyed hard work and appreciated it in others. Yet others mistook him for something altogether different.

People regularly confused his humility for servility. He was mistaken for a landscape worker, a janitor, and once he sat next to a gentleman on a plane who kept referring to him as a "wetback." He was a poor Mexican-American kid who grew up in the Segundo Barrio of El Paso, Texas, for certain. But he was also an Air Force veteran who had served for 20 years. He was an electrical engineer, a proud father, an admirable storyteller, and a pretty decent fisherman.

I didn't respond to my suitemate. To him, my father was a funny caricature, a curio he could pick up, purchase and discard. And as much as it was hidden beneath my elite, liberal arts education, I was a novelty to him too, an even rarer one at that. Instead of a serape, I came wrapped in the trappings of middle-classness, a costume I was trying desperately to wear convincingly.

That night, I realized that no clothing or ill-fitting costume could cover us. Our bodies were incongruous to our surroundings. No matter how comfortable we were in our skins, our presence would make others uncomfortable.

Karen Good Marable

When the Q train pulled into the Cortelyou Road station, it was dark and I was tired. Another nine hours in New York City, working in the madness that is Midtown as a fact-checker at a fashion magazine. All day long, I researched and confirmed information relating to beauty, fashion and celebrity, and, at least once a day, suffered an editor who was openly annoyed that I'd discovered an error. Then, the crush of the rush-hour subway, and a dinner obligation I had to fulfill before heading home to my cat.

Karen Good Marable is a writer living in New York City. Her work has been featured in publications like The Undefeated and The New Yorker. Courtesy of Karen Good Marable hide caption

The train doors opened and I turned the corner to walk up the stairs. Coming down were two girls — free, white and in their 20s . They were dancing as they descended, complete with necks rolling, mouths pursed — a poor affectation of black girls — and rapping as they passed me:

Now I ain't sayin she a golddigger/But she ain't messin' with no broke niggas!

That last part — broke niggas — was actually less rap, more squeals that dissolved into giggles. These white girls were thrilled to say the word publicly — joyously, even — with the permission of Kanye West.

I stopped, turned around and stared at them. I envisioned kicking them both squarely in their backs. God didn't give me telekinetic powers for just this reason. I willed them to turn around and face me, but they did not dare. They bopped on down the stairs and onto the platform, not evening knowing the rest of the rhyme.

Listen: I'm a black woman from the South. I was born in the '70s and raised by parents — both educators — who marched for their civil rights. I never could get used to nigga being bandied about — not by the black kids and certainly not by white folks. I blamed the girls' parents for not taking over where common sense had clearly failed. Hell, even radio didn't play the nigga part.

I especially blamed Kanye West for not only making the damn song, but for having the nerve to make nigga a part of the damn hook.

Life in NYC is full of moments like this, where something happens and you wonder if you should speak up or stay silent (which can also feel like complicity). I am the type who will speak up . Boys (or men) cussing incessantly in my presence? Girls on the train cussing around my 70-year-old mama? C'mon, y'all. Do you see me? Do you hear yourselves? Please. Stop.

But on this day, I just didn't feel like running down the stairs to tap those girls on the shoulder and school them on what they damn well already knew. On this day, I just sighed a great sigh, walked up the stairs, past the turnstiles and into the night.

Robyn Henderson-Espinoza

When I was 5 or 6, my mother asked me a question: "Does anyone ever make fun of you for the color of your skin?"

This surprised me. I was born to a Mexican woman who had married an Anglo man, and I was fairly light-skinned compared to the earth-brown hue of my mother. When she asked me that question, I began to understand that I was different.

Robyn Henderson-Espinoza is a visiting assistant professor of ethics at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, Calif. Courtesy of Robyn Henderson-Espinoza hide caption

Following my parents' divorce in the early 1980s, I spent a considerable amount of time with my father and my paternal grandparents. One day in May of 1989, I was sitting at my grandparents' dinner table in West Texas. I was 12. The adults were talking about the need for more laborers on my grandfather's farm, and my dad said this:

"Mexicans are lazy."

He called the undocumented workers he employed on his 40 acres "wetbacks." Again and again, I heard from him that Mexicans always had to be told what to do. He and friends would say this when I was within earshot. I felt uncomfortable. Why would my father say these things about people like me?

But I remained silent.

It haunts me that I didn't speak up. Not then. Not ever. I still hear his words, 10 years since he passed away, and wonder whether he thought I was a lazy Mexican, too. I wish I could have found the courage to tell him that Mexicans are some of the hardest-working people I know; that those brown bodies who worked on his property made his lifestyle possible.

As I grew in experience and understanding, I was able to find language that described what he was doing: stereotyping, undermining, demonizing. I found my voice in the academy and in the movement for black and brown lives.

Still, the silence haunts me.

Channing Kennedy

My 20s were defined in no small part by a friendship with a guy I never met. For years, over email and chat, we shared everything with each other, and we made great jokes. Those jokes — made for each other only — were a foundational part of our relationship and our identities. No matter what happened, we could make each other laugh.

Channing Kennedy is an Oakland-based writer, performer, media producer and racial equity trainer. Courtesy of Channing Kennedy hide caption

It helped, also, that we were slackers with spare time, but eventually we both found callings. I started working in the social justice sector, and he gained recognition in the field of indie comics. I was proud of my new job and approached it seriously, if not gracefully. Before I took the job, I was the type of white dude who'd make casually racist comments in front of people I considered friends. Now, I had laid a new foundation for myself and was ready to undo the harm I'd done pre-wokeness.

And I was proud of him, too, if cautious. The indie comics scene is full of bravely offensive work: the power fantasies of straight white men with grievances against their nonexistent censors, put on defiant display. But he was my friend, and he wouldn't fall for that.

One day he emailed me a rough script to get my feedback. At my desk, on a break from deleting racist, threatening Facebook comments directed at my co-workers, I opened it up for a change of pace.

I got none. His script was a top-tier, irredeemable power fantasy — sex trafficking, disability jokes, gendered violence, every scene's background packed with commentary-devoid, racist caricatures. It also had a pop culture gag on top, to guarantee clicks.

I asked him why he'd written it. He said it felt "important." I suggested he shelve it. He suggested that that would be a form of censorship. And I realized this: My dear friend had created a racist power fantasy about dismembering women, and he considered it bravely offensive.

I could have said that there was nothing brave about catering to the established tastes of other straight white comics dudes. I could have dropped any number of half-understood factoids about structural racism, the finishing move of the recently woke. I could have just said the jokes were weak.

Instead, I became cruel to him, with a dedication I'd previously reserved for myself.

Over months, I redirected every bit of our old creativity. I goaded him into arguments I knew would leave him shaken and unable to work. I positioned myself as a surrogate parent (so I could tell myself I was still a concerned ally) then laughed at him. I got him to escalate. And, privately, I told myself it was me who was under attack, the one with the grievance, and I cried about how my friend was betraying me.

I wanted to erase him (I realized years later) not because his script offended me, but because it made me laugh. It was full of the sense of humor we'd spent years on — not the jokes verbatim, but the pacing, structure, reveals, go-to gags. It had my DNA and it was funny. I thought I had become a monster-slayer, but this comic was a monster with my hands and mouth.

After years as the best of friends and as the bitterest of exes, we finally had a chance to meet in person. We were little more than acquaintances with sunk costs at that point, but we met anyway. Maybe we both wanted forgiveness, or an apology, or to see if we still had some jokes. Instead, I lectured him about electoral politics and race in a bar and never smiled.

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What is racism?

What are some of the societal aspects of racism, what are some of the measures taken to combat racism.

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Racism is the belief that humans can be divided into separate and exclusive biological entities called “races”; that there is a causal link between inherited physical traits and traits of personality, intellect, morality, and other cultural and behavioral features; and that some races are innately superior to others. Racism was at the heart of North American slavery and the colonization and empire-building activities of western Europeans, especially in the 18th century. Since the late 20th century the notion of biological race has been recognized as a cultural invention, entirely without scientific basis. Most human societies have concluded that racism is wrong, and social trends have moved away from racism.

Historically, the practice of racism held that members of low-status “races” should be limited to low-status jobs or enslavement and be excluded from access to political power, economic resources, and unrestricted civil rights. The lived experience of racism for members of low-status races includes acts of physical violence, daily insults, and frequent acts and verbal expressions of contempt and disrespect.

Racism elicits hatred and distrust and precludes any attempt to understand its victims. Many societies attempt to combat racism by raising awareness of racist beliefs and practices and by promoting human understanding in public policies. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights , adopted by the United Nations in 1948, is an example of one measure taken to combat racism. In the United States, the civil rights movement ’s fight against racism gained national prominence during the 1950s and has had lasting positive effects.

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racism , the belief that humans may be divided into separate and exclusive biological entities called “races”; that there is a causal link between inherited physical traits and traits of personality, intellect, morality , and other cultural and behavioral features; and that some races are innately superior to others. The term is also applied to political, economic, or legal institutions and systems that engage in or perpetuate discrimination on the basis of race or otherwise reinforce racial inequalities in wealth and income, education , health care, civil rights, and other areas. Such institutional, structural, or systemic racism became a particular focus of scholarly investigation in the 1980s with the emergence of critical race theory , an offshoot of the critical legal studies movement. Since the late 20th century the notion of biological race has been recognized as a cultural invention, entirely without scientific basis.

Following Germany’s defeat in World War I , that country’s deeply ingrained anti-Semitism was successfully exploited by the Nazi Party , which seized power in 1933 and implemented policies of systematic discrimination, persecution, and eventual mass murder of Jews in Germany and in the territories occupied by the country during World War II ( see Holocaust ).

In North America and apartheid -era South Africa , racism dictated that different races (chiefly blacks and whites) should be segregated from one another; that they should have their own distinct communities and develop their own institutions such as churches, schools, and hospitals; and that it was unnatural for members of different races to marry .

Historically, those who openly professed or practiced racism held that members of low-status races should be limited to low-status jobs and that members of the dominant race should have exclusive access to political power, economic resources, high-status jobs, and unrestricted civil rights . The lived experience of racism for members of low-status races includes acts of physical violence , daily insults, and frequent acts and verbal expressions of contempt and disrespect, all of which have profound effects on self-esteem and social relationships.

Racism was at the heart of North American slavery and the colonization and empire-building activities of western Europeans, especially in the 18th century. The idea of race was invented to magnify the differences between people of European origin and those of African descent whose ancestors had been involuntarily enslaved and transported to the Americas. By characterizing Africans and their African American descendants as lesser human beings, the proponents of slavery attempted to justify and maintain the system of exploitation while portraying the United States as a bastion and champion of human freedom, with human rights , democratic institutions, unlimited opportunities, and equality. The contradiction between slavery and the ideology of human equality, accompanying a philosophy of human freedom and dignity, seemed to demand the dehumanization of those enslaved.

By the 19th century, racism had matured and spread around the world. In many countries, leaders began to think of the ethnic components of their own societies, usually religious or language groups, in racial terms and to designate “higher” and “lower” races. Those seen as the low-status races, especially in colonized areas, were exploited for their labour, and discrimination against them became a common pattern in many areas of the world. The expressions and feelings of racial superiority that accompanied colonialism generated resentment and hostility from those who were colonized and exploited, feelings that continued even after independence.

Since the mid-20th century many conflicts around the world have been interpreted in racial terms even though their origins were in the ethnic hostilities that have long characterized many human societies (e.g., Arabs and Jews, English and Irish). Racism reflects an acceptance of the deepest forms and degrees of divisiveness and carries the implication that differences between groups are so great that they cannot be transcended .

Racism elicits hatred and distrust and precludes any attempt to understand its victims. For that reason, most human societies have concluded that racism is wrong, at least in principle, and social trends have moved away from racism. Many societies have begun to combat racism by raising awareness of racist beliefs and practices and by promoting human understanding in public policies, as does the Universal Declaration of Human Rights , set forth by the United Nations in 1948.

In the United States, racism came under increasing attack during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, and laws and social policies that enforced racial segregation and permitted racial discrimination against African Americans were gradually eliminated. Laws aimed at limiting the voting power of racial minorities were invalidated by the Twenty-fourth Amendment (1964) to the U.S. Constitution , which prohibited poll taxes , and by the federal Voting Rights Act (1965), which required jurisdictions with a history of voter suppression to obtain federal approval (“preclearance”) of any proposed changes to their voting laws (the preclearance requirement was effectively removed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 [ see Shelby County v. Holder ]). By 2020 nearly three-quarters of the states had adopted varying forms of voter ID law , by which would-be voters were required or requested to present certain forms of identification before casting a ballot. Critics of the laws, some of which were successfully challenged in the courts, contended that they effectively suppressed voting among African Americans and other demographic groups. Other measures that tended to limit voting by African Americans were unconstitutional racial gerrymanders , partisan gerrymanders aimed at limiting the number of Democratic representatives in state legislatures and Congress, the closing of polling stations in African American or Democratic-leaning neighbourhoods, restrictions on the use of mail-in and absentee ballots, limits on early voting, and purges of voter rolls.

Despite constitutional and legal measures aimed at protecting the rights of racial minorities in the United States, the private beliefs and practices of many Americans remained racist, and some group of assumed lower status was often made a scapegoat. That tendency has persisted well into the 21st century.

Because, in the popular mind, “race” is linked to physical differences among peoples, and such features as dark skin colour have been seen as markers of low status, some experts believe that racism may be difficult to eradicate . Indeed, minds cannot be changed by laws, but beliefs about human differences can and do change, as do all cultural elements.