Wait, What?
Race is a categorization at the sub-species level. Everyone has long agreed that human beings are a single inter-breeding species, and have been for thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of years. To sort a species into sub-species, it is necessary to have biological variation AND a way to group that variation. We have biological variation. The problem comes in establishing the ways variation clumps, groups, or sorts into subsets. We can try this in terms of skin color or skull characteristics, bone measurements, and genetic variation.
Race Reconciled: Skin Color and Skulls
Most people in the U.S. think they use skin color to classify races. U.S. categories relate to skin color, but not exactly. If it was actually about skin color, racial classifications would look more like Brazil, with lots of different terms and gradations. If it were about skin color, then people might change race classification over the years, or children from the same parents could be classified as different races.
In contrast, the traditional U.S. system is known anthropologically as hypo-descent: children get the racial classification of the parent with the least socially desirable classification. Barack Obama, Halle Berry, and some of Thomas Jefferson’s descendants are considered black. The most extreme example is the “one drop rule,” that any black ancestry meant being classified as black. There have been recent shifts in these attitudes, and there have been regional and historical variations, but this system remains dominant.
