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Defining Race:
What is race? Theoretically, a race is a population that differs from others in the frequency of one or more biological traits. Races ares usually characterized as having several distinguishing characteristics. Races are associated with different geographical regions where their populations are found.
Race is a biological category, yet it is socially constructed. The significance of the race concept cannot be understood without attending to the political implications of biological categorization as well as the scientific biases inherent in social construction.
The convenient lumping and splitting of human groups into different divisions based on a combination of several traits will produce what are being called races. But those "races" are created by the scientist, not by nature. If one draws a line around any geographical area and averages the frequencies of the different traits found in the circumscribed population(s), one will have a statistical representation of that population's biology. Yet, relatively few individuals within that circle will actually look like the average created, because the true variation will be as high as the circle is large. Still, what one represents by that average is not a naturally occurring population; instead, the average is of what the researcher has defined by the act of drawing the circle. If one draws circles around many different populations, the averages for the different trait frequencies will be different, and races will have been created by the observer's choices about where the circles should be drawn. Here in lies the necessary malleability for social construction.
Yet, to many people, races appear to be very real, natural, and fixed categories. Let us return to when definitions of race began and trace the social and scientific influences that spawned our modern notions of it.
The Origins of Biological Race:
Franz Boas, often considered the "father of American anthropology," at the turn of the 20th Century was one of the first critics of the race concept. Boas believed that race constituted a "folk" taxonomy of non-scientific origin, subsequently fit within the new scientific framework. The pre-existing European folk beliefs about human variation would have to have been very crude. Prior to their world-wide imperialistic ventures beginning in the 17th century, Western Europe was a global backwater. Mediterranean Europe was better...