In 1951, UNESCO published "The Race Question" -- a statement signed by leading biologists, anthropologists, and geneticists from around the world declaring that race, as a biological category, was not scientifically valid. The statement had to be written because the science that Nazi Germany had invoked to justify the Holocaust had been presented as legitimate science. The racial classifications, intelligence hierarchies, and eugenic theories that had served as intellectual frameworks for genocide had been produced within the walls of universities and published in scientific journals. The signatories were not announcing a new discovery -- they were attempting to set the record straight about what genetics and anthropology had already established and what a political movement had systematically distorted. Seven decades later, the scientific consensus remains what it was in 1951. What has changed is the depth and precision of the evidence, and the sophistication of the social science that explains why race persists as a powerful social reality even as its biological foundations have been thoroughly excavated.

The question "what is race?" is genuinely one of the most important questions in modern social science, and it is one of the most consistently misunderstood. The confusion takes several forms. Some people believe that dismissing biological race means denying that human beings differ genetically or that ancestry is meaningless. It does not. Some believe that the demonstrated social reality of race -- its effects on wealth, health, incarceration, and life expectancy -- proves that race must have a biological basis. It does not. Others believe that because racial categories are politically constructed, they are somehow not real and have no consequences. They are not real as biology, but they are profoundly real as social facts. Untangling these layers requires moving carefully through the genetics, the history, and the sociology.

The stakes are practical as much as intellectual. How we understand race determines how we diagnose racial health disparities, whether we look for genetic or social causes of educational gaps, how we think about representation and remediation, and whether we understand racism as a system with biological consequences or as a social phenomenon whose biological language is a scientific category error.

"In the United States, a person does not have to be told they are Black. They can feel it in the doctor's office, the classroom, the traffic stop, the mortgage application." -- Arline Geronimus, Weathering (2023)

Concept Definition Key Point
Race Socially constructed category based on perceived physical traits No biological basis for discrete races
Ethnicity Shared cultural heritage, language, or ancestry Socially defined; self-identified
Racism System of disadvantage based on race Operates at individual, cultural, and structural levels
Structural racism Racial disparities embedded in institutions and policies Does not require individual racist intent
Colorism Discrimination based on skin shade within racial groups Operates within and across racial categories
Racial formation Process by which racial categories are created and changed Omi & Winant's sociological framework

Key Definitions

Race: A system of social classification that divides people primarily on the basis of perceived physical characteristics, especially skin color and facial features, and their presumed biological heritability. A social and political category that produces real biological consequences through social experience but is not a natural biological taxonomy.

Ethnicity: Shared cultural identity based on language, religion, national origin, history, and traditions. Distinct from race in being primarily cultural rather than physical, and typically asserted from within a community rather than imposed from outside.

Clinal variation: The pattern in which genetic variants change gradually across geographic space rather than jumping sharply at discrete boundaries. The predominant pattern of human genetic variation.

FST (fixation index): A measure of genetic differentiation between populations, ranging from 0 (identical allele frequencies) to 1 (completely different alleles). Between continental human groups, FST is approximately 10-15%, indicating substantial overlap.

Allostatic load: The cumulative biological cost of stress response, measured through multiple physiological markers (cortisol levels, blood pressure, inflammation markers, telomere length). The mechanism through which chronic social stressors produce biological damage.

Weathering hypothesis: Arline Geronimus's theory that Black Americans experience accelerated biological aging due to the chronic physiological stress of navigating racism, explaining racial disparities in health outcomes that persist after controlling for income and education.

Racial formation: Michael Omi and Howard Winant's concept of race as an unstable, contested set of meanings that is continuously produced, transformed, and destroyed through political struggle and social conflict rather than reflecting fixed natural categories.

The Genetics of Human Variation

Human beings are a genetically young species. Modern Homo sapiens emerged in Africa roughly 300,000 years ago, and the ancestors of all non-African populations left Africa in migrations that began approximately 60,000-70,000 years ago. This is a very brief period in evolutionary time. The result is that humans are remarkably genetically similar: we share approximately 99.9% of our DNA sequence. The genetic diversity within the human species is considerably less than within most other primate species, including our closest relatives, chimpanzees.

The 0.1% of DNA that varies between human individuals -- roughly 3 million sites in the genome -- is geographically structured, but in a specific way. Richard Lewontin's foundational 1972 analysis calculated how human genetic variation was distributed: within racial groups (comparing two Europeans, or two West Africans) versus between racial groups (comparing a European to a West African). He found that approximately 85-90% of genetic variation was within groups and only 10-15% between them. The implication was striking: more of the genetic difference between two randomly chosen humans reflects their individual ancestry than their continental ancestry.

A.W.F. Edwards published a critique of this analysis in 2003, pointing out that while Lewontin's arithmetic was correct for any single genetic marker, it missed correlated patterns across many markers simultaneously. Using many markers together, statistical methods can indeed distinguish continental populations with considerable accuracy -- not because any single marker is highly diagnostic but because many weakly informative markers in combination are more informative. This critique is valid and important. But it does not overturn the core point: the between-group genetic differentiation (FST of roughly 10-15% between continental populations) is modest compared to within-group variation, and it does not support the idea of discrete, biologically meaningful racial types.

Noah Rosenberg and colleagues demonstrated this vividly in their 2002 Science paper. Using 377 genetic markers and a statistical clustering algorithm (STRUCTURE) applied to 1,056 individuals from 52 populations worldwide, they found that the algorithm could identify clusters roughly corresponding to five continental regions: Africa, Eurasia, East Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. This has been cited by some as confirming biological race. But the paper's authors were careful to note that the clusters emerged partly because of the sampling structure: populations were sampled from geographically isolated groups. When populations on continuous gradients are included, the "clusters" dissolve into the gradients they actually reflect. The discrete-looking results are artifacts of discontinuous sampling, not evidence of biological discontinuity in the underlying variation.

The predominant pattern of human genetic variation is clinal -- varying gradually across geographic space, like the gradient of a color wheel rather than the sharp boundaries of a bar chart. Skin color, for example, varies continuously with latitude (as an adaptation to UV radiation) rather than jumping at continental boundaries. Most medically and biologically significant variants follow the same pattern.

"The problem with race as a biological concept is not that there is no genetic variation between groups. There clearly is. The problem is that this variation is continuous, not discrete, and the groupings we call races do not correspond to natural clusters in the genetic data." -- Sarah Tishkoff, geneticist, University of Pennsylvania (quoted in National Geographic, 2018)

What Genomics Has Actually Revealed

The Human Genome Project, completed in 2003, and the subsequent wave of large-scale population genomics studies have clarified the structure of human genetic variation in unprecedented detail. The 1000 Genomes Project (2008-2015), sequencing the complete genomes of over 2,500 individuals from 26 populations worldwide, documented that no single genetic variant is present in all members of any one continental group and absent in all members of another. The variants that differ in frequency between populations do so in continuous gradients, with populations geographically intermediate between any two groups also showing intermediate allele frequencies.

The American Society of Human Genetics (2018), in a formal statement, declared that "genetics exposes the concept of 'racial purity' as scientifically meaningless" and that attempts to use genetic science to support racial hierarchy "distort what genetics can and cannot tell us." The statement was signed by the elected leaders of the world's largest genetics professional society.

This does not mean ancestry is irrelevant to medicine. Some genetic variants associated with disease risk do vary in frequency across ancestrally defined populations, and knowing a patient's ancestral background can inform genetic risk assessment. But ancestral population and social race are not the same thing, and using race as a proxy for ancestry in medical practice introduces errors (Braun et al., 2007). The most significant risk factors for the racial health disparities that concern clinicians -- differences in rates of hypertension, maternal mortality, infant mortality, and life expectancy -- are attributable to social determinants, not genetic ones.

The Social History of Race

The modern concept of biological race -- humanity divided into a small number of discrete, heritable natural types -- is not a timeless biological truth. It is a specific historical construction, developed in a specific political and economic context, and serving specific political and economic purposes.

Carl Linnaeus included human racial varieties in his 1735 Systema Naturae, classifying Homo sapiens into four continental groups characterized not just by physical traits but by temperament and the systems of governance suited to them. Europeans were governed by law; Africans by caprice. These were not neutral descriptions. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's five-race classification (1795) became the template for subsequent racial science, and his addition of "Caucasian" as the original, most beautiful, and implicitly superior race reflected the aesthetic biases of European Enlightenment racialism.

In the United States, racial classification was a legal and economic project before it was a scientific one. The institution of chattel slavery required a clear line between those who could be enslaved and those who could not, and racial ancestry provided that line. The "one-drop rule" -- the legal principle that any known African ancestry made a person Black regardless of appearance -- had no biological rationale; it existed to prevent enslaved people from claiming freedom through white parentage. The history of who "counted" as white in American law reveals the political nature of racial classification: Irish immigrants, Italian immigrants, and Jewish immigrants were not automatically classified as white in 19th and early 20th century America. Courts decided racial membership on a case-by-case basis, producing contradictory outcomes. When Bhagat Singh Thind, an immigrant from India, argued to the Supreme Court in 1923 that he was Caucasian (in the anthropological sense) and therefore white, the Court ruled that "common understanding" of whiteness, not scientific taxonomy, determined legal status.

Scientific racism -- craniometry, polygenism, eugenics, intelligence testing -- provided academic legitimacy for these political and economic arrangements. The science was shaped by the politics: studies were designed to find what their authors and funders already believed, anomalous evidence was discarded, and conclusions were pre-determined. Franz Boas, working at the turn of the 20th century, provided the first sustained scientific challenge to biological race, demonstrating the plasticity of physical traits previously thought to be fixed markers of racial type. Ashley Montagu generalized this critique in Man's Most Dangerous Myth (1942). The post-Holocaust scientific consensus represented in the UNESCO statements was built on decades of empirical work that had already undermined scientific racism's foundations.

The Construction of Whiteness

Historian David Roediger, in The Wages of Whiteness (1991), documents how the category of "white" was actively constructed in American political economy. Irish and Italian immigrants, initially subjected to the same kinds of racial othering applied to Black Americans, gradually achieved inclusion in the white category through a combination of political organization, labor market competition with Black workers, and deliberate cultural identification with Anglo-American norms. This historical malleability of racial categorization is itself evidence of the social, rather than natural, character of race.

The wages of whiteness -- the psychological, social, and economic benefits of racial classification -- help explain why racial categories persist even when their biological foundations are thoroughly understood to be illusory. Race functions as a system for allocating social advantage, and those who benefit from the allocation have interests in its continuation regardless of its scientific validity.

Racial Formation and the Social Reality of Race

If race is not a biological type, what is it? Michael Omi and Howard Winant developed the concept of "racial formation" to describe race as an unstable set of meanings continuously produced, contested, and transformed through political conflict and social interaction. Race is real as a social institution -- a system that allocates power, resources, and status based on perceived physical characteristics and ancestry. That system has real, measurable consequences.

The history of American residential segregation illustrates the mechanisms. From the 1930s through the 1960s, the Federal Housing Administration systematically refused to insure mortgages in or near Black neighborhoods -- a practice known as redlining, after the red lines drawn on government maps to mark "hazardous" areas. The racial wealth gap between white and Black Americans today -- median white household wealth is approximately eight times median Black household wealth (Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances, 2019) -- is substantially a product of this differential access to homeownership and the intergenerational wealth that homeownership generates. The social construction of race, enforced through government policy and private discrimination, produced lasting material differences in wealth and opportunity.

Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow (2010) traced a parallel dynamic in criminal justice: the war on drugs, applied with dramatically unequal enforcement against Black communities, created a system of felony records, disenfranchisement, and legal discrimination that functioned, Alexander argued, as a contemporary form of racialized social control. The mechanism was ostensibly race-neutral -- "equal" enforcement of drug laws -- but produced systematically unequal outcomes that shaped educational, employment, and civic opportunities.

These social mechanisms produce biological outcomes. Arline Geronimus, developing her weathering hypothesis from the late 1980s, documented that Black Americans showed signs of accelerated biological aging relative to white Americans of similar socioeconomic status. Telomeres -- the protective caps on chromosomes that shorten with age and with chronic stress -- were shorter in Black adults. Allostatic load -- the cumulative physiological toll of chronic stress -- was higher. Rates of hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and preterm birth were elevated in ways not explained by income or education alone. The proposed mechanism is the chronic physiological stress of navigating racism: the hypervigilance required to manage discrimination, the cognitive and emotional burden of stereotype threat, the cumulative toll of microaggressions and overt racism. Social structures produce biological effects through the body's stress response systems.

This is a precise and important claim: race affects biology through social experience, not through genes. The health consequences of race are products of racism as a social system, not of biological differences between racial groups.

Ancestry, Admixture, and Consumer Genomics

The rise of direct-to-consumer genetic testing -- 23andMe, AncestryDNA, and similar services -- has introduced population genetics to a mass audience and has generated considerable confusion about what genetic ancestry does and does not tell us about race.

These tests are doing real science. They compare a customer's DNA to reference populations from different world regions and estimate the proportions of ancestry from those regions. The estimates are based on genuine genetic patterns and are reasonably reliable at the continental level. A person whose four grandparents were all from Ireland will indeed receive a result heavily weighted toward Northwestern European ancestry. The underlying genetic variation is real and geographically patterned.

But what these tests measure is ancestry -- which populations your forebears came from -- not race as socially defined. In many cases the two correlate, but they are not the same thing, and the divergences are revealing. Most people in the Americas, particularly those of African or Latino heritage, carry genetic ancestry from multiple continental groups reflecting centuries of admixture. A person who identifies as Black in American society and is socially treated as Black may carry substantial European or Indigenous American genetic ancestry alongside West African ancestry. The social racial category -- the one that determined how they were treated in housing applications, traffic stops, and medical care -- bears no precise relationship to the ancestry percentages in their genomic report.

By some estimates, approximately 30 percent of Americans who self-identify as white carry detectable African ancestry (Bryc et al., 2015, The American Journal of Human Genetics). This is the genetic residue of centuries of sexual contact across the color line, much of it coerced. The "one-drop rule" produced a society in which people with African ancestry were legally classified as Black regardless of appearance, while people with the same ancestry who could pass as white were classified as white. The genetic record of this social history is visible in population genomics data, and it illustrates vividly how social racial categories diverge from biological ancestry patterns.

The clusters that STRUCTURE analysis identifies are partially artifacts of sampling: when reference populations are drawn from geographically isolated groups, the algorithm produces discrete-looking clusters from what is actually a continuous gradient. Sample continuously, and the clusters dissolve. The existence of genomic tests that can identify continental ancestry does not validate racial categories as natural biological kinds -- it validates the existence of geographic variation in allele frequencies, which is a real but different phenomenon.

Race and Intelligence: What the Science Actually Shows

No aspect of the race debate has been more persistent, more politically weaponized, or more carefully studied than the question of whether racial groups differ in average intelligence and whether such differences, if real, have genetic explanations.

The scientific consensus is clear. A 2012 synthesis by Richard Nisbett and eleven co-authors -- representing some of the most prominent intelligence researchers in the world -- reviewed the full body of evidence and concluded that there is no compelling evidence for genetic differences between racial groups in intelligence and strong evidence that observed group differences in measured cognitive performance reflect environmental factors.

The Flynn effect is decisive evidence for the environmental malleability of measured intelligence: average IQ scores have risen 3 points per decade across many countries over the 20th century. The rise is far too rapid to reflect genetic change -- it must reflect changes in environment, education, nutrition, or test familiarity. This establishes that what IQ tests measure is highly responsive to environmental conditions.

The Black-white gap in average test scores in the United States has narrowed substantially during periods of environmental equalization -- following school desegregation and reductions in childhood lead exposure in particular. A study by Dickens and Flynn (2006) documented that the Black-white gap in standardized test scores narrowed by approximately 5-6 IQ points (about a third of the gap) between 1972 and 2002, a change consistent with environmental improvement rather than genetic change. Adoption studies consistently show that Black children adopted into white middle-class households perform at levels comparable to white peers, implicating environment rather than genes. No specific genetic variants have been identified that would explain racial group differences in cognitive test performance.

What gene-environment research has shown is that the social variables associated with race -- neighborhood quality, school funding, exposure to environmental toxins like lead, chronic stress, access to nutrition -- are powerful determinants of cognitive development. The persistence of measured group differences reflects the persistence of these environmental inequalities, not fixed biological characteristics.

The history of scientific racism in this area warrants ongoing vigilance. Studies claiming to show genetic bases for racial differences in intelligence have repeatedly been found to rely on flawed methodology, biased sampling, or selective reporting of results. The American Psychological Association's task force report Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns (1995) concluded that there are no established genetic explanations for racial group differences in IQ and that the evidence points strongly to environmental causes.

Structural Racism: How Race Operates Without Racist Intent

One of the most significant intellectual developments in the sociology of race in recent decades has been the elaboration of the concept of structural racism -- the idea that racial inequality can be reproduced and maintained through institutional arrangements, policies, and practices that do not require individual racist intent.

The concept challenges the common-sense view that racism is primarily a matter of individual prejudice and that its elimination requires changing individual attitudes. Evidence increasingly suggests that much of the most consequential racial inequality in contemporary societies is produced not by overt discrimination but by the accumulated weight of policies, practices, and institutional designs that systematically produce racially disparate outcomes.

Research by Devah Pager (2003) illustrated this with striking simplicity. In an audit study, pairs of equally qualified job applicants -- one white, one Black -- applied for the same jobs in Milwaukee. The white applicant with a felony conviction was called back for interviews at the same rate as the Black applicant without one. Race and criminal record interacted to produce dramatically different hiring outcomes for equally qualified applicants, with race functioning as a signal about employability that overrode objective qualifications.

Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2003), in Racism Without Racists, developed the concept of colorblind racism -- the use of ostensibly race-neutral language and frameworks to explain and justify racial inequality. The argument that racial disparities in wealth, incarceration, and health reflect individual choices or cultural deficits rather than structural factors functions, Bonilla-Silva argues, as a contemporary form of racial ideology: it explains racial inequality in ways that naturalize it and deflect attention from the social structures that produce it.

The Global Dimensions of Race

Race as a system of social classification is not uniquely American, though its American form has been particularly extensively studied. Colonial racial hierarchies in Latin America, the apartheid system in South Africa, caste hierarchies in India with racial dimensions, anti-Black racism in contemporary Europe and East Asia, and the racial classifications imposed by European colonial powers across Asia and Africa all represent distinct but related phenomena.

Historian Achille Mbembe (2017), in Critique of Black Reason, argues that "Blackness" as a category was invented by the Atlantic slave trade and the plantation economy: it designated not a biological type but a condition of disposability, a social status that could be imposed on any human body marked for exploitation. This analysis locates the origins of modern racial thinking not in natural science but in the economics of slavery and the ideological requirements of its justification.

The caste system in South India, studied by sociologist Isabel Wilkerson in Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020), shares structural features with American racial hierarchy -- an inherited social status, maintained through social policing, that determines life outcomes more powerfully than individual merit -- while differing in its historical origins and cultural expression. Wilkerson's comparative framework suggests that racial hierarchy in the United States might be understood not simply as racism but as a caste system: a structure of inherited social rank that has persisted across the formal abolition of the legal instruments that originally defined it.

What Race Is

Race is a sociohistorical classification system that divides people based on perceived physical characteristics -- especially skin color -- and ancestry, and uses that division to allocate social power and material resources. It is not a natural biological kind. The categories are historically variable, legally defined, and reflect the political economy of their time and place more than they reflect the underlying biology of human variation. What this means is that race is real -- profoundly, consequentially real -- but its reality is social, not biological. It produces biological effects through social mechanisms. Dismantling those effects requires dismantling those mechanisms.

The scientific consensus on this question has been stable for seventy years. What has changed is the precision of the genetics -- allowing a clearer picture of how human variation is actually structured -- and the sophistication of the social science -- explaining how a classification system without biological foundations can produce such durable biological consequences. Both bodies of knowledge point in the same direction: toward the social systems that create and maintain racial inequality, and away from the biological essentialism that has been used to justify that inequality for centuries.

References

  • Alexander, M. (2010). The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New Press.
  • American Anthropological Association. (1998). AAA Statement on Race. American Anthropological Association.
  • American Psychological Association. (1995). Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns. APA Task Force Report.
  • American Society of Human Genetics. (2018). ASHG denounces attempts to link genetics and racial supremacy. American Journal of Human Genetics, 103(5), 636. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2018.10.011
  • Bonilla-Silva, E. (2003). Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. Rowman & Littlefield.
  • Braun, L., et al. (2007). Racial categories in medical practice: How useful are they? PLoS Medicine, 4(9), e271.
  • Bryc, K., et al. (2015). The genetic ancestry of African Americans, Latinos, and European Americans across the United States. American Journal of Human Genetics, 96(1), 37-53.
  • Dickens, W. T., & Flynn, J. R. (2006). Black Americans reduce the racial IQ gap. Psychological Science, 17(10), 913-920.
  • Edwards, A. W. F. (2003). Human genetic diversity: Lewontin's fallacy. BioEssays, 25(8), 798-801. https://doi.org/10.1002/bies.10315
  • Federal Reserve. (2019). Survey of Consumer Finances. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.
  • Geronimus, A. T. (2023). Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society. Little, Brown Spark.
  • Geronimus, A. T., et al. (2006). "Weathering" and age patterns of allostatic load scores among Blacks and Whites in the United States. American Journal of Public Health, 96(5), 826-833. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2004.060749
  • Lewontin, R. C. (1972). The apportionment of human diversity. Evolutionary Biology, 6, 381-398.
  • Mbembe, A. (2017). Critique of Black Reason (L. Dubois, Trans.). Duke University Press.
  • Nisbett, R. E., et al. (2012). Intelligence: New findings and theoretical developments. American Psychologist, 67(2), 130-159. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0026699
  • Omi, M., & Winant, H. (1994). Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (2nd ed.). Routledge.
  • Pager, D. (2003). The mark of a criminal record. American Journal of Sociology, 108(5), 937-975.
  • Roediger, D. R. (1991). The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Verso.
  • Rosenberg, N. A., et al. (2002). Genetic structure of human populations. Science, 298(5602), 2381-2385. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1078311
  • Wilkerson, I. (2020). Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Random House.

See also: What Is Intelligence | How Inequality Affects Health | Why Good People Do Bad Things

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Frequently Asked Questions

What does genetics actually show about race and human biological variation?

Population genetics has produced a clear and consistent finding about human biological variation that is often poorly understood in public debate: human genetic diversity exists on a continuum (it is clinal), not in discrete clusters that correspond to traditional racial categories.Richard Lewontin's landmark 1972 analysis of blood group polymorphisms found that approximately 85% of total human genetic variation exists within traditionally defined racial groups, not between them. Only about 15% of variation is attributable to differences between groups. This finding has been replicated and refined with vastly larger genomic datasets. The 2002 analysis by Rosenberg and colleagues using microsatellite markers produced graded clinal patterns when geographic sampling was continuous rather than based on isolated populations. Alan Templeton's 2013 review of human genetic diversity confirmed that genetic differentiation between human populations falls well below the threshold (FST greater than 0.25) conventionally used to define subspecies in other organisms; human populations do not meet the biological definition of subspecies or races.Humans are a remarkably genetically homogeneous species. Two randomly chosen humans from anywhere on Earth share approximately 99.9% of their DNA sequence. All humans are descended from a relatively small African ancestral population within the last 200,000-300,000 years; the genetic bottleneck of the Out of Africa migration further reduced diversity in non-African populations. Contrary to a common misconception, genetic diversity is greatest in Africa, not in Europe or East Asia, because African populations have had more generations to accumulate variation.This does not mean human populations are genetically identical, or that ancestry is irrelevant in medicine. Populations that have been geographically separated for thousands of years have accumulated different allele frequencies for traits affected by local selection (skin pigmentation, disease resistance, altitude adaptation) and by genetic drift. Ancestry can be statistically inferred from genetic data with considerable accuracy at continental scales. But these ancestry differences are quantitative gradients, not sharp discrete boundaries, and they do not map neatly onto the racial categories constructed in 17th-18th century European thought. Self-identified race is a poor proxy for genetic ancestry and an even poorer proxy for the specific genetic variants relevant to most medical conditions.

What is racial formation theory, and why is race called a social construction?

Racial formation theory, developed by sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant in their 1986 book 'Racial Formation in the United States', is the most influential framework for understanding race as a social and political category rather than a natural biological one.Omi and Winant argue that race is not a stable, given category but a historically contingent, politically constructed one: a product of racial projects (organized efforts to distribute resources along racial lines) that have been institutionalized through law, custom, and state power. Race is not something people simply have; it is something that is done to and by people through ongoing social processes. The categories change across time and context: who counts as white in the United States has expanded dramatically over two centuries to include Irish, Italian, and Jewish Americans who were once racialized as non-white. In Brazil, racial categories follow different logics than in South Africa or the United States. The same individual might be classified differently in different national contexts.The phrase social construction is frequently misunderstood to mean that race is not real or does not matter. This is precisely backwards. Social constructions are real in their consequences: the law of gravity is physically real; racism and racial hierarchy are socially real. Racial categorization has determined who could vote, own property, marry whom, live where, and access education and healthcare for centuries. Its effects are material and measurable even if its foundations are historical and political rather than biological.The social construction argument does not deny that humans vary biologically or that ancestry has medical relevance in specific contexts. It argues that the particular categories used in most societies do not map onto coherent biological divisions, and that the work these categories do in allocating power and resources is social and political, not natural. Race is constructed but not imaginary: it is a real social institution whose reality needs to be explained rather than simply accepted as natural fact.

How has race been used and misused in medicine?

Race appears in medical practice in several ways, and the appropriateness of each use is increasingly contested as precision medicine and genomics advance.Some race-based clinical adjustments have been defended as correcting for observed population differences in physiology. The spirometry race correction, adjustments to lung function reference values based on race, was widely used in pulmonary medicine for decades, applying lower normal values for Black patients than white patients on the grounds that studies showed lower average lung volumes in Black individuals. In 2022, the American Thoracic Society recommended abandoning race-based spirometry corrections, concluding that the differences reflected socioeconomic and environmental factors (lower lung function in populations with higher rates of air pollution exposure, childhood illness, and occupational hazards), not inherent biological differences. Using race-corrected values had delayed diagnoses of lung disease in Black patients.BiDil was the first drug approved by the FDA with a race-specific indication: in 2005, it was approved for treatment of heart failure specifically in Black patients, based on a clinical trial conducted exclusively in self-identified Black patients that showed mortality benefit. The approval was controversial because the drug had failed to show benefit in an earlier race-neutral trial; critics argued the race-specific approval reflected commercial strategy (a new patent) rather than sound science, and that the mechanism of benefit (nitric oxide enhancement) was pharmacologically race-independent. The BiDil case illustrates the risks of treating race as a biological category in clinical decision-making: it can generate circular reasoning rather than identifying the actual biological predictors of drug response.Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have overwhelmingly recruited participants of European ancestry, producing polygenic risk scores that perform poorly in non-European populations. This creates a medical disparity: precision medicine tools developed in predominantly European cohorts give less accurate predictions for people of African, Asian, or Indigenous ancestry. The solution is not to use race as a proxy but to diversify research cohorts so that the genetic variants relevant in diverse populations are actually identified and incorporated into clinical tools.

How did the history of racial classification lead to scientific racism?

The modern concept of biological race, the idea that humanity is divided into a small number of fixed, heritable types with distinct characteristics, is a product of European thought from the 17th century onward, not an ancient or universal human category.Carl Linnaeus included a racial taxonomy in the 10th edition of Systema Naturae (1758), dividing Homo sapiens into four varieties: Europaeus, Asiaticus, Americanus, and Afer, each characterized by physical features, temperament, and social governance in terms that encoded a clear hierarchy.Johann Friedrich Blumenbach proposed five races in his 1795 third edition of 'On the Natural Variety of Mankind': Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malay. Blumenbach coined the term Caucasian from his belief that the most beautiful skull in his collection came from the Caucasus region. His classificatory framework was taken up by less careful successors.19th-century scientific racism institutionalized racial hierarchy as empirical science. Samuel Morton's craniometry project, collecting hundreds of skulls and measuring cranial capacity, claimed to demonstrate a racial intelligence hierarchy. Stephen Jay Gould's analysis in 'The Mismeasure of Man' (1981) showed that Morton's measurements were unconsciously biased to fit his prior beliefs. Paul Broca in France and the polygenist school argued that races were separately created species, specifically to provide scientific justification for slavery and colonial domination.The eugenics movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, championed by Francis Galton and implemented in US immigration law (the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe based on alleged racial inferiority), took scientific racism to catastrophic conclusions in Nazi racial ideology. The Holocaust, combined with the collapse of the biological race concept under mid-20th century genetics, delegitimized scientific racism in the postwar period, though racial hierarchy was embedded in legal structures that persisted for decades afterward.

What is colorism, and how does it differ from racism?

Colorism refers to discrimination based on skin tone within a racial or ethnic group, where individuals with lighter skin tones receive preferential treatment over those with darker skin. The term was coined by novelist Alice Walker in her 1983 essay collection 'In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens'. Colorism exists within Black American, Latino, South Asian, East Asian, and other communities alongside the broader system of racism, and can operate independently of it.Colorism in the United States has roots in slavery's hierarchical structure, where lighter-skinned enslaved people (often the children of white enslavers) were more frequently assigned to domestic labor and were sometimes given preferential access to literacy and other resources. Post-emancipation, informal gatekeeping excluded darker-skinned individuals from certain social clubs, fraternities, and sororities, institutionalizing colorism within Black professional communities.Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has analyzed color-blind racism, the contemporary racial ideology that denies that racial discrimination remains operative ('I don't see color') while structural racial advantages and disadvantages persist. His 2003 book 'Racism Without Racists' argues that color-blind racism perpetuates racial inequality by attributing racial disparities to culture, individual behavior, or market forces rather than structural discrimination, making it more difficult to address than overt racism because it has no acknowledged perpetrators.Research consistently documents colorism's material effects. Within Black, Latino, and South Asian populations, lighter-skinned individuals earn higher wages, receive better employment offers, experience more lenient treatment in the criminal justice system, and report higher self-esteem on average than darker-skinned individuals with otherwise comparable characteristics. In countries across the Global South, including India, Brazil, South Korea, and Mexico, a multi-billion-dollar skin-lightening industry reflects and reinforces the social premium placed on lighter skin. Colorism is thus both a legacy of colonialism and an ongoing system of discrimination operating within as well as between racial groups.

What is Critical Race Theory, and how does it differ from popular accounts of it?

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is an academic legal framework that emerged in American law schools in the late 1970s and 1980s, developed by legal scholars including Derrick Bell, Kimberle Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, Mari Matsuda, and Patricia Williams. It arose as a critique of Critical Legal Studies' insufficient engagement with race, and of civil rights liberalism's assumption that colorblind law was sufficient to address racial inequality.CRT's core claims include: racism is ordinary and embedded in legal and institutional structures, not merely a matter of individual prejudice; interest convergence means that civil rights gains for Black Americans have historically occurred when they also served the interests of white elites; racial categories are social and political constructions; different minority groups have been racialized differently at different times; and race does not operate independently of gender, class, sexuality, and other identity categories.Kimberle Crenshaw's 1989 article 'Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex' introduced intersectionality through a specific legal problem: Black women plaintiffs whose claims of discrimination were dismissed because they could not point to discrimination against Black people as a whole or against women as a whole. Their experience at the intersection of race and sex was invisible to single-axis legal analysis.The popular controversy over CRT that erupted in the United States in 2020-2021 bears little relationship to the academic framework. Legislation banning CRT in K-12 schools targeted a range of educational practices (teaching about slavery's role in American history, discussing systemic racism) that are not CRT and that were never described using that term in school curricula. CRT is a graduate-level legal and social theory framework that is not taught in K-12 schools. The debate was primarily about what history should be taught and how, not about the academic framework itself.

How does racial formation differ across countries, and what is Brazil's racial democracy myth?

Racial formation is not uniform globally. Different societies have constructed racial categories through different historical processes and maintain different ideologies about race, with significant consequences for how inequality operates and how it is addressed.Brazil's racial classification system is the most frequently contrasted with the American model. Brazil has historically operated on a color continuum rather than the American binary of Black and white: dozens of color terms are used in everyday speech; racial classification depends partly on socioeconomic status (a wealthy person of mixed ancestry may be classified as lighter than a poor person with similar features, captured in the saying 'money whitens'); and the official national ideology since the early 20th century has been racial democracy, the claim that Brazil achieved a uniquely harmonious racial mixing that transcended the racial conflicts of other societies.Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre promoted racial democracy in his 1933 work 'The Masters and the Slaves', arguing that the intimacy of Portuguese colonialism and the mixture of African, Indigenous, and European populations had produced a uniquely tolerant racial order. This ideology has been powerfully critiqued. Carlos Hasenbalg and Nelson do Valle Silva's 1980s sociological research demonstrated large racial income disparities in Brazil that the racial democracy ideology obscured. Anthropologist France Winddance Twine's ethnographic research in Brazil documented the denial of racism among lighter-skinned people of mixed ancestry even as they enacted colorist preferences.South Africa's post-apartheid racial formation presents a different configuration: the explicit and legally codified racial categories of apartheid remain in use in affirmative action policies (black economic empowerment), creating a paradox in which dismantling the consequences of racial classification requires using racial categories. The debates over whether to maintain these categories for equity purposes or move toward race-blind policy echo debates in the United States over affirmative action, but in a context where the racial hierarchy was explicitly legalized within living memory.

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