Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey
Speaker 1: Brainstuff Lauren vog Obam Here. The concepts of race and
Speaker 1: ethnicity are so intertwined that it's sometimes hard to tell
Speaker 1: one from the other. Even unwound, the ideas are not
Speaker 1: as well defined as many people would present them to be.
Speaker 1: The reason for that is simple. Yes, humans are a
Speaker 1: diverse lot. We can look distinctively different. We're seen sometimes
Speaker 1: completely differently based on those looks. We come from different places,
Speaker 1: though we all as a species come from modern day Ethiopia,
Speaker 1: and the groups from which we have grown. Our families,
Speaker 1: our clans, our cultures, our nations all have traveled different paths.
Speaker 1: A wide world of factors have influenced our appearance and
Speaker 1: our ways of life during thousands of years of evolution
Speaker 1: and migration. Yet all of those amazingly diverse people's don't
Speaker 1: exist in a vacuum. Across all those millennia and all
Speaker 1: those miles. We've come back together lots of times and
Speaker 1: in lots of ways, and we continue to do so.
Speaker 1: Putting us in distinct boxes with fixed labels is near impossible.
Speaker 1: Even the labels get jumbled. We spoke with Douglas Hartman,
Speaker 1: a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota and
Speaker 1: co author of the book Ethnicity and Race, Making Identities
Speaker 1: in a Changing World, along with sociologist Stephen Cornell. Hartman said,
Speaker 1: I think there's a ton of overlap between the terms
Speaker 1: ethnicity and race. I really think it's difficult to disentangle them,
Speaker 1: and maybe even inappropriate, because all of these categories have
Speaker 1: elements of identity, self assertion, culture, and heritage, but they
Speaker 1: also have elements of labeling, of stigma, of differential treatment,
Speaker 1: of power, inequality. Still, maybe because of some innate need
Speaker 1: for order or something more sinister, we continue to define.
Speaker 1: We identify people as this race or that ethnicity. We
Speaker 1: self identify too, and so it is that these labels
Speaker 1: become blurry and at times inseparable. The modern idea that
Speaker 1: there are independent races of man can be traced to
Speaker 1: the late sevents, when German anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach attempted
Speaker 1: to scientifically classify humans, largely by how they looked and
Speaker 1: where they called home. From an article on Bluemenbach in
Speaker 1: Discover magazine, Blumenbach's final taxonomy of sevente divided all humans
Speaker 1: into five groups defined both by geography and appearance in
Speaker 1: his order, the Caucasian variety for the light skinned people
Speaker 1: of Europe and adjacent parts of Asian Africa, the Mongolian
Speaker 1: variety for most other inhabitants of Asia, including China and Japan,
Speaker 1: the Ethiopian variety for the dark skinned people of Africa,
Speaker 1: the American variety for most native populations of the New World,
Speaker 1: and the Melee variety for the Polynesians and Melanesians of
Speaker 1: the Pacific and for the Aborigines of Australia. Blumenbach not
Speaker 1: only used geography and skin color, but notably the size
Speaker 1: and shape of skulls to explore what he called the
Speaker 1: quote varieties of mankind. One of his measures, though, was
Speaker 1: unmistakably unscientific. He called Caucasian, named for the people of
Speaker 1: the Caucus Mountains in eastern Europe, beautiful. Many Europeans, who
Speaker 1: already believed mistakenly that the first humans came from the Caucus,
Speaker 1: seized upon bloom Inbo's work as scientific proof that the
Speaker 1: light skinned race, the original race, was biologically and inherently
Speaker 1: superior to others. They did so despite the fact that
Speaker 1: blumenbach EON's ahead of his time, held that all races
Speaker 1: and people's were equal, and stated that the quote many
Speaker 1: varieties of man are at present known to be one
Speaker 1: and the same species that thinking by Europeans that one
Speaker 1: race is superior to another has led historically to some
Speaker 1: of the worst of human behavior colonization, slavery, apartheid, and genocide.
Speaker 1: It's given rise to forced inequality in many different forms,
Speaker 1: including political, social, and economic. And here's the kicker, the
Speaker 1: High and Mighty Europeans were dead wrong. Scientists now overwhelmingly
Speaker 1: agree that humans, biologically and genetically speaking, are all the
Speaker 1: same our DNA. The genetic makeup of all human beings
Speaker 1: who live today is ninety nine point nine percent alike.
Speaker 1: In fact, there's more genetic variance within any given race
Speaker 1: than there is among the different races. Basically, what that
Speaker 1: means is because genetic differences in humans are so minimal,
Speaker 1: some scientists simply describe humans as belonging to just one race,
Speaker 1: the human race. Despite the scientific shootdown, the term race
Speaker 1: is still widely used today, and a person is still
Speaker 1: assigned a race according to physical characteristics skin color, the
Speaker 1: shape of the nose or lips, or the type of hair. Now,
Speaker 1: instead of claiming some pseudo scientific basis, though race is
Speaker 1: considered a social construct, meaning it's something we as societies
Speaker 1: used to place people conveniently into groups. Here's how Hartman
Speaker 1: and co author Cornell define race in their book quote
Speaker 1: a human group defined by itself or others as distinct
Speaker 1: by virtue of perceived common physical characteristics that are held
Speaker 1: to be inherent. Determining which characteristics constitute the race is
Speaker 1: a choice human beings make. Some of the reasons for
Speaker 1: the continuing use of race as an identifier may be acceptable.
Speaker 1: The US Census Bureau, for example, asks people to identify
Speaker 1: themselves by race, and currently gives them six choices, including
Speaker 1: some other race, which they can fill in. The bureau
Speaker 1: also allows respondents to say there of more than one race.
Speaker 1: The bureau uses that data for purposes such as funding
Speaker 1: government programs aimed at specific groups. Other reasons, though, are
Speaker 1: definitely not acceptable. A racial discrimination is still real all
Speaker 1: over the globe. Though genetically race is not a valid concept, socially,
Speaker 1: it is very very real in some definitions. It goes
Speaker 1: well beyond physical characteristics too. Hartman said, there really are
Speaker 1: cultural differences between people who grew up in an African
Speaker 1: American community versus a white suburban community. It's not genetic,
Speaker 1: but it's a real thing. There are different lane, which is,
Speaker 1: different patterns of behavior, different ways of thinking about the world.
Speaker 1: Cultural differences suggest the other word most often conflated with race, ethnicity,
Speaker 1: and that muddies the terminology waters even more. Cornell and
Speaker 1: Heartman defined ethnicity this way, quote a sense of common
Speaker 1: ancestry based on cultural attachments, past linguistic heritage, religious affiliations,
Speaker 1: claimed kinship, or some physical traits. So the difference between
Speaker 1: race and ethnicity. Then, whereas race is mostly defined and
Speaker 1: determined by physical characteristics, ethnicity is considered to be more
Speaker 1: about a person's culture, language, family, and place of origin.
Speaker 1: Nationalities are thrown into the mix too. Examples of ethnicity
Speaker 1: include being Indian, Jewish, or Asian regardless of race. So
Speaker 1: a woman born in Atlanta to parents from Japan might
Speaker 1: consider herself as racially Asian, but as ethnically Japanese American,
Speaker 1: Japanese American, or even something more specific based on exactly
Speaker 1: where in Japan her parents are from. Selected displays like
Speaker 1: clothing can play a part two. A Scottish American man
Speaker 1: wearing a plaid or tartan kilt or an Indian American
Speaker 1: woman wearing a sorry are examples of how people display
Speaker 1: their ethnicity through dressing. But the important thing to remember
Speaker 1: here is that both race and ethnicity are socially defined,
Speaker 1: neither is biologically valid. Cornell and Hartmann say that people
Speaker 1: are more likely to self identify with multiple ethnicities than
Speaker 1: multiple races, though of course some consider themselves to be
Speaker 1: more than one race. It's important to note to other
Speaker 1: points the sociologists make about race and ethnicity. Race, unlike ethnicity,
Speaker 1: is still mostly a term that is assigned by other groups,
Speaker 1: which often leads to one claiming superiority over the other,
Speaker 1: and racial identity is usually considered inherent. In other words,
Speaker 1: you're born as a certain race, and it's generally not
Speaker 1: something you can change just by saying so. Remember Rachel
Speaker 1: dolisal that said all of these are observations, not rules.
Speaker 1: The rules, as we've said, are tad Murky. Hartman said,
Speaker 1: people have this kind of crazy idea about the purity
Speaker 1: of races. There's no way to really isolate a race,
Speaker 1: and today even more so with intermarriage, with globalization, those
Speaker 1: categories that we often think are so firm Americans are
Speaker 1: so convinced there's five main races. Because we've acted like
Speaker 1: there are in our senses and everything else, they get
Speaker 1: blurred and mixed up, and they don't make sense anymore.
Speaker 1: If it's logic were after when discussing the terms of
Speaker 1: race and ethnicity, the last word probably ought to go
Speaker 1: to someone who's an expert at words, say a poet.
Speaker 1: This is from Maya Angelo's piece Human Family. I note
Speaker 1: the obvious differences between each sort and type, but we
Speaker 1: are more alike my friends, than we are unlike. Today's
Speaker 1: episode was written by John Donovan and produced by Tyler Clang.
Speaker 1: Brain Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How
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