BY RAZIB KHAN AND BRIAN B. BOUTWELL
WE SEEK TO ADDRESS A SINGULAR, SIMPLE QUESTION: are racial classifications (Black, White, Hispanic, etc.) a pure social construction, or are they “real” on some deeper biological level? Scientific advances continue to converge on a single, clear, conclusion: Race is a useful social construction that maps on to a biological reality.1
Our everyday understandings about race generally have to do with physical appearance.2 The reason why is obvious—it’s what we can see. But obviously that is a coarse, less trustworthy measure. The indigenous people of the New World, for instance, had brown skins and straight black hair; so early Europeans labeled them “Indians.”1 The only people known by Europeans to have brown skin and straight black hair in the Old World were Indians (as in residents of the Indian subcontinent). But the history of these two populations is very different; they just happen to have some physical characteristics in common.