Racial categories vary enormously across cultures and eras, revealing their social construction

Evidence

Nevertheless, the second approach has rejected the “natural race” view in favor of the argument that racial categories are always socially constructed (Harding, 1993). Reflection on the World War II atrocities committed in the name of maintaining “racial purity” decreased the attractiveness of continuing to search for biological determinants of racial differences. Moreover, the “social race” defenders pointed out the immense cultural variation in systems of racial classification. The US had had a complex system of classifying people of African descent as quadroons, octoroons, and those legally counted as black because their ancestry gave them 1/32 “black blood.” In parts of the Caribbean class has shaped racial classification so that the richer one is, the whiter one is perceived to be. South Africa, Japan, and other cultures have their own systems of racial classification. Furthermore, the emergence of population genetics, as indicated, made it compelling to treat alike variation in human populations and in animal and plant populations. Purported “racial difference” is best understood on the model of classifying butterflies or petunias. By the 1960s this social race approach was well-established in biology and the social sciences. According to this view, racial prejudice, now deprived of its scientific grounds, should soon wither away. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1564

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘social race’ approach to racial classification and its historical rise.
• CANDY: The 1/32 ‘black blood’ legal threshold and the Caribbean ‘richer equals whiter’ rule are punchy, memorable examples of how arbitrary classification systems are.
• QUESTION: The claim that prejudice ‘should soon wither away’ once deprived of scientific grounds is a prediction that clearly failed — worth examining why.
• XREF: connects to: Racial categories are relative, situational constructs engendered by historical processes.; South African racial categories shifted with expediency despite extreme racism — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 564