11.3 Theoretical Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity
11.3 Theoretical Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity
Jennifer Puentes; Matthew Gougherty; and Nora Karena
Contemporary sociologists reject the argument that race is rooted in biology and have devoted decades of sociological research to understanding how race is socially constructed. According to German-American anthropologist Franz Boas (1911), “The existence of any pure race with special endowments is a myth, as is the belief that there are races all of whose members are foredoomed to eternal inferiority” (figure 11.3). In the following sections, we’ll explore a variety of theories used to understand race. First, we will examine the role of pseudoscience in understanding racial categories, before moving on to theories that challenge some initial constructions of race and difference.
“Science” and Social Theory
Thanks to Charles Darwin’s work on natural selection, early European scientists came to accept that all humans descend from a common ancestor and therefore are the same species. However, the misleading racial categories outlined by Blumenbach endured and created the false assumption that race was a biological phenomenon. The superiority of the White race was accepted by early scientists and social theorists. This led them to believe that race was rooted in biology and that White people were “naturally” superior, even as they struggled to understand and describe the origins of social inequality.
Many scientists and social theorists doubled down on biological race by way of social Darwinism. This worldview combines Darwin’s ideas about biological evolution with unsupported theories that race is genetically determined and can therefore be selected for through breeding. During the late 1800s, eugenics was a pseudoscientific political project to “improve humanity” through selective breeding of the “best” specimens of White humans. Eugenics lent a veneer of scientific legitimacy to Hitler’s racist campaign of genocide in Europe. In addition, eugenics undergirded the forced sterilization by the U.S. government of women of color, mostly Indigenous and Black women, who were seen as unfit mothers. Even with these faulty and problematic foundations, eugenics and biological race were also widely accepted in the United States for much of the twentieth century.
Emancipatory Theories
The anthropologist Franz Boas began to question commonly held ideas about biological race and European racial superiority while working with Inuit people on Baffin Island in 1883. He developed the theory of cultural relativism, which asserts that the differences between groups of people were culturally determined and could only be understood by considering specific cultural and historic contexts. Throughout his career, Boas challenged racism with rigorous social science. Despite his broad impact in the field of cultural anthropology, the biological basis for race remained a basic assumption of physical anthropology until the 1960s (Caspari 2003).
In his classic 1903 sociologi