Race: Are We So Different?

267 Pages·2012·5.293 MB·English

The Authors
Alan H. Goodman is Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty
at Hampshire College. A biological anthropologist who has written extensively
on human variation and the biological consequences of inequality and poverty,
he co-leads the national public education project sponsored by the AAA
and funded by NSF and the Ford Foundation. Goodman is a past President of
the AAA.
Yolanda T. Moses is Professor of Anthropology, Associate Vice Chancellor for
Diversity, Excellence and Equity at the University of California, Riverside.
A cultural anthropologist, she has published extensively on issues of social
inequality in complex societies and cultural diversity in higher education in the
United States, India, and South Africa. She chaired the National Advisory
Committee composed of distinguished scholars and curators that designed the
original exhibit and website. She co-leads the national public education project
sponsored by the AAA and funded by NSF and the Ford Foundation. Moses is
past President of the AAA.
Joseph L. Jones is former RACE project manager for the American
Anthropological Association. He also has written extensively on race and
the stresses of enslavement. He is finishing his dissertation from University
of Massachusetts Amherst on “The Political Ecology of Early Childhood
Lead Exposure for Enslaved Africans from the New York African Burial
Ground.”
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R ACE
Are We So Different?
Alan H. Goodman
Yolanda T. Moses
Joseph L. Jones
A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication
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This edition first published 2012
© 2012 American Anthropological Association
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Goodman, Alan H.
Race : are we so different? / Alan H. Goodman, Yolanda T. Moses, Joseph L. Jones.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-470-65713-3 (hardback : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-470-65714-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Race–Social aspects–United States. 2. Race–Social aspects. 3. Racism–United States. 4. Racism.
I. Moses, Yolanda T. II. Jones, Joseph L. III. Title.
E185.86.G637 2012
305.800973–dc23
2011044946
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover image: Courtesy American Anthropological Association
Cover design by Cyan
Timeline design by Design Deluxe
Set in 10/12pt Bembo by SPi Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India

1 2012
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Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xiii
1 Regarding Race 1
Part 1 Histories of Race, Difference, and Racism 7
2 Introducing Race 9
3 Creating Race 15
4 Human Mismeasure 26
5 Inventing Whiteness 44
6 Separate and Unequal 67
Part 2 Why Human Variation Is Not Racial 91
7 Introduction: Race ≠ Human Biological Variation 93
8 Skin Deep? 101
9 Sickle Cell Disease: Not for Blacks Only 111
10 The Apportionment of Variation, o r … Why We Are All Africans Under the Skin 123
11 The Evolution of Variation 133
Part 3 Living with Race and Racism 145
12 Introduction: Living with Race and Racism 147
13 Race and the Census 154
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vi contents
14 Race and Education 174
15 Linking Race and Wealth: An American Dilemma 195
16 Race and Health Disparities 214
17 Conclusion 231
Glossary 246
Index 253
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Illustrations
0.1 Are we so different? xi
1.1 “Seward Montessori Graduation” 1
The imaginary of whiteness 7
3.1 The “Great Chain of Being” 17
3.2 Lorenz Fries’s Caribbean cannibals 17
3.3 The Landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth 18
3.4 Pocahontas 18
3.5 The first Africans arrive in Jamestown 18
3.6 Metacom, or King Philip 19
3.7 Carolus Linnaeus 20
3.8 Systema Naturae 20
3.9 Thomas Jefferson 20
4.1 Nott and Gliddon’s T ypes of Mankind 29
4.2 Blumenbach’s five races 30
4.3 Samuel Morton 30
4.4 Frederick Douglass 31
4.5 Native American lifeways display c. 1902 32
4.6 Anténor Firmin 32
4.7 Minik 32
4.8 Franz Boas 33
4.9 1917 Army Beta test for “innate intelligence” 34
4.10 Jesse Owens at start of record-breaking 200 meter race in the 1936 Olympics 34
4.11 “The Inheritance of Racial Features” 35
4.12 Reconstruction of the head of Kennewick Man 36
5.1 The Irish were seen as an inassimilable ingredient in American society 48
5.2 V isit of the Ku-Klux 49
5.3 Native children were forced to attend boarding schools 50
5.4 Anti-Chinese sentiment evidenced in “Workingmen’s Party” poster 50
5.5 The Cliff Dwellers’ Village at the 1904 World’s Fair 51
5.6 Booker T. Washington 52
5.7 The Birth of a Nation 52
5.8 Lucky Brown Pressing Oil 53
5.9 The cast of L eave It to Beaver 53
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viii list of illustrations
5.10 “Race tag” 54
6.1 Slave auction advertisement 72
6.2 Harriet Tubman 72
6.3 Dred Scott 73
6.4 Mid-19th century advertisement encouraging westward migration 73
6.5 “Some reasons for Chinese exclusion” 74
6.6 Composite photograph of the heads of justices from various years 74
6.7 Wong Kim Ark 75
6.8 Thurgood Marshall 75
6.9 Social Security poster 76
6.10 Japanese Americans bound for internment at Manzanar 76
6.11 George McLaurin was required to sit apart from white students 77
6.12 Rosa Parks was arrested for violating segregation law 78
6.13 President Johnson signs Civil Rights Act into law 78
6.14 U.S. Presidents 79
Race is not “in the blood.” 91
7.1 Jeff Van Gundy and Yao Ming 94
7.2 Race is like a gun. D iscovery of Nat Turner 95
7.3 Kenyan children 96
7.4 Girls from Oslo 96
7.5 Cube of variation 98
7.6 “The Tall and Short of It” 99
7.7 Drawing of silhouettes of individuals from short to tall 99
8.1 Individuals as well as groups vary by skin color 101
8.2 Life under the sun 101
8.3 Vitamin D metabolism 102
8.4 Map of predicted human skin colors based on annual UVR exposure and
other environmental factors 103
8.5 Cut away of a layer of skin and the location of the melanin-producing melanocytes 103
8.6 Inuit children 104
8.7 Example of childhood rickets 104
8.8 Radiograph of a child with rickets 104
8.9 Von Luschan color tiles 105
8.10 Example of use of a skin reflectance spectrophotometer 105
8.11 Walk from Nairobi to Oslo 108
9.1 Normal red blood cells and sickled red blood cells 111
9.2 The structure of hemoglobin 113
9.3 How individuals might inherit sickle cell disease and sickle cell trait 113
9.4 Cross section of a blood vessel with normally shaped red blood cells and sickled
red blood cells 114
9.5 History and evolution explains sickle cell 114
9.6 Anopheles minimus 115
9.7 Pathway by which individuals contract malaria 115
9.8 Distribution of malaria 116
9.9 Distribution of the genetic variation that causes sickle cell disease 117
9.10 Frank Giacomazza and his daughter, Angelina 119
10.1 Three views of human genetic variation 124
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list of illustrations ix
10.2 Venn diagram of human genetic diversity 131
11.1 “21 A Bus” 133
11.2 Dominos provide a visual metaphor for the spread of genetic variation 134
11.3 A pointillist view of human evolution and variation based on the work of Kenneth Kidd 136
11.4 Major route of genetic migration 139
11.5 How objects developed in one area show up in another 140
11.6 “Long-nosed god” ear ornament c. 1150 and 1350 C.E. 140
11.7 Costa Rican jade pendant 140
11.8 Henry Greely 141
11.9 Rick Kittles 141
11.10 Alondra Nelson 142
11.11 Kimberly TallBear 142
11.12 Duana Fullwiley 142
The controversial school mascot, “Chief Illiniwek.” 145
13.1 Students and a faculty advisor from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota 154
13.2 U.S. census race categories, 1790–2010 155
13.3 Enslaved African American family 156
13.4 Closing the gate on racially undesirable Chinese immigrants 157
13.5 Japanese Americans being relocated to internment camps 157
13.6 Alabama physician Josiah Nott 157
13.7 Asian immigrants arriving at Angel Island, about 1910 158
13.8 Romina Takimoto 159
13.9 South Asian girl 159
13.10 Deportees waiting at a train station in Los Angeles, March 9, 1932 160
13.11 Immigration reform activists protest in Washington, DC 161
13.12 Now the children in this family can choose how the census classifies them 162
13.13 Kemi Adeyemi 163
13.14 “I am a person” 164
13.15 “I’m a grown man who just exposed my breasts to a complete stranger” 164
13.16 A wide range of people are classified together within the census’s “black or African
American, or Negro” category 165
13.17 Tinbete Ermyas 166
13.18 Jessica Masterson 168
13.19 United States Census Bureau 2010 questionnaire 169
14.1 Busing. Boston, 1976 175
14.2 Students in classroom 178
14.3 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the GI Bill into law 181
14.4 Tuskegee Institute (later, Tuskegee University) 181
14.5 Supporters and opponents of affirmative action 181
14.6 President Lyndon Baines Johnson 182
14.7 2003 U.S. Supreme Court 182
15.1 Native lands today 196
15.2 Cherokee lands 197
15.3 President Andrew Jackson 198
15.4 The Trail of Tears 198
15.5 The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferred just under half of Mexico’s
land to the U.S. 199
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x list of illustrations
15.6 Del Valle family, Rancho Camulos, Ventura County, 1888 199
15.7 American Progress 199
15.8 California, c. 1920 201
15.9 Heart Mountain Relocation Center, 1942 202
15.10 U.S. home-ownership rates, 2005 203
15.11 1937 map of Syracuse, New York, showing “undesirable” neighborhoods 205
15.12 Displaced New Orleans residents take shelter in the Houston Astrodome 207
15.13 Lynju Yang and John Sou Yang 208
15.14 Race and the wealth gap 209
16.1 Salud 216
16.2 Incidence of Hypertension 218
16.3 Measuring blood pressure 219
16.4 Industrial pollutants have a disproportionately high impact on racial minorities
and the poorer members of society 221
16.5 BiDil 221
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Preface
this book will strike each reader in slightly different
ways. As is the tendency with the exhibit and website,
readers may gravitate to areas of the book that have
particular, individual interest and meaning. However,
we have designed this book with a clear beginning,
middle sections, and conclusions to best develop
knowledge and analysis. As a companion to the larger
project called RACE: Are We So Different? the book
is meant to be read from front to back, and as a sort of
primer on race (as well as human biological variations
and racism). We hope that our main messages are
expressed in ways that resonate with all readers.
The project that led to this book first took recog-
nizable shape in 1997. One of us, Yolanda Moses, then
president of the American Anthropological Association
(AAA), the world’s largest and foremost organization
of professional anthropologists, called together a
group of scholars from the subfields of anthropology
to talk to each other about what race means in their
subfields.
Figure 0.1 Are we so different?.
The participants came out of that session at the
annual meeting of the AAA with a clear consensus
that, rather than occupying conceptually different uni-
Not unlike the networks of meaning and actions that verses, we had many points of agreement: much more
coalesce and continually refashion the powerful idea agreement than difference. We came to our points of
of race, writing a multiauthored book on race comes agreement from different intellectual histories and
about through the synergies of multiple personal, with different observations and data. We found that
institutional, and professional connections. Invaluable subfields of anthropology, such as linguistic anthropol-
to us, we have also had a large, complex, active, and ogy, archaeology, biological anthropology, and political
supportive beehive of supporters. This is especially anthropology, highlighted diverse aspects of the com-
true of this project and this book. plexly protean idea of race and the dynamics of racism.
Race also looks different depending on one’s Remember the parable of blindfolded individuals
experience, place, and history. We expect, then, that touching different parts of an elephant? One touches
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