Understanding Race

Addresses misunderstandings about race in a rational and comprehensive way, emphasising that race is a purely social construct.

Rob DeSalle (Author), Ian Tattersall (Author)

9781316511374, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 7 July 2022

188 pages
18.4 x 13.2 x 1.3 cm, 0.29 kg

'Understanding Race explains to the reader in accessible terms all the misconceptions that continue to plague both lay people and professionals concerning race. First, the authors establish for the reader the fundamental mechanisms of evolution that are responsible for the variation within all species; then they explain how people thought about variation before there was a science to correctly explain it. The book guides the reader through how racial thinking changed as our understanding of evolution, as well as the technology to understand genetic variation, improved. The authors end by drawing attention to ongoing misconceptions concerning biological variation and social definitions of race in a variety of arenas, including medicine. If you don't read my books, you should read theirs; and in the best of all worlds you should read both.' Joseph L. Graves, Jr, Professor of Biological Sciences, North Carolina A&T State University

The human species is very young, but in a short time it has acquired some striking, if biologically superficial, variations across the planet. As this book shows, however, none of those biological variations can be understood in terms of discrete races, which do not actually exist as definable entities. Starting with a consideration of evolution and the mechanisms of diversification in nature, this book moves to an examination of attitudes to human variation throughout history, showing that it was only with the advent of slavery that considerations of human variation became politicized. It then embarks on a consideration of how racial classifications have been applied to genomic studies, demonstrating how individualized genomics is a much more effective approach to clinical treatments. It also shows how racial stratification does nothing to help us understand the phenomenon of human variation, at either the genomic or physical levels.

1. The evolutionary background
2. Race before evolutionary theory
3. Race after Darwin
4. Race in the era of genetics and genomics
5. Variation in genomes, and how humans took over the world
6. Clustering and treeing
7. Race in medicine and complex phenotypic studies
8. Human adaptations
9. Race, science and pseudoscience.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC], Social theory [JHBA], History of ideas [JFCX], Social & political philosophy [HPS]