Racism

Wade and Leroi: Racism is Biological and Graves and Lewontin: Race is a Social Construct

Racism: Biological or Socially Constructed

The term race is controversial by the notions of superiority and inferiority that it carries. The race was the justification to establish the rule of slavery, persecution of minorities and other social groups such as the Jewish people in Nazi Germany or the apartheid system in South Africa. As a biological concept, race was more evident when the differences were related to morphological features such as skin pigmentation, color, shape and thickness of hair, nose shape or body structure. The advent of genetic analysis came to refute this idea. Prior to this definition, classification of races depended on a combination of geographical, ecological and morphological (Ehrenreich, 2007).

The concept of race, invalidated by modern genetic research, has not disappeared. Some scholars still use it, however, many experts advise against it, even as a scientific idea, because of its political overtones and boom are having some racist ideologies in some Western European countries. Today, the dominant approach in the debate about race is constructionism Social. Proponents of this approach argue that the concept of race does not refer to any biological reality. According to them it is a pseudo-biological concept used to justify and rationalize the unfair treatment of a group of people by another. Moreover, because the concept of race is a social construct, it is possible that it can be deconstructed (in revealing the historical stages of its construction, for example) and, ultimately, eliminated. For social constructionists, a world without the concept of race is conceptually possible.

Social constructionism became prevalent position in the debate on race mainly because, from the 70s, we began to recognize that the concept biological subspecies could not be applied to humans The color of the skin and other ...