Race

Anthropologists and other social scientists and humanists believe that what is known as race and racial identity is a cultural or social construct. Social scientists often use the terms cultural and social interchangeably. To anthropologists, “cultural” (culture) is broader and includes shared belief systems and other cultural knowledge. The term social focuses more on society, social identities, and social institutions, such as the family and the law.

To say that race is a culturally created construct is not to deny that there is no relationship between humans in a physical sense. Anthropologists talk about physical and genetic differences among the species Homo sapiens as human variation and not race. In other words, there are many varieties of human variation, but none of that variation constitutes separate races. For anthropologists, race is about understanding the history of the United States; the establishment of intransient, racialized social hierarchies; and the laws, customs, traditions, and behaviors that perpetuate a racial hierarchy, with European Americans at the top.

Historically, 18th-century European elites classified people in their colonies, including the colonial United States, into a hierarchy of categories that placed northern Europeans at the top of a pseudo-evolutionary scale. They ranked the darker-skinned people in the colonial United States (Africans and Native Americans) lower on the racialized social hierarchy that developed in the colonies. The plantation political economy and the ownership of land and slaves to work the land became the paramount way in which people in the colonies achieved social and economic status.

A connection between social race and citizenship was established as early as 1790, the year the first U.S. Census was conducted. In accord with the new U.S. Constitution and in keeping with slaveholding, which was then legal, the first census counted each enslaved individual as three-fifths of a person when determining state populations. Native Americans were not even identified in censuses dating from 1790 through 1840. Sixteen U.S. marshals and 650 assistants conducted the first U.S. Census. It took the marshals 18 months to visit colonial households and compile a final tally of 3.9 million people in the new nation, including nearly 700,000 slaves.

If social scientists and biologists claim there is no such thing as biological race, but that it is instead a social construction, why does the modern U.S. Census still ask a question about race? In addition, there are laws at the federal as well as the state level that prevent discrimination on the basis of so-called race, ancestry, and [Page 1780]natural origin. The answer given by officials at the U.S. Office of Management and Budget is that although once used to support discriminatory practices, race data gathered by the U.S. census is now used to help enforce civil rights laws and to collect information to help the government better serve underserved populations.