Racial Skepticism Is The Idea That Race, As A Biological

Racism imposes additional health issues on people of color because it is an unnecessary stressor in their every day lives. “African Americans die earlier and have higher rates than whites of many chronic diseases across the social gradient” (Unnatural Causes, 2008). Increased cortisol levels, which are caused by stress have been linked to high blood pressure, coronary artery disease, and other health problems.

Smedley, Audrey, and Brian D. Smedley. "Race as Biology Is Fiction, Racism as a Social Problem Is Real: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives on the Social Construction of Race." American Psychologist 60.1 (2005): 16-26. JSTOR. Web. 23 July

Some would say race accounts for certain issues, for example one would say African Americans have elevated risk of disease due to genetics. What Syme explains is in countries where discrimination is less prevalent you don’t find those kinds of rates. He believes as an Epidemiologist that the stress of discrimination causes health issues. Chapter 9 explains race as a social concept because there is no biological justification

The purpose of categorizing people into different racial groups can be how we see each other and the exterior traits. Exterior traits include their skin tone, type of hair and eye color. In “Rethinking the Color Line – Understanding How Boundaries Shift,” Gallagher mentions we tend to sort out the categories by skin color and then by cultural background. These racial differences have been predetermined by having the mindset of having a superior and inferior group. The superior group are to be the whites and inferior group are the minorities. These ideas have changed because of the major influences such as time, social and politics.

Race is a hot topic in our world. We all think we know what race is. After all, we are constantly being bombarded with it whether it be from media, politics, or sports. The truth is that race does not revolve around the idea of biological traits or characteristics. It is a modern concept that we as a society have created to divide people into categories. I will argue that race is socially constructed from a biological, political history, and sociological standpoint, and how it may impact other areas of our society.

One of the most prevalent themes throughout the world’s history is the dispute over race and racial differences. But, there is a problem: the majority of the population doesn’t have a clear understanding of what race is. Race is a socially constructed grouping of people that was created in order for people to differentiate themselves from one another and has many sources of influence. While most people believe race is determined by biological characteristics (hair type, skin color, eye shape, etc.), this is not true. To make things more complicated, there is no cut and dry definition to race. Authors of Race and Ethnicity in Society, Elizabeth Higginbotham and Margret Anderson, claim that there are seven different distinct ways to define race. They begin with the popular belief of biological characteristics, and, as mentioned before, through social construction. They go on to note that race can be formed from an ethnic group, from social class rank, from racial formation by institutions, and also can form from one’s self-definition (Higginbotham & Anderson, 2012, p. 13). All of these ways to define race have been seen throughout our history, and many of them have caused problems for minorities, especially in the United States.

The PBS series “Race: The Power of an Illusion” effectively works to expose race as a social construct and deconstructs the false notions that race is a biological marker. The series first discusses that all human beings originated from Africa but dispersed about 70,000 years ago to various places in the world. As a result of this migration, people were spread to different locations throughout the world with different environmental conditions that affected their physical traits. It was many years after the migration in which people began to display these new physical traits such as slanted eyes, fair skin, and differing hair textures. While the series notes the physical changes that occurred during the migration it also emphasizes that race while it may seem apparent in skin color and other physical features has no real biological basis.

The meaning, significance, and definition of race have been debated for centuries. Historical race concepts have varied across time and cultures, creating scientific, social, and political controversy. Of course, today’s definition varies from the scientific racism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that justified slavery and later, Jim Crow laws in the early twentieth. It is also different from the genetic inferiority argument that was present at the wake of the civil rights movement. However, despite the constantly shifting concepts, there seems to be one constant that has provided a foundation for ideas towards race: race is a matter of visually observable attributes such as skin color, facial features, and other self-evident

Throughout history, many conflicts have arisen from the differences between races and ethnicities. These conflicts have resulted from one population, historically the white American population, wanting more power over another population, more often the African American population. From these power struggles, racism and discrimination developed and were even more strengthened from the development of slavery in the US and further on with segregation in the 1900s. From slavery, segregation, and racism, health disparities developed in the African American population that have continued to this day. African Americans generally have a shorter life expectancy than whites, but a recent discovery, entitled the minority crossover, has changed the understanding of health disparities in elderly populations. The minority crossover phenomenon refers to the growing elderly African American population and increase in life expectancy of this group over white Americans.

Although there are a few “race related” diseases, such as sickle cell anemia, the illnesses that are killing the minority population are environment related, like Coronary Heart Disease. In a study done by Alan Goodman, he cites four important points about race and genetics:

There is a positive association between racial discrimination and blood pressure that shows in African Americans who have had experiences of racial discrimination and unfair treatment. In the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) study (1996), Krieger and Sidney studied self-reported experiences of unfair treatment and racism from 4,086 black and white men and women ages 25 to 37 years old. Krieger and Sidney found out that working class blacks reported experiencing two or more discrimination cases when getting a job or looking for housing. Their blood pressures were 7 mmHg higher than working class whites (Arriola, 2002; Barksdale, Farrug, & Harkness, 2009). This showed that working class blacks also had higher blood pressure than professional blacks (Leary, 1996). The professional black males who experienced one or two discrimination situations had higher rates of hypertension than those professional white males. In addition, the blood pressure of professional black females who had two or more experiences of racial discrimination was higher than professional white females. These findings show that there’s a relationship between discriminatory experiences and hypertension (Krieger & Sidney, 1996)(Barksdale et al., 2009). More experiences of racial discrimination, result in blood pressure that is high.

When the scientific community begins to spread unfounded hypotheses regarding genetic differences between races, particularly differences that attribute poorer health or increased susceptibility to disease among minority groups, a Pandora’s Box is opened of potential dangers which can aid proponents of racist doctrines. Historically, scientific studies that sought to prove biological differences among races have led to violently racist movements like slavery, colonialism, and the Holocaust. Hence, as other pharmaceutical companies follow NitroMed’s path and begin marketing drugs targeted for specific racial groups, the dangers of such race-based therapeutics must be acknowledged.

Although it is intuitive to hypothesize that disparities in health arise because of socioeconomic differences between racial groups, studies often find that racial disparities persist even after accounting socioeconomic factors. Ethnicity is highly correlated with residential location, with minorities and whites often living segregated from one another. Differential residential location comes with differential exposure to health risks.

The Williams Model is the most prominent model for analysing the relationship between race and health. Conceptualisation of race is important and can have implications in society in the form of racism (Williams, 1997). The historical definition of race was on a biological basis, but it was later found that there was a slight biological difference between different races (Bhopal, 2004). At this time, there was a stigma around those with different physical appearances and this contributed to racism, where people were ‘othered’. Now, the more favoured definition of race is the human classification of people based on social origins such as ancestry and social interactions between them (Bhopal, 2004). Despite the more

Due to scientist’s interest in human genetic variation, human racial classification became a focus of scientific investigation by evolutionary biologists attempting to categorize individual humans based on presumed patterns of biological difference. Scientists had hoped to classify humans in the same way that they classified other species. These scientists attached hierarchical titles to these categorizations; they claimed that differences in skin color, physiognomy, and geography were associated with scientifically measurable differences in character, aptitude, and temperament (Smedley, 1998). However, studies supporting these claims have been unsound (Gould, 1981). Categorization of humans by racial and ethnic groups continues, as researchers must remain aware of this historical legacy of the science of heredity as the genomic era continues to develop (Bonham et al., 2005).