(This article appeared in Encyclopedia of Multiculturalism (HarperCollins, 1993) and its use is strictly limited to classes in the Spring 1998 Conflict Resolution internet course. No other use, reproduction, or dissemination may be utilized without the permission of the publisher.)

"One of the marveylous thynges that god useth in the composition of man, is colourew: which doubtlesse can not bee consydered withowte great admiration in beholding one to be white and an other blacke, beinge coloures utterlye contrary. Sum lykewyse to be yelowe whiche is betwene blacke and white: and other of other coloures as it were of dyvers liveres." (Francisco Lopez de Gomara - 1555, cited by Jordan, 1968)

Race refers to physical traits that are socially defined as distinguishing one group from another. Obviously, if social actors refused to give credence to such physical traits race would not exist. Although race is often assumed to be genetically based, science has had difficulty identifying that gene or those sets of genes responsible for race. At best, if we assume race to be genetically based, then there would be at least 2,000 groups that could be so designated. Race and the emotions that it produces have plagued scholars and humanity for close to two centuries. Race, a term arriving rather late in human discourse, has been observed among the earliest of civilizations. Race at once is both ideology and reality.

Race and the average person. A visitor to any metropolitan area in America will immediately become aware of the variety of people they come into contact with. Cities (such as, Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Houston or Los Angeles) have been described as global cities because they reflect the rich diversity of humanity. Here you will find Japanese, Germans, Africans, Mexicans, Jews, Russians or Italians, etc. - in concentrations second only to those found in their native lands. Racial and cultural diversity are the definitive terms of what America is. Although race helps to define America, race defies definition.

Race, as with love, is in the eye of the beholder. When defining one's own race the better qualities are typically assigned to self, while condemnation or scorn is projected on the other. Such praise or scorn, when coupled with a dominant position, often becomes reified as truth. This tendency of self praise may be seen in the writings of such diverse thinkers as Plato or Hitler, as Jefferson or Eisenhower, or as the Fulani aristocracy (in ancient Zari) or the Afrikaners (of contemporary South Africa).

In America we generally recognize three large racial groups. These groups are: (1) Caucasians, originating in Europe, northern Africa, and western Asia, are distinguished by a lighter (whitish, pinkish, or reddish) skin complexion, blond or brunette, wavy or straight hair (having a marked tendency toward balding), blue or green eyes, a straight, hooked, or pug nose, conspicuous jaws, and relatively long torsos; (2) Mongoloids, tracing their origins to northern and eastern Asia, are distinguished by a yellow to brown skin complexion, straight black hair, wide cheekbones, low or lacking a pronounced nose bridges, and almond-shaped or slanted eyes (caused by epicanthic folds of the eyelids); and (3) Negroids, originating in Africa, are distinguished by light tan to dark brown skin complexion, brown to black hair (typically described as kinky, curly or wooly), thick lips and noses, and high foreheads.

Race in world history (see Gossett, 1965). Societies throughout history and the world have attempted to understand and account for racial variation. These accounts may be found in ancient mythology, religion or legend. In most instances race is assumed to be either a result of divine intervention, punishment or innately reflecting immorality and bestiality. Racial variations have been acknowledged among the earliest of civilizations.

Racial variations were observed over 5,000 years ago in India. According to the Rig-Veda racial distinctions were brought about by a supernatural act. As the story goes, the invasion by the Aryas (or Aryans) into India was aided by their god Indra. As an act of final conquest the god Indra 'with supernatural might' blew away the black skin of a noseless people called Anasahs.

The early Chinese also attributed racial distinctions to mystical circumstances. According to legend, a Chinese emperor promised to give his daughter in marriage to whoever was able to kill a particularly hated chieftain. While others tried and failed, it was the palace dog who accomplished the deed. The emperor, loathe to break his oath, gave his daughter to the dog to wed. Their children, developing traits of both dogs and humans, came to inhabit the mountains.

Ritual drawings found in Egyptian tombs, dating around 1350 B.C., demonstrate an awareness of racial variations. Paintings on the walls of many of these tombs depict four distinct peoples. Egyptians were given a reddish hue, enemies from the east were colored yellow, while people from the north were painted white, and other Africans were painted black. Each group, at one time or another, was in power. Color prejudice was linked to a groups' position in the hierarchy. When the lighter group dominated they referred to the subordinate groups as darker peoples of the evil race of Ish. Alternatively, when the darker group dominated, lighter skinned groups were described as the debased race of Arvad.

Jewish religious oral traditions, dating from the 2nd through the 6th century A.D., held that racial variation originated as a result of sinful acts committed by Ham. One such legend held that Ham had offended his father by looking upon his nakedness. Ham and all of his offsprings (the Canaanites) were cursed by Noah. The other descendants of Shem and Japheth were to be blessed. In this earliest of legends, skin color is not mentioned as part of the curse. Skin color, as a curse, does appear in other Jewish legends. One such legend depicts Ham as cursed with blackness because he resented his father's desire to have another child. Ham, not wanting a rival, chose instead to castrate his father. For this act Ham and his offspring were cursed with black skin.

Racial distinctions also can be seen in Greek mythology. Accordingly, Phaethon, son of the God Helious, convinced his father to allow him to drive the sun chariot. This task proved beyond his ability. Losing control, Phaethon at times came to close to the earth causing the inhabitants to be sunburnt. In other places, he was too far causing the people to become pale due to the cold. Versions of this legend can be found in the writings of Hippocrates and Aristotle where physical and behavioral differences among races are described as caused by climate, particularly heat and cold. According to Plato, humanity was a result of consecrated blood Zeus spilling over the earth. Different characteristics of various racial groups were acquired from 'lessor deities'.

The early Christian Church also considered racial variation. On the side of racial toleration could be found the North African St. Augustine (of Hippo). He preached that all humanity (regardless of temperament, physical or intellectual differences) sprang from one common pair. It was not until the 10th century that the Catholic Church would take a decidedly racist stance. During this period Pope Urban II (1095) preached a sermon referring to some groups, notably the Moslems, as infidels and thus beyond the grasp of salvation. The infidel designation would soon be transferred to thousands of Jews at Worms who were massacred by the Crusaders. For the next five centuries, non-Christians, particularly Jews, were viewed as loathsome creatures whose immorality was innate and thus immutable.

By the 19th century, European aristocrats (in England, France and Germany) would use race to justify their privileged position. These aristocrats, traced their descent from the Teutons (Aryans or Caucasians) who had conquered the old Roman Empire. The conquered, or common people, were characterized as descending from other, more inferior European stocks. It was thus argued that the aristocrats, deriving their superiority from the distant past, were the true originators of civilization. As a consequence, their right to govern should be taken as a given and not challenged.

During this period race was primarily more of an oddity than a reality for most Europeans. Such sentiments can be found expression in most European societies. Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519) argued that racial differences were a consequence of environmental differences. The Swiss physician, alchemist and chemist Philippus Paracelsus (1493-1541) argued that humanity could not have developed from one solitary pair. The children of Adam, to include the white world, only occupied a small region of the earth. Other races, particular Negroes, were of a decidedly different origin. This central theme was reiterated by the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), who argued that Ethiopians could not possibly have descended from the same pair as the Jews.

Race has been problematical for America since its discovery by Europeans. In 1492, Columbus's voyage of discovery would affect cultures and peoples throughout the world. This period of discovery was coupled with acts of exploitation, to include expropriation of land and persons, genocide, subjugation and racism, for the non-white races encountered. The death toll associated with this period of 'discovery' has been estimated to be 12 million Native Americans, 200 million Africans, and innumerable Asians. With time, the exploitative acts became institutionalized into systems of colonization and slavery stretching from Africa and Asia to the Americas and eventually to all the continents of the world. In each of these societies a racial stratification system favoring Europeans was created.

Racial ideologies to justify this system began surfacing in the early19th century. Race gradually was used to refer to specific groups along an evolutionary continuum, where increasing gradations of whiteness were viewed as signs of superior development. By 1818, for example, Sir William Lawrence, a physician in the Royal College of Surgeons in London, argued that Europeans reflected a specific human type that were inherently superior to Asians and blacks. Although, he insisted that this was not a reason to enslave people of color, soon this purported inferiority was used to buttress arguments for the continuance of slavery. Similar racial topologies were expanded and given universal expression by the Scottish anatomist Robert Knox (The Races of Men 1850), the French Count Arthur de Gobineau (Essay on the Inequality of Human Races 1853-54), and in the United States by J.C. Nott and G. R. Gliddon (Types of Mankind - 1854). It was not until the work of Charles Darwin that these statements began to assume the status of science. It was the work of Charles Darwin - On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life (1859) that provided the theoretical justification used to explain the development of specific racial groups as a process of selection.

Darwin had described the process of selection he did not identify the instrument of this selection. It was Mendal, however, who identified the gene as the instrument that allowed natural selection to take place. Mendal's work became the basis for the development of population genetics during the 1930s. These studies led to Boyd's Genetics and the Races of Man that defined races as referring to specific human populations possessing one or more combinations of genes. The only problem with this approach to race is that current information suggests as many as a million different genes, which leads to the untenable conclusion that potentially a million different races could be identified. Notwithstanding this conceptual variability, race became a socially established reality in this and other countries around the world.

Once established, race was institutionalized and perpetuated by socialization processes operant within a particular society. The internalization of these racial designations produces a screen by which the individual becomes viewed and by which the individual comes to view themselves and significant others. Racial designations, interacting with historical, social, economic, political and cultural factors,further serves to promote the development of racial identity, racially ascribed socio-cultural products (which typically include music, art, life-styles, group membership, language patterns, etc.), and invariably racism.

In the so-called new world, Spanish conquistadors would be the first Europeans to confront and attempt to annihilate indigenous cultures under the guise of progress and Christianity. The Spanish initially attempted to enslave or destroy the various Native American groups they encountered. Las Casas, a Spanish Priest, argued successfully to the Pope that Native Americans were indeed human and therefore through conversion subjects of God's kingdom and the churches' protection. Unfortunately, the plea for the humanity of Africans fell went unheeded.

The first Africans to be imported to this country in 1619 came as indentured servants and were accorded the same status and rights as many of the first Europeans. With time the terms of indenturement for Africans was extended to life and covered their offsprings. Slavery, America's peculiar institution, was born.

The framers of the constitution found themselves hotly debating theissues of race. The basic equality of all humans, endowed with 'certain inalienable rights', dictated that the status and humanity of Africans (and others) must be determined. If human, then they must be afforded equality with the Europeans; if not, then they could be enslaved as an act of humanity. Conveniently non-whites were defined as less than human and consequently biologically inferior to whites. With the egalitarian creed expressed in the Declaration of Independence intact, slavery was allowed to continue. Native Americans, were conveniently dismissed as heathens in these discussions. A protracted process of genocide was developed to either eliminate or break the Native Americans. African Americans, defined as 3/5ths human, could therefore continue in their servitude as slaves. With time other groups in America, particularly the Mexicans, Haitians, Jews, Japanese, and other non-white groups would experience similar degradations and racial designations.

Race and Academia. The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line, the question as to how far differences of race - which show themselves chiefly in the color of the skin and the texture of the hair - will hereafter be made the basis of denying to over half the world the right of sharing to their utmost ability the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization. (Du Bois, 1969)

Commonly, race is associated with a particular human group with certain cultural traits such as language, religion or music (for example the Jewish race, black race, and German or Aryan race). Linguists have utilized race to refer to particular language groups (such as Romance, Sino-Tibetan, Polynesian, or Germanic).

On the basis of what was presumed to be 'immutable traits', others have attempted to argue that racial categories reflected different levels of evolutionary development. In such a scheme darker peoples were typically at the bottom. Such pronouncements could be identified in the early literature of most of the social science disciplines.

Early 20th century anthropologists, for example, used race to divide homo sapiens into several subspecies. Race groups were consequently associated with genetic and physical variation (such as Negroid, Mongoloid, and Caucasoid). Currently very little agreement exist among anthropologists regarding the exact number of racial groups.

Social scientists have used race to refer to a social group that eitherdefines itself or is defined by others as a distinct group by virtue of identifiable and immutable physical features. Associated with these racial designations, society or the group typically ascribes particular sets of cultural and psychological norms thought likewise to be immutable and easily identifiable among racial group members.

From a strictly biological basis, race is defined as a referring to a specific group who, as a result of either social or physical isolation, has a restricted gene pool. Such a group would be further distinguished because of identifiable physical characteristics that make them unique. With such a definition, it would seem easy to categorize the various human groups into specific races. Nothing, however, would be further from the truth.

As scientists attempted to apply these criteria to groups throughout the world, several groups were found that could not easily be categorized. For example, Polynesians and Australian aborigines simply defied such a simple categorization. Other problems were identified within groups. For example, those considered of Caucasoid stock (like Asiatic Indians with dark-skins) physically were more like Negroid peoples, while some classified as Negroid, like the Kalahari Bushmen, were light-skinned.This confusion has led many to attempt to develop more precise classification systems. The result has been in the identification of as few as four to as many as 2,000 racial groups. Even if we could agree upon how many exact racial groups exists, there would remain the question of how would a person of mixed ancestry be classified. Ignoring these obvious definitional and identification problems, scientists have consistently attempted to demonstrate a link between race and life outcomes (particularly as it relates to intellectual development and behavior).

Race and Intelligence. Intelligence testing began in the early 1890's. The first I.Q. test, promoted as accurate and objective measures of intelligence, were developed by Alfred Binet and Theophile Simon of France in 1905. By World War I such tests, particularly Stanford-Benet scales, Yerkes Alpha and Beta tests, were used to assess intelligence among American soldiers during World War I. Social scientists would use these and later tests to compare intellectual develop of various racial groups. Leading the charge into this abyss have been both geneticists and psychologists.

Geneticists and psychologists have both implicitly utilized I.Q. tests to answer a basic question of which is most important an influencer of behavior - those factors considered innate (such as race) or those determined by environment (those resulting from processes of socialization such as class, education, religious and other cultural value system).

Psychologists, such as Carl C. Brigham, who a priori assumed that Blacks were intellectually inferior to Native Born Whites, utilized data from the Army tests to prove his claim. Early test results demonstrated a wide variation among and within all racial groups. The lowest results have consistently been obtained by minorities, in general, and African Americans and the poor, in particular. Research conducted by Henry Goddard, a pioneer of I.Q. test in this country, would conclude that such results were inaccurate to say the least. In 1912, he gave intelligence test at Ellis Island finding that at least 80 percent of newly arriving southern European immigrants would be classified as 'feeble-minded.' Based upon these and other findings, America would develop immigration legislation that would severely restrict all but northern European immigration.

Later research would determine that I.Q. test do not really measureinnate capacity or intelligence, but rather access to certain social and intellectual resources. Racial minorities, to include the poor and African Americans, have experienced a long history of being both socially isolated and racially segregated. These groups, therefore, have had less access to educational or social environments that would promote higher performance on I.Q. or other standardized tests.

Other social scientists, attempting to minimize the influence of environment, began testing infants to judge the relationship between race and intelligence. Ironically, when black infants scored lower than whites, their lower performance confirmed lessor evolutionary development and their lower levels of adult achievement resulted from inferior racial development. Those tests or those cases that deviated from this norm, were explained away as the extremes that prove the case. The debate regarding the link between Race and I.Q. yet looms and is being raged in academic circles across this country and throughout the world.

Race and Discrimination. When race is used to determine access to rewards, privileges, and status it is usually defined as racism. Racism is discriminatory behavior, institutional practices, social actions,codes of conduct, and legal sanctions reflecting prejudicial attitudes that have a disparate impact upon (i.e. serves to restrict opportunities of) an individual or group of individuals primarily on the basis of skin-color. In America this applies to Afro-Americans, Latin Americans, Haitians, Puerto Ricans, Chinese Americans, Native Americans and Mexican Americans. Specifically, racism involves the subordination of people of color by those who consider themselves white. By implication, racism permanently define whites as superior and all non-whites as inferior. When racism permeates the society, ideological justifications are developed to explain as natural the subordination of people of color. These ideological justifications take the form of religious indoctrination, cultural beliefs, national policy, institutional practices, economic expediency and individual actions.

Racism serves to restrict the liberty of an individual or group of individuals because of their skin color. Implicit in this definition is the notion that discrimination absent the power to enforce such does not constitute racism. Individuals in minority power positions may indeed discriminate on the basis of race, but absent the ability to influence, coerce, or compel compliance (i.e. power) it does not constitute racism. Racism is a multi-dimensional, insidious process that has taken on different characteristics at different historical periods and among different cultural groups. It represents a belief system based on the assumption that skin color between whites and non-whites are so significant that they permanently determine most, if not all, of the economic, educational, social, cultural, political, behavioral, and athletic rewards available in society. It holds that skin-color not only determines race but the entire set of factors that control their lives. All differences of temperament, reproduction, propensity toward deviance, motivation, achievement, and aspirations are assumed to be defined by these racial designations.

Contemporary examples of racism may be seen as the basis of discrimination, prejudice, conflict and violence in societies throughout the world - in South Africa racism is practiced against blacks, coloreds and Indians; between Islamic Arabs and black Christians in the Sudan; between East Indians and blacks in Guyana; in Brazil and Paraguay it is between those of Spanish, African and Indian descent; between Aryans, Jews and Gypsies in Germany; Jews have suffered racism in the Soviet Union; while in Japan it is the Eta or Burakumin; and in Great Britaint is the Africans and Indians (i.e. Sikh, Muslim and Hindu).

Racism may be either formal or informal, conscious or unconscious. Formal racism refers to those situations when discriminatory practices, behavior and etc. are sanctioned by official rules, codes or laws of an organization, institution or society. Informal racism refers to discriminatory practices, behavior and etc. that although practiced, are not officially sanctioned.

The most obvious forms of racism are no longer legally or openly accepted in American society. Such racist practices as slavery, Jim Crow, the Black Codes, the Indian Removal Act, interment of the Japanese during World War II, and Chinese Exclusion Act are not only condemned, but unfortunately too conveniently forgotten. Racism, with it's legacy of submission and subordination, has left its scars and exists today in more subtle and complex forms at the individual, organizational and institutional levels in our society.

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