MATT CARTMILL Department of Biological Anthropology and Anatomy Duke University Durham, NC 27710 The Status of the Race Concept in Physical Anthropology There are hereditary differences among human beings. Some of these differences have geographical correlates. Some ge- netic variants that produce physical or behavioral deficits occur significantly more often in some areas, or in some ethnic groups, than in others. However, none of these facts provides any intellectual support for the race concept, for racial clas- sifications, or for social hierarchies based on ethnic-group membership. The geographical element of the race concept is important in theory but is widely ignored in practice since it does not conform well to the facts of current human phenotype distribution. Much of the literature on supposed racial differences involves such geographically meaningless exercises as studying differences among "races" by subdividing a sample of North Americans. If races are defined as geographically delimited conspecific populations characterized by distinctive regional phenotypes, then human races do not exist now and have not existed for centuries, [race, human variation, intel- ligence] he concept of race is a divisive and emotionally seminate the revision in the name of the Association. After charged topic among physical anthropologists. three years of additional discussion, debate, and revision, TThe history of the American Association of Physi- the statement was finally approved by the Executive Com- cal Anthropologists' "Statement on Biological Aspects of mittee and published in the December 1996 issue of the Race" (AAPA 1996) attests to our divisions on this issue. American Journal of Physical Anthropology (AJPA). The AAPA statement had its inception at the 1989 meet- Some AAPA members who spoke against the race ings of the American Association for the Advancement of statement in Toronto were opposed to it on philosophical Science, where the Canadian psychologist J. Philippe grounds. The AAPA, they argued, simply had no business Rushton was invited to deliver a talk on his notorious ra- making pronouncements of this sort. If the issues being cial theories (Rushton and Bogaert 1989). Some physical dealt with were matters of scientific fact, they should be anthropologists who happened to be present were ap- thrashed out in the scientific literature, not settled by pass- palled to hear Rushton's views propounded under the aus- ing resolutions at meetings. It was no more appropriate for pices of the AAAS. They felt that physical anthropolo- the AAPA to have an official position on the facts of hu- gists, as the supposed scientific experts on matters of race, man racial variation, these people insisted, than it would ought to have been consulted before Rushton was given a be for it to have an official position on the phylogeny of platform. Convinced by this incident that it was high time marmosets, or the diagnostic skeletal signs of syphilis, or for physical anthropologists to take an official stand any other factual issue. And if the issues in question were against scientific racism, they asked the Executive Com- matters not of fact but of politics and morality, then physi- mittee of the American Association of Physical Anthro- cal anthropologists could say nothing more authoritative pologists to establish a committee to work toward that about them than anyone else. end. Although these objections to the "Statement on Bio- A working group set up under the direction of Sol Katz. logical Aspects of Race" had nothing to do with the issue the AAPA's representative to the AAAS, submitted a of race as such, the rejection of that statement at the 1993 draft statement on race in 1992 to the AAPA Executive AAPA business meeting also reflected substantive dis- Committee (Sirianni 1992). The Executive Committee re- agreements about race among biological anthropologists.1 vised it further and passed it along for approval to the As- Some of us, myself included, regard human races as over- sociation's business meeting in Toronto in 1993. The simplified or nonsensical constructs (Brace 1964, 1996; statement was rejected by a vote of 43 to 35, with 4 absten- Goodman and Armelagos 1996: Harrison et al. 1977; tions (Sirianni 1993). Nevertheless, the AAPA executive Keita and Kiftles 1997; Livingstone 1962: Marks 1995: was given permission to rewrite the statement and dis- Molnar 1992; Montagu 1942a, 1942b). Others think that American Anthropologist 100(3)651 -660. Copyright © 1999. American Anthropological Association 652 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST • VOL. 100, No. 3 • SEPTEMBER 1998 races are real biological entities. In a 1985 survey, 365 African ancestry, or to lump them together for some pur- physical anthropologists were asked whether they agreed poses with their parent populations in Africa as constitut- with the statement, "There are biological races within the ing a "Negroid" group. species Homo sapiens." Almost half of them {N = 181) Proponents of the race concept acknowledge that racial said they did. Almost as many (N = 148) said they did not classifications can be used to discriminate against people. (Lieberman and Reynolds 1996). But because such classifications reflect certain facts of hu- A similar 1978 survey, which revealed a similar differ- man biology, they can also be used justly and fairly to ence of opinion, showed that the positions that physical serve benign ends. For example, doctors need to be alerted anthropologists take on these issues tend to correlate with to the elevated probability of sickle-cell disease in patients their social status and cultural background (Lieberman of equatorial African ancestry. Forensic anthropologists and Reynolds 1978). Scientists' attitudes toward the race may be asked by the police to provide racial identifica- concept are probably also correlated to some degree with tions to help in solving crimes—say, to determine whether their politics. Experience suggests that (as might be ex- a skeleton found in the woods could be that of an African pected) physical anthropologists who reject the concept of American murder victim. Because there are some skeletal race tend to lean more to the political left than their oppo- traits that occur more frequently among some North nents do. But the division between the two camps is not re- American ethnic groups than among others, it is some- ally a split between tender-minded liberal egalitarians and times possible to answer such questions with a fair degree tough-minded conservative elitists. To a surprising ex- of confidence. And because racially defined ethnic group- tent, physical anthropologists in both camps make similar ings are real and important elements in American culture, assertions, cite similar sources, and express similar fer- we often need to recognize such groupings in investigat- vent opposition to racist practices and beliefs. The differ- ing the interaction between culture and biology. For in- ence between them is mainly one of emphasis. The find- stance, if we wish to determine whether Black children ings that one group admits grudgingly and seeks out have been systematically exposed to higher environ- reasons for disregarding are spotlighted by the other group mental lead levels than Whites, we need to structure our as the central facts that reveal the way things really are. sample in terms of race (Schell 1997). There is a case to be made for each side, and it is not hard to find physical anthropologists who have questioned the The Case against the Race Concept existence of races in one publication but have used racial categories to structure their data in another. Biological anthropologists who deny the value of racial typology would grant all these points, but would insist that The Case for the Race Concept racial categories are nevertheless biologically incoherent and heuristically misleading. As one classic textbook of Those who defend racial taxonomies generally say they human biology expressed it two decades ago, "Classifica- are just one way of expressing the generally recognized tions of man into Mongoloids, Caucasoids, Negroids, etc. fact that human genetic variation is correlated with geog- undoubtedly express certain genuine features of human raphy. For example, most of the world's people who have variation but they do so in a crude and misleading way" very dark skin and woolly-textured, tightly curled hair live (Harrison etal. 1977:184). in Africa south of the Tropic of Cancer. Although many Proponents of the race concept usually define races in people who live elsewhere also meet this description, the terms of the typical or average properties of regional hu- great majority of them are descended from people who man populations, as though racial categories were geo- lived in sub-Saharan Africa. In some parts of the world, graphically delimited biological subspecies. Summariz- immigrants from tropical Africa have simply disappeared ing the definitions of "race" proposed by proponents of into the general population through interbreeding, but in human racial classifications over the past half-century, other areas—for instance, in North America—they have Molnar (1992:23) notes that all such definitions stress the formed persistent ethnic groups with distinctive cultural concept of races as geographical entities: "Primarily, the traditions and a tendency toward preferential mating divisions are based on the sharing of a common territory or within the group. Within such ethnic groups, assortative space and [assume] that geography