The Myth of Race

Author: Robert Wald Sussman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674745302
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Book Description
Biological races do not exist—and never have. This view is shared by all scientists who study variation in human populations. Yet racial prejudice and intolerance based on the myth of race remain deeply ingrained in Western society. In his powerful examination of a persistent, false, and poisonous idea, Robert Sussman explores how race emerged as a social construct from early biblical justifications to the pseudoscientific studies of today. The Myth of Race traces the origins of modern racist ideology to the Spanish Inquisition, revealing how sixteenth-century theories of racial degeneration became a crucial justification for Western imperialism and slavery. In the nineteenth century, these theories fused with Darwinism to produce the highly influential and pernicious eugenics movement. Believing that traits from cranial shape to raw intelligence were immutable, eugenicists developed hierarchies that classified certain races, especially fair-skinned “Aryans,” as superior to others. These ideologues proposed programs of intelligence testing, selective breeding, and human sterilization—policies that fed straight into Nazi genocide. Sussman examines how opponents of eugenics, guided by the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas’s new, scientifically supported concept of culture, exposed fallacies in racist thinking. Although eugenics is now widely discredited, some groups and individuals today claim a new scientific basis for old racist assumptions. Pondering the continuing influence of racist research and thought, despite all evidence to the contrary, Sussman explains why—when it comes to race—too many people still mistake bigotry for science.

The Myth of Human Races

Author: Alain F. Corcos
Publisher: Wheatmark, Inc.
ISBN: 1627874178
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
The idea that there are different human races is false. It is a socially constructed myth that has no grounding in science. Protagonists of race theory have tried to prove that human races exist with flawed research. The Myth of Human Races unravels these flaws and exposes the theory's underlying prejudice of race superiority.

The Myth of Race

Author: Jefferson M. Fish, Ph.D.
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781539987932
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 154

Book Description
The Myth of Race draws on scientific knowledge to debunk a series of myths that pass as facts, correct false assumptions, and clarify cultural misunderstandings about the highly charged topic of race. Praise for The Myth of Race comes from former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen, and from anthropologist Audrey Smedley, author of Race in North America. Secretary Cohen said, "Writing with stunning clarity, Dr. Fish poses profound and perturbing questions about race...The Myth of Race is must reading." Here are some of the myths dealt with in the book: * The myth that humans are divided into Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid races * The myth that people cannot change their race * The myth of the tragic mulatto * The myth of biologically based differences in intelligence among the races The Myth of Race demonstrates that the apparently straightforward concept of race is actually a confused mixture of two different concepts; and the confusion often leads to miscommunication. The first concept, biological race, simply doesn't exist in the human species. Instead, what exists is gradual variation in what people look like (e.g., skin color and facial features) and in their genes, as you travel around the planet--with more distant populations appearing more different than closer ones. If you travel in different directions, the populations look different in different ways. The second concept, social race, is a set of cultural categories for labeling people based on how their ancestors were classified, selected aspects of what they look like, or various combinations of both. These sets of categories vary widely from one culture to another.

A Dreadful Deceit

Author: Jacqueline Jones
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465069800
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Book Description
In 1656, a planter in colonial Maryland tortured and killed one of his slaves, an Angolan man named Antonio who refused to work the fields. Over three centuries later, a Detroit labor organizer named Simon Owens watched as strikebreakers wielding bats and lead pipes beat his fellow autoworkers for protesting their inhumane working conditions. Antonio and Owens had nothing in common but the color of their skin and the economic injustices they battled—yet the former is what defines them in America’s consciousness. In A Dreadful Deceit, award-winning historian Jacqueline Jones traces the lives of these two men and four other African Americans to reveal how the concept of race has obscured the factors that truly divide and unite us. Expansive, visionary, and provocative, A Dreadful Deceit explodes the pernicious fiction that has shaped American history.

The Myth of the Jewish Race

Author: Raphael Patai
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 9780814319482
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 472

Book Description
In this carefully researched analysis, Raphael and Jennifer Patai begin by defining race. They then develop the idea of the existence of "races" through history. In rich and fascinating detail, the authors consider the effects of intermarriage, interbreeding, proselytism, slavery, and concubinage on the Jewish population from Biblical times to the present. New material explores the psychological aspects of the Jewish race issue, the Jewish psyche, and the consequences of the 1975 United Nations resolution equating Zionism with racism. A revised and updated scientific section on the measurable genetic, morphological, and behavioral differences between Jews and non-Jews supports the conclusion that the idea of a "Jewish race" is, indeed, a myth.

The Race Myth

Author: Joseph Graves
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0452286581
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
“Graves’ integration of science and objective analysis with popular biological assumptions of race makes this an enlightening and provocative work.”—Booklist DOES RACE AS WE KNOW IT REALLY EXIST? Preeminent evolutionary biologist Joseph Graves proves once and for all that it doesn’t. Through accessible and compelling language, he makes the provocative argument that science cannot account for the radical categories used to classify people, and debunks ancient race-related fallacies that are still held as fact, from damaging medical profiles to misconceptions about sports. He explains why defining race according to skin tone or eye shape is woefully inaccurate, and how making assumptions based on these false categories regarding IQ, behavior, or predisposition to disease has devastating effects. Demonstrating that racial distinctions are in fact social inventions, not biological truths, The Race Myth brings much-needed, sound science to one of America’s most emotionally charged debates.

Whitewashing Race

Author: Michael K. Brown
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520385861
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 398

Book Description
In an updated new edition of this classic work, a team of highly respected sociologists, political scientists, economists, criminologists, and legal scholars scrutinize the resilience of racial inequality in twenty-first-century America. Whitewashing Race argues that contemporary racism manifests as discrimination in nearly every realm of American life, and is further perpetuated by failures to address the compounding effects of generations of disinvestment. Police violence, mass incarceration of Black people, employment and housing discrimination, economic deprivation, and gross inequities in health care combine to deeply embed racial inequality in American society and economy. Updated to include the most recent evidence, including contemporary research on the racially disparate effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, this edition of Whitewashing Race analyzes the consequential and ongoing legacy of "disaccumulation" for Black communities and lives. While some progress has been made, the authors argue that real racial justice can be achieved only if we actively attack and undo pervasive structural racism and its legacies.

The Myth of Racial Color Blindness

Author: Helen A. Neville
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
ISBN: 9781433820731
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
"Is the United States today a "postracial" society? In this volume, top scholars in psychology, education, sociology, and related fields dissect the concept of color-blind racial ideology (CBRI), the widely held belief that skin color does not affect interpersonal interactions and that interpersonal and institutional racism therefore no longer exist in American society. The chapter authors survey the theoretical and empirical literature on racial color blindness; discuss novel ways of assessing and measuring color-blind racial beliefs; examine related characteristics such as lack of empathy (among Whites) and internalized racism (among people of color); and assess the impact of CBRI in education, the workplace, and health care--as well as the racial disparities that such beliefs help foster"--Provided by publisher.

Myths of Harmony

Author: Marixa Lasso
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822973251
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 219

Book Description
This book centers on a foundational moment for Latin American racial constructs. While most contemporary scholarship has focused the explanation for racial tolerance-or its lack-in the colonial period, Marixa Lasso argues that the key to understanding the origins of modern race relations are to be found later, in the Age of Revolution.Lasso rejects the common assumption that subalterns were passive and alienated from Creole-led patriot movements, and instead demonstrates that during Colombia's revolution, free blacks and mulattos (pardos) actively joined and occasionally even led the cause to overthrow the Spanish colonial government. As part of their platform, patriots declared legal racial equality for all citizens, and promulgated an ideology of harmony and fraternity for Colombians of all colors. The fact that blacks were mentioned as equals in the discourse of the revolution and later served in republican government posts was a radical political departure. These factors were instrumental in constructing a powerful myth of racial equality-a myth that would fuel revolutionary activity throughout Latin America.Thus emerged a historical paradox central to Latin American nation-building: the coexistence of the principle of racial equality with actual racism at the very inception of the republic. Ironically, the discourse of equality meant that grievances of racial discrimination were construed as unpatriotic and divisive acts-in its most extreme form, blacks were accused of preparing a race war. Lasso's work brings much-needed attention to the important role of the anticolonial struggles in shaping the nature of contemporary race relations and racial identities in Latin America.

Fatal Invention

Author: Dorothy Roberts
Publisher: New Press/ORIM
ISBN: 1595586911
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 485

Book Description
An incisive, groundbreaking book that examines how a biological concept of race is a myth that promotes inequality in a supposedly “post-racial” era. Though the Human Genome Project proved that human beings are not naturally divided by race, the emerging fields of personalized medicine, reproductive technologies, genetic genealogy, and DNA databanks are attempting to resuscitate race as a biological category written in our genes. This groundbreaking book by legal scholar and social critic Dorothy Roberts examines how the myth of race as a biological concept—revived by purportedly cutting-edge science, race-specific drugs, genetic testing, and DNA databases—continues to undermine a just society and promote inequality in a supposedly “post-racial” era. Named one of the ten best black nonfiction books 2011 by AFRO.com, Fatal Invention offers a timely and “provocative analysis” (Nature) of race, science, and politics that “is consistently lucid . . . alarming but not alarmist, controversial but evidential, impassioned but rational” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). “Everyone concerned about social justice in America should read this powerful book.” —Anthony D. Romero, executive director, American Civil Liberties Union “A terribly important book on how the ‘fatal invention’ has terrifying effects in the post-genomic, ‘post-racial’ era.” —Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, professor of sociology, Duke University, and author of Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States “Fatal Invention is a triumph! Race has always been an ill-defined amalgam of medical and cultural bias, thinly overlaid with the trappings of contemporary scientific thought. And no one has peeled back the layers of assumption and deception as lucidly as Dorothy Roberts.” —Harriet A. Washington, author of and Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself