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 Race

Author: Robert W. Sussman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674417313
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Book Description
Although eugenics is now widely discredited, some groups and individuals claim a new scientific basis for old racist assumptions. Pondering the continuing influence of racist research and thought, despite all evidence to the contrary, Robert 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.

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 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.

Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You

Author: Agustín Fuentes
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520285999
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
There are three major myths of human nature: humans are divided into biological races; humans are naturally aggressive; and men and women are truly different in behavior, desires, and wiring. In an engaging and wide-ranging narrative, Agustín Fuentes counters these pervasive and pernicious myths about human behavior. Tackling misconceptions about what race, aggression, and sex really mean for humans, Fuentes incorporates an accessible understanding of culture, genetics, and evolution, requiring us to dispose of notions of “nature or nurture.” Presenting scientific evidence from diverse fields—including anthropology, biology, and psychology—Fuentes devises a myth-busting toolkit to dismantle persistent fallacies about the validity of biological races, the innateness of aggression and violence, and the nature of monogamy and differences between the sexes. A final chapter plus an appendix provide a set of take-home points on how readers can myth-bust on their own. Accessible, compelling, and original, this book is a rich and nuanced account of how nature, culture, experience, and choice interact to influence human behavior.

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.

The Myth of the Jewish Race

Author: Alain F. Corcos
Publisher: Lehigh University Press
ISBN: 9780934223799
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 186

Book Description
As a youth, the author, who had two Jewish grandparents, was defined as a Jew by Vichy France; his parents, however, refused to register the family as Jews. (In March 1944 Corcos and his brother fled to Spain and joined the Allied Forces in North Africa.) States that antisemites consider Jewishness to be inherited and to embody inferior, evil traits. This view is based on two false biological premises: that there are pure races of humans, and that some races are superior to others. Rejects these premises by considering modern biology and Jewish history. The latter indicates that the Jews cannot be a race, due to their lack of sexual isolation; diversity among Jews is a result of both intermarriage and proselytism. Sees the Spanish "limpieza de sangre" statutes and the Inquisition as precursors of Nazi racism. Observes that sometimes Jews have joined antisemites in accepting biological determinism. Intermarriage in countries such as China, India, and the USA has led to considerable biological diversity among Jews and to the reduction of diversity between Jews and non-Jews, if such diversity existed at all. Stresses that if antisemites have worried about "contamination" of their "race" by the Jews they have already missed the boat since Jews have mixed with non-Jews for many centuries.

Everyone is African

Author: Daniel J. Fairbanks
Publisher:
ISBN: 1633880184
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Book Description
"What does science say about race? In this book a ... research geneticist [posits] that traditional notions about distinct racial differences have little scientific foundation. In short, racism is not just morally wrong; it has no basis in fact, [and] the author ... describes in detail the factors that have led to the current scientific consensus about race"--Amazon.com.