SOCIOL 2S06 Final: RACE AND RACISM THEORIES
22 Apr 2016
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The biological perspective: racial classifications: (1920s) , scientists believed that human beings could be divided up into real and objective categories called races. Subdivisions based on physical and genetic characteristics (e. g. skin color, metabolic rates) Typology of so called (cid:498)races(cid:499): (cid:498)caucasoid(cid:499) white (cid:498)mongoloid(cid:499) - asian (cid:498)negroid(cid:499)- black. A notion developed that some races were superiority and other were inferior: current conceptions: (1930s), Scientists had started to raise serious concerns about the concept of race. Began to question the typology, thinking changed over the next couple decades. By the 1950s, scientists had reached a consensus that racial classification are arbitrary, that genetic differences between groups are small, and genetic differences are behaviorally insignificant it was concluded that (cid:498)races(cid:499) are a biological myth. Outside of academia there continued to be wide spread belief that there are at least three biological races. Socially constructed physical and genetic characteristics to be important.
