SOC 1001 Lecture 3: Ch. 9 Race Notes
CH. 9 RACE
Race
• A group of people who share a set of characteristics—typically but not
always physical ones—and are said to share a common bloodline
• Race is a way of classifying people into group and there are legal and social
consequences for which group you are assigned to
• Race is not a biological or genetic category that we tend to this it is but more
of a political or social category
Human Variation
• Human’s subspecies do not exist. We are among the most genetically similar
of all species
• Humans only vary in 0.1% of our DNA
• 85-90% of human variations exists within any local population and only the
remaining 10-15% between any 2
• In thinking about ancestry, go back 5 generations and we have 32 ancestors,
in 10 generations we have 1,024
Race as Social Construction
• Race as a biological, genetic, geographic, or cultural category, race has fluid
and changeable boundaries
• Racialization-when a previously unnoticed group gets identified as a
separate race
• The categories of each race are constructed differently in different societies
• We have to learn to see race
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