Importance Score: 65 / 100 🔴
A recent series of executive actions by President Donald Trump included a warning about a “distorted narrative” concerning race, asserting it is “driven by ideology rather than truth.” This directive specifically cited “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” a current exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, as an example. The exhibit, exploring race and American sculpture, showcases over two centuries of artworks illustrating how art has shaped and perpetuated racial attitudes and ideologies, arguing that race is a social construct rather than a biological reality. This perspective, supported by scientific consensus, contrasts with the concept of biological race.
The Social Construct of Race: Examining Historical Perspectives
The executive order criticizes the exhibition for “promoting the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating ‘Race is a human invention.’”
The objection appears to stem from viewpoints such as: “Although an individual’s genetics influences their observable traits, and self-identified race may be linked to physical appearance, race itself is a social construct.” Notably, this statement originates not from the Smithsonian, but from the American Society of Human Genetics.
Scientists widely refute the notion of race as biologically tangible. The assertion that race is a “biological reality” contradicts current scientific understanding.
As a historian specializing in the scientific study of race, it’s clear the executive order sets “social construct” against “biological reality.” Examining the history of both ideas reveals how modern science concluded that race is a human creation, not a natural phenomenon.
vCard.red is a free platform for creating a mobile-friendly digital business cards. You can easily create a vCard and generate a QR code for it, allowing others to scan and save your contact details instantly.
The platform allows you to display contact information, social media links, services, and products all in one shareable link. Optional features include appointment scheduling, WhatsApp-based storefronts, media galleries, and custom design options.
Early Scientific Attempts to Define Race Biologically
At the dawn of the 20th century, scientists operated under the belief that humanity could be categorized into distinct races based on physical attributes. This prevailing theory suggested that identifying physical variations among populations and observing their inheritance across generations validated the delineation of racial “types.”
However, employing this “typological” approach yielded inconsistent results. Charles Darwin, in 1871, expressed frustration, noting 13 scientists who had identified between two and 63 races. This ambiguity persisted for six decades. The lack of consensus among scientists regarding which physical characteristics were most pertinent and how to measure them resulted in nearly as many racial classifications as classifiers.
A significant obstacle in racial classification was the minute nature of physical differences among humans, making it challenging for scientists to reliably differentiate groups. W.E.B. Du Bois, a pioneering African American scholar, pointed out in 1906, “It is impossible to draw a color line between black and other races … in all physical characteristics the Negro race cannot be set off by itself.”
Nevertheless, scientific efforts persisted. In an 1899 anthropological study, William Ripley classified people using head shape, hair texture, skin tone, and height. By 1926, Harvard anthropologist Earnest Hooton, a leading figure in racial typology, enumerated 24 anatomical features, including “the presence or absence of a postglenoid tubercle and a pharyngeal fossa or tubercle” and “the degree of bowing of the radius and ulna,” while acknowledging the list was not exhaustive.
This widespread confusion contrasted sharply with the expected progress of scientific inquiry. As scientific tools and measurement precision advanced, the subject of study—race—became increasingly indistinct and unclear.
When sculptor Malvina Hoffman’s “Races of Mankind” exhibition debuted at Chicago’s Field Museum in 1933, it presented race as a biological reality, in spite of its ambiguous definition. Sir Arthur Keith, a globally recognized anthropologist, authored the catalog’s introduction for the exhibition.
Keith dismissed scientific methods for definitively distinguishing race; he asserted that racial identification is immediate, stating “a single glance, picks out the racial features more certainly than could a band of trained anthropologists.” Keith’s perspective perfectly embodied the belief in the tangible reality of race, grounded in visual perception, even as scientific validation remained elusive.
However, the scientific understanding of race was on the cusp of transformation.
Shifting Focus: Culture as an Explanatory Framework for Human Diversity
By 1933, the ascendance of Nazism intensified the urgency surrounding the scientific study of race. As anthropologist Sherwood Washburn articulated in 1944, “If we are to discuss racial matters with the Nazis, we had better be right.”
The late 1930s and early 1940s witnessed the emergence of two pivotal scientific concepts. Firstly, scientists began to prioritize culture over biology as the primary determinant of differences between human groups. Secondly, the development of population genetics challenged the biological basis of race.
Culture, Not Biology, Shapes Human Differences
In 1943, anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish co-authored a concise work also titled *The Races of Mankind*. Aimed at a broad audience, they contended that human beings are fundamentally more similar than dissimilar, attributing observed differences to culture and learning rather than inherent biology. An animated educational film subsequently broadened the dissemination of these ideas.
Benedict and Weltfish argued that while physical variations exist among people, these differences are inconsequential relative to the shared capacity for learning and achievement across all races. “Progress in civilization is not the monopoly of one race or subrace,” they wrote, highlighting historical examples: “Negroes made iron tools and wove fine cloth for their clothing when fair-skinned Europeans wore skins and knew nothing of iron.” This cultural lens offered a more compelling explanation for diverse human lifestyles than unreliable appeals to a biologically defined race.
This shift towards culture aligned with a fundamental evolution in biological knowledge.
Population Genetics: A New Lens on Human Variation
Theodosius Dobzhansky, a prominent biologist of the 20th century, alongside other biologists, focused on evolutionary change. Races, conceptualized as static and unchanging, were deemed unhelpful in understanding organismal evolution.
A more effective tool emerged: the “genetic population.” Dobzhansky asserted that geneticists define populations based on shared genes to investigate evolutionary processes. Natural selection, over time, molds the population’s evolutionary trajectory. Should a population fail to illuminate natural selection, it is discarded in favor of a new population characterized by a different set of shared genes. Crucially, any population under study is subject to change, contrasting with the notion of fixed and immutable human races.
Sherwood Washburn, Dobzhansky’s associate, integrated these principles into anthropology. He recognized that genetics aimed not to categorize people into rigid racial groups, but to comprehend human evolution. This perspective fundamentally contradicted the teachings of his mentor, Hooton.
In a 1951 publication, Washburn contended, “There is no way to justify the division of a … population into a series of racial types” due to its lack of utility. The assumption of group immutability hindered the understanding of evolutionary dynamics. A genetic population is not inherently “real”; it is a construct employed by scientists as an analytical instrument to study organic change.
Roller Coaster Analogy: Race as a Tool, Not a Biological Truth
To grasp this critical distinction, consider the analogy of roller coasters.
Amusement parks display height restrictions for roller coasters, delineating who is eligible to ride. However, these restrictions do not define an objective category of “tall” or “short” individuals, as height requirements vary across rides. Height markers serve a specific function—ensuring rider safety on a particular roller coaster—not to classify individuals into inherently “tall” groups.
Similarly, genetic populations are utilized as “an important tool for inferring the evolutionary history of modern humans” or to gain insights with “fundamental implications for understanding the genetic basis of diseases.” These are tools for specific biological inquiries, not for racial classification.
Just as using a screwdriver to hammer a nail proves ineffective, genetic populations are tools tailored for specific biological tasks, not for categorizing people into “real” racial groups.
Washburn challenged proponents of racial classification to provide “important reasons for subdividing our whole species.”
The Smithsonian exhibition elucidates how racialized sculpture functioned as “both a tool of oppression and domination and one of liberation and empowerment.” Science corroborates its assertion that race is a human construct, not a biological actuality.