When reading the assigned articles and pieces on race through an anthropological perspective, I am not surprised that there is a consensus within the academic community that race as we know it is artificially important and the concept was practically invented to serve those who were already in power. Both the government and society as a whole placed emphasis on the issue of race to mainly distinguish an artificial hierarchy. The American Anthropological Association (AAA) mentioned how the concept of race and the traits associated with specific races was primarily used as justification for poor treatment of groups of people. This poor treatment includes the justification of slavery on Africans and justifying the removal of indigenous Americans from their land. I think one of the statements that were the most shocking was in the AAA article where they started, “Differences among the “racial” categories were projected to their greatest extreme when the argument was posed that Africans, Indians, and Europeans were separate species, with Africans the least human and closer taxonomically to apes.” When this idea was first conceptualized, it was considered modern science. It is crazy that anthropology has come so far from its less scientific roots and even more crazy how the idea of race has continually evolved throughout time.

Based on what I have learned so far, I would tell a person who is unfamiliar with the idea that there is non-existence of biological race that race exists only in society. Race as a concept was created to instill and maintain a hierarchy. Stigmatized and often less desirable traits were assigned to specific races. It was believed races all inherently shared the same culture and languages. Biologically we are all so similar. It is obvious that we all have differing phenotypes, or observable traits resulting from our genotypes, but we all share the same genetic makeup. A fact that may influence their perspective was offered up by the American Anthropological Association. They stated in their website’s statement on race that “Conventional geographic “racial” groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes. This means that there is greater variation within “racial” groups than between them.” Biologically, we all are related and members of the same species, homo sapiens. The concept of race is non-biological and early theories where conceptualized races were seen as differing species proves the lack of biology involved in previous eras of anthropology. According to the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA) in their Statement of Biological Aspects of Race, there has been no evidence that there has ever been a homogenous race, and that the differences we see in observable traits, phenotypes, can be results of natural selection, environment, mutations, and more! It is easy to now say that the traits, culture, and languages associated with race are non-existent considering that culture and language are environmental. The AAPA noted in bullet point eleven of their Statement of Biological Aspects of Race why it is that some groups who share commonalities such as proximity, culture, and language, share some physical traits, but this is due to a higher frequency in selecting similar mates. There is no genetic linkage that connects the behavior and culture of someone to someone else.

https://www.americananthro.org/ConnectWithAAA/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=2583
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mdfR1wVmXmCgXI8FwQPMnYm81uWwJ8Ct/view