As a whole, the content of week 3 has been incredibly interesting to me, both in accordance with my majors, but also my interests. It is also interesting that in the late 1990s both the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA) were prompted to release statements regarding how their specific organization, as well as the field, view the existence/non-existence of race. Another overall thematic difference I found interesting is that it seemed the AAA was more focused on the historical/cultural components, as opposed to the AAPA’s more scientific/biological approach. But into the specifics: in the statement made by the AAA, it was really interesting to think of race being “modeled after an ancient theorem of the Great Chain of Being, which posited natural categories on a hierarchy established by God or nature. Thus ‘race’ was a mode of classification linked specifically to peoples in the colonial situation”. I previously understood that race had been used during the colonial era to subjugate indigenous populations or create a hierarchy where those populations or slave populations were forced to the bottom. However, I have not heard of the Great Chain of Being and found it fascinating (in a way) that it was used to justify such behaviors for hundreds of years. From the AAPA statement, much of the third lecture was echoed in the positions they held. The discussion of independently inherited traits was also interesting because they demonstrate how there aren’t specific traits that make a “race” distinct and only belong to one specific race, as opposed to the fact that traits can vary within and between groups. Lastly, I found it interesting, and surprising, that they included discussion of urbanization and “intercontinental migrations” and how they have “the potential to reduce the differences among all human populations”. I found it surprising more so in that I wasn’t sure if anthropological organizations focused on more ‘small’ (as opposed to large changes via evolution) impactful processes like urbanization to create change in human populations than those bigger processes.

I believe all of the readings for this week could help contribute to explaining the non-existence of biological race, but most of all, I think the first PDF (“Forensic Anthropology and the Concept of Race: If Races Don’t Exist, Why are Forensic Anthropologists so Good at Identifying Them?”) best explains it (using the others as examples). The way it makes sense to me is that [forensic] anthropologists have become less torn about whether ‘race’ exists. Overtime, they have come to a more so consensus that race has been used in a two-step process of involving “the construction of a biological profile and the second is an attempt at a positive match”. The anthropologists acknowledge the use of racial categories to try to positively identify/match the body and a missing person’s report. They will also then testify in court to their research. However, the leading pioneers on the subject, C. Loring Brace and Frank Livingstone state that race does not exist because “the discordance of traits made defining races on the basis of more than one or two characters impossible. Since no human biologist would support such limited criteria for defining a race, the race concept was deemed untenable for human populations”. The fact that, as also stated in lecture, skin color (primarily) was a result of the relationship between the need for Vitamin D and the fact UV rays are much stronger/more prevalent in tropical locations shows that skin color and other traits (that vary within populations) makes an argument for races more so obsolete. Lastly, in the Understanding Race lessons, they state that “skin pigmentation developed as the body’s way of balancing its need for vitamin D and folate”, showing that skin color was a result of the needs of those people to adapt to their environment. So, overall, I’d say that the non-existence of biological race refers not to racial groups created by society nor the non-existence of variation, but to the fact that it is difficult to pin millions of people who vary within these ‘groups’ to a rigid identity that doesn’t fit all that it supposedly includes.