• Homo sapiens is the most widespread species on Earth, having spread across the globe over the past ten thousand years.
• Throughout history, humans have been divided into innumerable societies, each maintaining its own culture and perceiving others as “they”.
• The physical and cultural diversity among humans is remarkable, despite our shared history of warfare, migration, and expansion.
• This diversity has often led to conflict and inequality, with human relationships typically being shaped by differencesrather than similarities.
• Racial and ethnic groups are arbitrary divisions based on physical characteristics or cultural traits.
  • Race: A group sharing similar physical characteristics.
  • Ethnicity: A group sharing similar cultural traits.
• Race and ethnic relations have often been characterized by prejudice, antagonism, warfare, and social inequality.
• Over the past few decades, there have been atrocities, with hundreds of thousands killed and millions subjected to cruelty due to their racial or ethnic group membership.
• The chapter focuses on race, ethnicity, prejudice, and discrimination, aiming to understand why some groups live in harmony while others experience violence and discord.
• The goal is to examine the nature of race and explore the issues faced by minority groups.

RACIAL GROUPS AND ETHNIC GROUPS

Racial Groups

• Race is a controversial concept with varied interpretations. In popular usage, it can refer to humanity as a whole, a specific nationality, or a group socially designated as different.
• The term race is not biologically defined. Despite physical differences like skin color and facial features, intermixing and overlapping traits make the concept of race problematic as a biological category.
• Race is a social creation, shaped by attributing real or imagined physical traits to groups that are then treated as distinct from others.
• Horton and Hunt define a race as a group of people with inherited physical traits, but its identity is shaped by popular social definition.
• Richard T. Schaefer describes a racial group as a group identified by obvious physical differences, such as whites, blacks, and Asian Americans in the United States.
• N.J. Smelser sees a racial group as a type of ethnic group distinguished by a combination of inherited physical traits like skin color and facial features.
• The conventional three-fold classification of races (Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid) has been discredited due to its reliance on outdated theories that linked physical traits with moral and mental characteristics.
• There is no fixed set of physical traits that can define any race; traits overlap too much to make definitive classifications.
• Examples of racial overlap include:
  • Asian Indians with Mongoloid skin color but Caucasoid facial features.
  • Some dark-skinned Africans with straight hair and narrow noses.
  • Light-skinned Europeans with woolly hair and thick lips.
  • The Ainu of Japan with a combination of Caucasoid skin and Mongoloid facial features.
• Interbreeding among populations has blurred physical traits, making it difficult to classify distinct races.
• The Jews of Israel serve as an example of this overlap, as their complexions vary widely due to migration and interbreeding.
• Physical differences are often adaptations to the environment, such as:
  • Dark skin for protection against sun exposure in tropical regions.
  • Large lung capacity in populations living at high altitudes.
  • Short limbs in populations from cold climates to conserve body heat.
• There is no evidence to support the idea that different groups inherit different psychological traits, such as intelligence or artistic ability.
• The concept of pure race is a myth, as human populations have been interbreeding for tens of thousands of years.
• The idea of distinct races is a social construction, not a natural or biological reality.
• Human groups have exchanged genes to such an extent that categorizing them into “pure races” is impossible.
• Race assumes importance not because of biological reality, but because it is a social fact. People attach social meanings to physical differences, which influences race relations.
• People act on the belief that certain groups form a biological unity, even when these beliefs have no biological basis.
• For instance, people may regard Jews as a race, though their interbreeding with various populations throughout history means no “pure” Jewish race exists.
• Despite its lack of biological basis, the social belief in race can have important consequences, such as in the case of Nazism in Germany, where Jews were treated as a distinct race with harmful consequences.