Here is a little article I picked up:
http://www.westernherald.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2002/10/28/3dbca86818f4f
Professor challenges racial myths by Thomas Watkins
News Writer
October 28, 2002
According to George Armelagos, professor of biological anthropology at Emory University, the concept of race is one of the great myths of man and can be thought of as nothing more than a social construct with harmful repercussions attached to it.
Last Friday, Armelagos spoke at length about race with a slide-presentation titled "Myths of Race: The Reality of Racism." The lecture was sponsored by the Visiting Scholars and Artists Program.
"Race really tells us more about society that it does biology," he said.
Over 80 people were in attendance, comprised mostly of undergraduate students, as well as some graduate students and faculty members, predominantly from the Department of Anthropology.
Jay Pugh, freshman majoring in secondary education, was there for his anthropology class, but was also excited to hear what Armelagos had to say.
"The theory and reality of racism intrigues me a bit," he said. "I don't believe in racism and I wonder why people are racist."
"There are not many other places where you can get exposed to this stuff, so I thought it was pretty interesting," said Garia Sestian, freshman majoring in elementary education.
Armelagos was also president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, as well as holding positions in many other anthropological groups. Over the years, Armelagos has been studying the concept of race and how it has played out in human history. At the lecture, he focused on how race has been used as a cultural concept and is a dead system of classifying people.
"Race as a meaningful scientific concept is bankrupt," Armelagos said. "This is a little bit of a difficult topic because it's claiming race is not a useful biological concept when we see, actually, before our eyes, what seems to be evidence of its importance."
Armelagos went out to prove the empirical evidence seen is not all that society thinks it is.
Race has been a deep-rooted idea in history and it has served as a way to explain variation in between populations of people. We have always felt the need to categorize ourselves into specific races with stereotypical guidelines. Armelagos argues that people by no means need a distinct racial classification system and it is extremely out of date.
"I think anthropologists have such a history of creating the racial categories that have caused so much trouble," said Robert Anemone, associate professor of anthropology. "I think it's really important for anthropologists to try to undo that work."
Using all kinds of different traits to apply to specific races is not very effective and, in many cases, is inconsistent, according to Armelagos.
"The features that you use to group populations can be very different and the different features that you use will give different classifications," he said.
According to Armelagos, any trait used will give a different racial classification. This is direct proof of how biological traits cannot be used to define a cultural social fact. Thus, the concept of race is completely arbitrary and artificial.
Yet still, countless people throughout history have used race to divide people. Armelagos went back to Carl Linnaeus and how he split human beings into strict groups that had extremely racist perceptions. For example, Africans had to have silky skin, flat noses and had to be relaxed and extremely negligent.
People back then bought Linnaeus' guidelines, which proves the masses will believe anything the intelligentsia says, Armelagos said. People even believed that the flatter the face someone had, the more civilized they were.
He said anthropology has, in many respects, consisted of what people wanted to believe at the time.
"I would rather think of (the nature of race) as having a chameleon-like quality that allows us to change its color to fit into the scientific or intellectual background of the day," Armelagos said.
Armelagos said everyone is at least 85 percent the same in terms of variations, creating a large common base that all humans share.
"We're really talking about, in terms of racial studies, very little, in terms of total variations," he said.
This is why there is too much overlapping when trying to classify peoples into races because many traits are not unique to a particular group.
"If race were a useful biological concept, then what we could probably expect is that races would be separated, so the variation that exists within race is less than the variation that exists between races," he said.
However, this is not the case, as there is many times more variation on the whole existing within a defined race rather than more variation when compared to another race.
Armelagos also discussed how race has been used to directly oppress people. Many scientists thought African-Americans were better runners than whites due to an inherent quicker muscle response. However, this was only an excuse to explain why the majority of running world records were held by African-Americans. In the end, Armelagos found there was ample counter-evidence against the notion that all black people were naturally better runners.
"I am not saying that human variation is not important, I am not saying that there are not differences in populations there are biological differences. And I'm not saying that everyone is biologically equal," Armelagos said. "What I am saying is that there is no evidence that features are distributed in a racial fashion."
[This message has been edited by Djehuti (edited 16 May 2005).]
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