Subtle Acts of Exclusion by Tiffany Jana

Author:Tiffany Jana
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2020-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

6

Race and Ethnicity SAE

BEFORE DIVING INTO the many examples of subtle acts of exclusion based on ideas of race and ethnicity, we thought it was important to step way back and discuss how race and ethnicity became ideas that influence how we treat other people in the first place. As the cultural anthropologist coauthor, Baran regularly finds himself answering questions about what people often refer to as the “social construction of race.” Typically, those conversations go something like this.

New friend: So what do you do for a living?

Baran: I am a cultural anthropologist by training with some study in cognitive psychology too, and now I work with organizations to support their diversity and inclusion efforts.

New friend: How interesting. You know what I think? I think we’re really all part of one race, the human race, and all the labels are just made up and people shouldn’t be treated differently because of their skin color.

Baran: Yes, I’m with you on that.

New friend: So we’ve really got to stop focusing on race and stop talking about it and then it will get better.

Baran: Noooooooo!

Anthropologists are very specific in what they mean when they say that race is a historical, cultural construction. It’s a long story with a ton of research and a lot of small variations and minor disputes. But for the broad strokes, there is agreement. In a nutshell, they mean something like the following.

Genetic differences between people are very small, and they are largely surface differences. Modern Homo sapiens evolved in Africa and began spreading out across the globe a couple hundred thousand years ago. As they migrated into Europe, Asia, Australia, and finally the Americas, they evolved physical differences in response to environmental pressures, the most critical of which was the sun. Having melanin in one’s skin, for example, was advantageous in some areas and disadvantageous in other areas. In fact, if you looked at the average skin color across the globe before long-range sea travel began in the 1400s, you would see a gradual range from darker around the equator to lighter as you got closer to the colder climates with less sun.

During that time, if you were to take a walking trip from Central Africa where average skin color was the darkest up to the northernmost areas of Europe and Asia where skin color was the lightest, you would find continuous variation along the whole way. There would never be a time when you would think to yourself, “That was one racial group over there and here is a clearly different racial group.” And that would be true for all the different physical features that one might associate with race—skin color, nose shape, eye shape, body type, hair texture, hair color, etc. All the physical features come in spectrums of difference and they don’t correlate neatly together. All of this is to say that racial groupings are more of an idea about difference than a description of actual biological difference.

Those ideas about difference developed historically, especially in the early years of the United States of America.

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