Race and society

Social interpretations of race regard the common categorizations of people into different races. Race is often culturally understood to be rigid categories (Black, White, Pasifika, Asian, among others) in which people can be classified based on biological markers or physical traits such as skin color or facial features. This rigid definition of race is no longer accepted by scientific communities. Instead, the concept of 'race' is viewed as a social construct. This means, in simple terms, that it is a human invention and not a biological fact. The concept of 'race' has developed over time in order to accommodate different societies' needs of organising themselves as separate from the 'other' (globalization and colonization have caused conceptions of race to be generally consolidated). The 'other' was usually viewed as inferior and, as such, was assigned worse qualities. The current idea of race was developed primarily during the Enlightenment, in which scientists attempted to define racial boundaries, but their cultural biases ultimately impacted their findings and reproduced the prejudices that still exist in society today.

Social interpretation of physical variation

Incongruities of racial classifications

The biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks (1995) argued that even as the idea of "race" was becoming a powerful organizing principle in many societies, the shortcomings of the concept were apparent. In the Old World, the gradual transition in appearances from one racial group to adjacent racial groups emphasized that "one variety of mankind does so sensibly pass into the other, that you cannot mark out the limits between them," as Blumenbach observed in his writings on human variation.