How Real Is Race?

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Invaluable for anthropologists of education, addressing their students' questions clearly, with crucial historical detail. * Kathryn Anderson-Levitt, educational anthropologist, University of California, Los Angeles * The third edition of How Real is Race? is better and more relevant than ever. The authors continue to frame their analysis with a biocultural, cross-cultural perspective on race. It courageously tackles how race shapes the wealth, health, and well-being of people as well as the lives, livelihoods, and DNA of social groups that have nothing to do with race as biology and everything to do with the construct of race impacting individual and collective bodies. With new and revised chapters, this edition focuses more on 'unraveling' the ideology and institutions of race while keeping its distinctive biocultural approach, which makes this a critical anthropological project. The authors intentionally open the conversation to a broad audience in and outside the academy. This book is needed now more than ever. -- Lee D. Baker, cultural anthropologist, Duke University Race is not biology, but race is very real. This lived, felt, and powerful conundrum is beautifully and effectively explained in this book. With real data, engaging prose, concise conclusions, and key conceptual points at the end of each chapter, this book is a state-of-the-art accessible, meaningful, and effective discussion of what race is, what it is not, and how we can use that information to make a difference. Whether a teacher, student or a member of the general public, anyone interested in understanding what race is, is not, and why that matters, should read this book. -- Augustin Fuentes, biocultural anthropologist, Princeton University This book is the clearest and most succinct guide to understanding what race is, and how race thinking has deformed human societies and distorted humanity. Through its meticulous tracing of the history of race, it allows us to see humanity with new eyes, which have been corrected for the aberrations caused by the clouded lens of race. * Nina G. Jablonski, biological anthropologist, Pennsylvania State University * Contentious debates about the very meaning of race rage across nearly every aspect of social organization and cultural life. How Real is Race? offers a wide-ranging and accessible account that deconstructs the concept of race and allows us to fully grasp its multiple and contradictory meanings. By doing so, it challenges the prevailing "racial worldview" and encourages us to move beyond it. -- Michael Omi, sociology, University of California, Berkeley A timely and much-needed update to a brilliantly clear integration of approaches to race and racism from biology, history, linguistics and social science that enables us to grasp human differences and commonalities across physical and cultural dimensions, while revealing how these are structured by and sustain hierarchies of power and privilege. -- Peter Wade, anthropologist, University of Manchester Today, more than ever, we need clear information supporting deep questioning and thoughtful dialogue related to issues of race in our society, our history, and the world. How Real is Race is an essential resource to meet that need. * Mica Pollock, University of California, San Diego * How Real Is Race? is one of the most essential books about the intersections of race, racism, and human diversity. The authors' thoughtful, proven exercises help readers to think more profoundly and synthetically. I hope this new, updated edition is read and used widely by teachers, students, and everyone else. -- Alan H. Goodman Ph.D., Professor Hampshire College, former president of the American Anthropological Association Race is the elephant in the room of American social life. In this masterful work, the authors continue their work of dismantling racial misconceptions and explaining how they act to influence society through false racial notions in culture, education, and health. This book provides us with a program to usher the elephant out the door. This is a critical read for our times. -- Joseph L. Graves Jr., author of Racism, Not Race: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions How Real Is Race? is destined to be a leading anthropology text. It deepens our understanding of race and racism and clarifies many current debates over topics such as immigration, affirmative action, and even evolution. At a time when racism is resurgent in United States and beyond, this work explains key issues and themes in a very accessible and commonsense way and also draws on the most advanced knowledge from both the social and biological sciences. This valuable and much-needed teaching tool is highly recommended for adoption! -- Howard Winant, University of California Santa Barbara Race persists as a hierarchic classification, physically marked without biological basis, culturally constructed with real-world consequences. By showing race's deep, long-term rootedness in global, national, economic, legal, medical, linguistic, gender, and other social institutions and practices shaping culture, this invaluable resource methodically and comprehensively explains anthropological concepts underlying that rootedness. -- Bonnie Urciuoli, Hamilton College How Real Is Race? is the essential volume to explain what race is -- and what it isn't. Its strength is its accessible presentation of biological, cultural, and historical perspectives on the racial worldview and its consequences. Updated with today's most compelling data and issues, this remains a necessary read. -- Kristina Wirtz, Western Michigan University; author, Performing Afro-Cuba: Image, Voice, Spectacle in the Making of Race and History Geneticists can only tell us what race isn't, but it takes anthropologists to tell us what race is. In the newest edition of their book, the authors explain race holistically, from biological, historical, legal, and cultural perspectives, with contemporary examples and a critical anthropological gaze. This is certainly an important and timely analysis for any reader in these confusing times, and one that I heartily recommend. -- Jonathan Marks, University of North Carolina, Charlotte Carol Mukhopadhyay, Rosemary Henze, and Yolanda Moses are seriously engaged anthropologists whose co-authored book, How Real is Race? Unraveling Race, Biology, and Culture, is an important contribution. It is an exemplar of socially responsible scholarship committed to serving the public good. More than ever, a compendium of this quality and scope-enriched by a cross-cultural overview--is urgently needed for the life-long learning of a wide range of readers situated across many sectors of society. The contents of the third edition have been enhanced by evidence from the most recent research trends on the difference between the sociocultural life of race and the biology of human variation; the interplay among race, sex, and gender; the effects of racial stratification on public health; and the impact that the racial worldview and its accompanying practices have on academic achievement and immigration policies. At a moment when race has become deeply contentious and dangerously polarizing, we need this book. In a sociopolitical climate in which books on this subject are being censored and banned, we cannot afford to allow the potency and legitimacy of How Real is Race? to be repudiated. -- Faye V. Harrison, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign This essential, updated text demonstrates how the cultural schemas that constitute the North American racial worldview shape what aspects of biology we pay attention to and which we ignore. At a time of polarizing political discourses, students, educators, clinicians, and many others will appreciate the way the authors anticipate and address their questions, carefully separating biological fact from fiction. * Claudia Strauss, Pitzer College *