Concepts of the History of Race - Essay Example

Beliefs surrounding this concept maintained that this chain was created by God and was very close to God in terms of perfection. This paper will seek to bring out issues regarding race which range from its history to current views. It will also give an insight as to whether there is a need to replace the term “race” with something else like “ethnicity”.
The etymology of the word “race” indicates that the term means common descent. Intellectual analysis on the book opines that the Europeans sought to define the term race at the Age of Enlightenment as a biological concept.

However, as time went by, scholars tried to define and classify race into types, origins, and correlations (Spiller 45). Concerted efforts by Ember, Peregrine, and Ember show that biomedical researchers, as well as forensic anthropologists, collected and analyzed information on populations and individuals and established that race, denotes distinctions that are scientifically practical (Ember, Ember, & Peregrine 97). In view of Hippocrates and many other thinkers, factors like climate and geography held a very significant place in shaping the physical appearance of different people. Ideally, the 19th-century naturalists made attempts that changed the race from taxonomy into a biological concept using anthropometrics.

Nonetheless, in the early 20th century, tensions between social conservatives and social liberals became paramount. This is because social conservatives believed in innate and hierarchical superiority while social liberals believed in human equality and social change (Spiller 87). With time, social conservatives exacerbated their belief and maintained that certain races portrayed innate inferiority after examining their shortcomings. A number of scientists claimed that they could determine the race of a certain population or an individual by evaluating the subject’s DNA or genes. On the other end, the largest number of scientists understood that race was a social construct. These scientists believed that certain phenotypical expressions of individuals were useful in determining their race (Napolitano 128). Language, culture, and environment also played a primary role in shaping the behavioral characteristics of an individual and they were of great importance in determining the race of that individual (Ember, Ember, & Peregrine 112).

The current views expressed by different people regarding race are different and overwhelming. The authors of this book mention that publications based on race as the subject receive uncomfortable facts, especially with reference to race differences and intelligence. Academic research points out that, as of today, many people including intellectuals and mainstream journalists become highly emotional when they come across race-related debates (Todorova 26).

This means that many historic events revolving around race are always rather disappointing. Other archival resources reveal that different authors, co-authors, and liberals, as well as conservatives, admit that the subject of intelligence and race should hedge out, be disqualified, and be rendered meaningless. Black multiculturalists describe white people as mean and cold by ascertaining that they like manipulating things. On the other side, the same multiculturalists paint black people as empathetic because they entertain love. This difference in IQ colors the existing views regarding race (Napolitano 202).

Arguably, the race is not a cultural construct. Linguists, as well as cultural anthropologists, through research, established that the effects of culture only explained people’s development into adulthood but failed to evaluate them with reference to human evolution and biology. This means that, without the aspect of the environment, culture alone cannot put a strong emphasis on race (Ember, Ember, & Peregrine 138). This cultural deficiency in determining the race of a group or a particular individual brought about encouraging academics whose function was to help break away from the static taxonomical classifications regarding race. The term race is valid mainly because the growing awareness about race is markedly generating different styles of the way different people of different races think. For instance, greater suggestibility relies heavily on emotional and rhetoric manipulation when it comes to black people due to their inadequate ability to think in terms of cause, objective, and effect (Todorova, 32).

In conclusion, it is agreeable that race plays a major role in our lives. For example, on the issue of race validity, most people consider race since it gives a particular level of distinction between the whites and the blacks (Spiller 211). Research findings observe that whites possess a higher level of IQ as opposed to their counterparts, blacks. These differences brought about by race raise debates as to whether to change the term “race” to something else like “ethnicity” in order to dismiss negative effects that come along with race-related distinctions (Ember, Ember, & Peregrine 91). Therefore, race should assume the term ethnicity for the benefit of societal well-being. Upon drawing all these facts together, it becomes clear that there should be a paradigm shining a light on the optical illusion for discovering racial sameness.
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