On "race" and ethnicity

On the Anthro-L email list someone asked:

For the uninitiated, could someone please tell me what distinction anthropologists make between race & ethnicity?

First have a look at a post on this blog some time back: "Paging Dr. Gupta: ethnic skin?!?"

Now then, briefly:

Both race and ethnicity are cultural categories used for sorting humans into groups.  The "race" category alleges that biological features can be used to do this, but it is not valid.  "Race" is equivalent to "subspecies," and it doesn't work even for non-human animals. For instance, the "Florida panther" is an alleged subspecies of mountain lion, Puma concolor coryii. It is a figment of people's imagination, although... the informal designation might be useful for conservation purposes: "the panthers that happen to live in Florida need to be protected."  The taxonomic label is simply invalid.

Ethnic group, as a category, alleges that people share language and culture, at least partly or mostly due to their having a common origin, coming from a place.  "African-American" comes to mind, of course. The Garifuna in Central America are an interesting example, because many of them appear to be of African descent, but they speak an Arawakan language: a nice example of the independent variability of biology and culture.

By the way, in the US at least, SAE (standard average European) is the unmarked ethnic category.  Other people belong to "ethnic groups," but not them (us?).  This is one facet of the trap Gupta fell into.  Of course, to be human is to belong to an ethnic group: without language and culture, we are not human.

More anthropological confusion

In last night's debate between Massachusetts Senate candidates Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown, Brown told the audience "The professor said she is a Native American, a person of color, and you can see she's not."

You can "see" that she has no Native American ancestry? Really? I guess Brown has some kind of special vision that allows him to see into people's DNA. Or something. I don't know if Warren has Native American ancestry or not, but I do know that you can't just look at someone and tell. As anthropologists have demonstrated, there is no reliable way to place people into the imaginary categories that we call "races."

And...  Given what we know about gene flow in the United States, there's a better than one in ten chance that Brown himself is African-American.  This is because placement in the culturally constructed category of "African-American" in the US is determined by what anthropologist Marvin Harris called the Hypodescent Rule: any [known] African ancestry makes you African-American.

Where do we come from?

This map from the US Census shows, by county, the majority ancestral group for the people of that county.

One likely surprise: Purple represents African-American ancestry. Note the broad swath of purple running through the South from Louisiana to Virginia.  Enjoy!