What race is and what it is not
Racial categories do not provide an accurate picture of human biological variation. Variation exists within and among populations across the planet, and groups of individuals can be differentiated by patterns of similarity and difference, but these patterns do not align with socially-defined racial groups (such as whites and blacks) or continentally-defined geographic clusters (such as Africans, Asians, and Europeans). What has been characterized as “race” does not constitute discrete biological groups or evolutionarily independent lineages. Furthermore, while physical traits like skin color and hair texture are often emphasized in racial classification, and assumptions are often made about the pattern of genetic diversity relative to continental geography, neither follows racial lines. The distribution of biological variation in our species demonstrates that our socially-recognized races are not biological categories.
While human racial groups are not biological categories, “race” as a social reality — as a way of structuring societies and experiencing the world — is very real. The racial groups we recognize in the West have been socially, politically, and legally constructed over the last five centuries. They developed in tandem with European colonial expansion and the emergence of American and European societies with well-documented histories of being shaped and structured by racial hierarchies, power inequities, economic exploitation, dispossession, displacement, genocide, and institutional racism. These practices are rooted in assumptions of innate, natural differences between Europeans and other peoples, and systems of racial classification are intimately tied to histories of European settler colonialism, empire, and slavery. Classifying human beings into different races has never been wholly innocent, unbiased, or apolitical; racial classification has long served to justify exploitation, oppression, discrimination, and structural racism. Notably, racial categories have changed over time, reflecting the ways that societies alter their social, political and historical make-ups, access to resources, and practices of oppression.