Are There Races or Only Racism?

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Are there races- or only racism? Race is often described as the classification of people into geographically determined groups that share a common gene pool and therefore physical characteristics. When looking at phenotypical variation in human beings, on a surface level it seems that there are straightforward differences that constitute racial divides, for example we classify some people as black and others as white depending on their skin colour. This classification and division of people into certain racial groups has had enormous social and political implications. Many argue that despite the genetic differences between human beings they cannot be 'meaningfully divided into a set of non-overlapping categories called races' (Boyd & Silk 2006: 424). Although it is plain to see that race is very much real in a social dynamic, there is an ongoing debate about whether it is a scientifically valid concept. Social Darwinism sought to integrate the principles of Darwin's evolutionary theory into a social and political context and was inherently racist. Francis Galton's 'Eugenics' argues that some human beings are more evolved than others and therefore superior, and goes to the extent of saying that whites, blacks, Amerindians and Asians are all different species, static and created by god. Many opposers of evolutionary theory point to Eugenics and the principles of Social Darwinism and claim that the theory of evolution and natural selection is therefore racist. However, this is a the result of a misinterpretation of Darwin, Eugenics and Social Darwinism are a perversion of Darwin's ideas and have no scientific basis. Darwin hypothesized that all races share a common ancestry and cannot be classified as different species, and the variation between people is mostly due to cultural differences not biological ones. Although biological anthropologists today unanimously
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