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The Concept of Race

 

Gill believes that race can be identified through bones. He argues that just like bones can determine the age or sex of the person, they can also determine their race. Gill states that "I am more accurate at assessing race from skeletal remains than from looking at living people standing before me" (Gill). Dr. George W. Gill believes that race is still a useful concept for anthropologists in the sense of classifying skeletal features such as the nose, mouth, femur, and cranium. .
             Furthermore, Dr. Gill also states that "the other half of the biological anthropology community believes either that the traditional racial categories for humankind are arbitrary and meaningless, or that at a minimum there are better ways to look at human variation than through the racial lens" (Gill). Dr. Loring Brace is a part of this half. Brace is an American anthropologist at the University of Michigan. He argues that there is no such thing as a natural division of race. Almost half a millennium ago, it was a "known" fact that the world was flat. Brace states that our views regarding race are based on the same sort of common sense, which is just blindingly incorrect. As regards to skin color, Europeans and Chinese are relatively similar to one another than either is to darker skinned Africans. Dr. Loring Brace says "If we test the distribution of the widely known ABO blood-group system, then Europeans and Africans are closer to each other than either is to Chinese" (Brace). This proves that those with very different skin colors, often referred to as different races, are in fact more related to each other than those with the same skin color.
             The last perspective I am going to talk about is that of Professors Michael Omi and Howard Winant. Omi is a Professor of ethnic studies at the University of California-Berkley, and Winant is a Professor of sociology at Temple University.


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