Race in Latin America

category to understand human biological diversity. Humans vary to some extent in their DNA and their outward physical appearance or phenotype, but this diversity cannot be organized into “racial groups” or “races,” even if some genetic and phenotypical variation seems to correlate very broadly with continental geography. Humans are too similar genetically and intracontinental genetic variation is too great to be able to categorize humans into races. So race is a set of ideas about human similarity and difference. But what kind of ideas? Scholars hold different views (Wade 2002b:ch. 1). This is partly because, as Goldberg says, “Race is not a static concept with a single sedimented meaning”; in fact as a signifier it is “almost, but not quite empty” (1993:80–81). While the word “race” began to appear in European languages from about the 14th century, its meaning has changed greatly since then. Banton (1987) traces how the concept first referred to genealogical linkages between a related set of people (or animals). This was “race as lineage”: all the descendants of a single ancestor or group of ancestors were connected genealogically and thus of the same lineage or race; physical appearance was not a key feature. Before the 19th century, European representations of Andean people did not show them as physically different from Europeans (D. Poole 1997: ch. 2). From the late 18th century, there was a shift to the idea of race as “type,” in which humans were categorized into a few racial types (African, European, Mongol, etc.), seen as primordial and relatively fixed; physical appearance was key to identifying racial type. This was the era of so-called scientific racism, when scientists developed “race” as a key biological category for understanding human physical variation and behavior; they legitimated racial hierarchies in which Europeans were at the top. During the 20th century, scientific racism was slowly dismantled, being mainly replaced, among scholars, by the concept of race as a “social construction,” a set of ideas about humans which can have very powerful social consequences such as racial discrimination and racial violence. At the same time, so-called cultural racism has been identified, in which categories of people familiar from the older conceptions Race in Latin America