Race and Society

ENGL 257 Culminating Project

By River Seeber

May 25, 2026

Race is a categorization of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into groups [...] The term came into common usage during the 16th century, when it was used to refer to groups [...] characterized by close kinship relations. By the 17th century, the term began to refer to physical [...] traits, and then later national affiliations or perceived ancestry.

Modern science regards race as a social construct, an identity which is assigned based on rules made by society.

— Wikipedia, "Race (human categorization)", emphasis mine.

Race

Many people think of race as being a scientific category. Some even think of it as being one of the taxonomic categories — the categories we draw of all biological organisms based on evolutionary ancestry.

It doesn't help this that the term 'race' is sometimes used as an informal categorization among species, similar to terms like "subspecies" and "strain".[1] Even worse than this is the fact that many of the progenitors of the biological taxonomic system were keenly intent on shoving their concepts of human race into this system, despite the fact that the lines of where one race ends and another begins are entirely arbitrary, and not based on clear lines of distinct ancestry or genetic similarity.[2]

Unfortunately, very few people are aware of this fact. It's widely believed by the public that the reason we have terms like "African", "Asian", "European", and "Native American" are because they form distinct groups which tell us something about a person when they belong to one of those groups. Even if that "something" is only about their genetics. This is not true though.

Would it surprise you to learn that there is more diversity between individual people groups of the "African race" than there is between certain African groups and their European neighbors? That is to say, many Africans are more closely related to Europeans than they are to other Africans![3] These categories are not scientific, but rather social groupings we've invented as a product of history, not of biological diversity.

Oppression

One might wonder why this matters. A grouping once thought to belong to the sciences actually ends up belonging to the humanities department. So what?

The reason we care is that we have started wars in the name of our supposed racial differences. We've committed genocides on the basis of racial categorizations. Even in hubs of Western ideals of democratic freedom and liberty such as the United States, we've totally stratified our societies following the arbitrary lines of modern racial categorizations.

In the past, such violence was often very clear and explicit, such as the genocide of Native Americans in order to make room for European colonizers and the enslaved Africans they brought with them.

Over time, the violence became more implicit, pitting marginalized communities against systemic, Kafka-esque institutions which disproportionately end up hurting non-white people more than their white counterparts. But because there's no instance of a white racist yelling rude profanities at anybody, its easy for those who are unaffected to not see the racism in the system. It's easy for white folks to look at the world around them, the lack of explicit racism (as opposed to the implicit, systemic racism), and declare that "racism is mostly gone in the United States".

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(taxonomy) ↩︎

  2. See The Origin of Race in the USA by PBS Origins ↩︎

  3. This is from the geneticist and science communicator, Adam Rutherford's book "How To Argue With a Racist", which I read a few semesters ago. ↩︎

Written Reflection

  1. What aspect of the class has impacted you? Why?

Two things really impacted me a lot in this class. First was the way that race really is just utterly arbitrary, and that the lines we divide our races on could easily be drawn differently, and that they very well might be drawn differently in the future. What has ended up happening is that our culture chose to divide itself among lines which were advantageous to the people in power. Additionally, I felt impacted by learning the way systemic racism impacts non-white people. We didn't go over it specifically, but I felt that it was emphasized a lot throughout the book There, There by Tommy Orange.

  1. How does your creative project reflect something from the class that you think is important?

I discussed the way that Europeans defined race in such a way as to advance themselves, and to put down other people groups such as Africans and Native Americans — who were perceived as obstacles to be cleared by the Europeans during this time. I also discussed lightly the way that these arbitrary lines have been used to justify horrific events in history — as well as events even into the present day which still continue to occur.