| Chapter 1: | Reconsiderations of Race, Ethnicity, and Identity: Transnational Migrants in Post–World War II Global Society |
and values—to supposedly measure human differences of intelligence. In the twenty-first century, race scientists persist in promoting these alleged heritable race-based characteristics. As a result, even today it is very difficult for people not to evaluate human beings on the basis of skin color, or judge their moral, physical, and intellectual abilities irrespective of race.
But, as the world globalizes, such attitudes are becoming harder to maintain. These days there is more and more miscegenation—to use the archaic term. It is hard to categorize the children of such mixed unions. Historically, in the United States, institutions like the “one-drop rule” prevented mixed people from ever being classified as “white.” Under this custom, for example, a person with any African ancestry at all would be classified as “black” for all legal purposes. Remnants of this still linger. The best contemporary example is Barack Obama. Regardless of him being a child of a European American mother and an African father, he is often called the “First Black President.” But in Brazil there are many different skin-color-based classifications of people and terms for them (e.g., Harris 1964; Hasenbalg 1991). Some say there are upwards of two hundred such words in Brazilian Portuguese. What is the significance for these different categorizations? Are there really any inherent biological differences between the races? Apparently not. Again, in the 1998 statement of the American Anthropological Association on race, we see that:
Many people, and most anthropologists, then, believe that skin-color-based races do not exist as biologically identifiable entities. However, as social categories, such fictions persist, and for all practical purposes are