The Human Nature Review 2002 Volume 2: 166-168 ( 1 May )
URL of this document http://human-nature.com/nibbs/02/graves.html
Book Review
The Emperor's New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium
by Joseph L. Graves, Jr.
Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 2001
Reviewed by Scott MacEachern, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Bowdoin
College, Brunswick, ME 04011, USA.
Racial identities and the characteristics of different racial groups have been
central to many of the public and intellectual debates about human nature that
have periodically convulsed the United States and the rest of the Western
world. The policy implications of race have been significant in large part
because the biological associations of the concept provide a powerful marker
for what is alleged to be intrinsic and unchanging in human populations,
against those elements of our individual and collective natures that are
amenable to modification through upbringing and experience. Western racial
typologies can perhaps best be thought of as reified arguments over how groups
of people should treat one another, rather than as the analytical expressions
of fundamental biological realities. These arguments are most vehement in
situations of conflict, whether physical, social or political, and so we can
anticipate that examinations of race will be attended by a considerable degree
of controversy.
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