What is race?

Race from different perspectives: The biological definition of race is "a geographically isolated breeding population that shares certain characteristics in higher frequencies than other populations of that species, but has not become reproductively isolated from other populations of the same species."

The Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association's Statement on Race says that every time that "different groups have come into contact, they have interbred. The continued sharing of genetic materials has maintained all of humankind as a single species." Therefore, "physical variations in the human species have no meaning except in the social ones that humans put on them."

If there are no biological differences between humans, why does the concept of race exist?

Peruvian Sociologist Anibal Quijano defines race as "a mental construction that expresses the basic experience of colonial domination and pervades the more important dimensions of global power, including its specific rationality: Eurocentrism."

UC Berkeley Law Professor Ian F. Haney Lopez defines race "as a vast group of people loosely bound together by historically contingent, socially significant elements of their morphology and/or ancestry".

Race is a concept of society that insists there is a genetic significance behind human variations in skin color that transcends out ward appearance. However, race has no scientific merit outside of sociological classification. There are no significant genetic variations within the human species to justify the division of "races."

"The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, — this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa; he does not wish to bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he believes that Negro blood has yet a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without losing the opportunity of self-development."

- W.E.B. DuBois