Social Construct Of Race Imposes Biology
"So humans are really really good, or at least Western traditionally educated humans are really, really good at categorizing things into types." Jennifer Raff. She’s an anthropologist at the University of Kansas. Raff spoke last month at New York University’s Journalism Institute.
詹妮弗·拉弗（Jennifer Raff）是堪薩斯大學的人類學家。上個月，拉弗在紐約大學新聞學院發表演講時講到，「所以人類真的很厲害，或者至少是受過西方傳統教育的人真的很擅長把東西分成不同的類型。」
"And if you go back through the history of physical anthropology, which we now call ourselves biological anthropologists to distance ourselves from that history, we as a discipline have a lot to answer for. Because we were the ones who measured crania, measured skulls, to try to come up with...we called it the Caucasoid, and the Negroid and the Mongoloid types, right, this ideal specimen of a cranium that fit these perfect measurements. And that was the type. And we tried to fit in then every other person into one of these categories, and that...really influenced eugenics."
「如果你回顧體質人類學的歷史，現在我們稱自己為生物人類學家是為了讓我們遠離那段歷史。但是作為一門學科，我們仍然有很多問題要解答。這是因為是我們測量過頭骨及頭蓋骨，試圖得出它們屬於……我們稱之為高加索人，黑人和蒙古人的哪一個類型。對，理想的頭蓋骨標本完美地符合這些測量數據。就是這樣。我們試圖把其他每一個人都歸入其中一個類別，這實際上影響了優生學。」
"We still have that notion, are you this group, are you that group, when in reality we’re mixtures, most of us are very mixed. We have lots of ancestry from lots of populations. So if we can stop thinking of these categories as these fixed entities, we』ll get somewhere."
「我們仍然有這樣的觀念，你屬於這類種族嗎，你屬於那類種族嗎，實際上，我們每個人都是混合種族，大多數人都是「混血兒」。我們的祖先來自不同的種族。所以，如果我們能停止把這些類別看作是固定的群體，我們就會有所作為。」
Raff later noted that race does involve biology—but as an effect. "But that doesn’t mean that these racial categories aren’t real in some sense. And what I mean by that is, yes, they are culturally constructed categories, but they actually have biological effects...when we create the race 』black』 or 』African-American』 or whatever we’re going to call it, we put people into that category regardless of their genetic background, right?"
隨後，拉弗指出，種族確實涉及生物學—但是是作為一種影響來講。「但這並不意味著這些種族類別在某種意義上是不存在的。我的意思是，是的，它們從文化角度構建的類別，但事實上，它們產生了生物效應……當我們創造出『黑人』或『非洲裔美國人』或任何其它叫法的種族時，我們就不管他們的遺傳背景如何而把他們納入了這一類別，對嗎？」
"So, I always come back to this example: President Obama is just as much Irish as he is African-Am-, but we code him as black, right..., when we do that, when we categorize and classify people—that can have biological effects. We know that stress levels in African-Americans are chronically high, because of racism, because of structural racism, these categories that we』ve created, right? That is biological, that’s real. It may not be because of the genetic variants that they had or there may be some complicated interaction there, but these categories that we create, these social categories, have biological effects."
「所以，我總是提到這個例子：歐巴馬總統既有是愛爾蘭血統，又是非裔美國人，但我們稱他為黑人，對嗎……當我們這樣做的時候，當我們對人進行分類時—可能會產生生物效應。」我們知道，長期以來，因為種族主義、結構性種族主義這些我們創造的類別，非裔美國人的壓力水平都很高，對嗎？這在生物學上是真實存在的。這可能不是因為它們的遺傳變異，或者它們之間存在著一些複雜的相互作用。但我們創造的這些類別，這些社會類別，產生了生物效應。」