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Race and Diversity

An old-fashioned set of concepts related to notion of ancestral lineage, useful in small scale societies to extend notion of connectedness/distance of connection to strangers. In nation states, race categories became way of maintaining stratification. In US conflation of genotype with phenotype, genetics with heritage, has us stuck with ambivalence of maintaining race as a social construction or abandoning it altogether.

Social Constructions of Race

Brazilian multiplicity and changeability of races.
Japan ancestral, rather than biological, imputation of race.

Relationship betwen Race and Racism

Hypodescent in US and other Caste societies

Descendants are ascribed as belonging to the same class as the least powerful of their ancestors. Octaroons, "...single drop of blood."

Zenophobias - Zenophilia

Fear of 'the others'. Notions of hospitality, structuring alliance.

US Census confusions - race, language, ethnicity, history and 'whatever'

Race and Class - social and political dynamics of stratification vs. obscuring explanations for it.

Lineage/Race and diversity of health/body - Thallasemia, Huntingdon's Chorea, Sickle Cell, Melanomas, Kuru etc --- Sherpa/Andean high alt accommodation, Nilotic body/Inuit body,

Grade/Clade - artifical borders, functional (who's function) divisions that have smooth transitions (African/Asian/European).

n

One of these men is not from Africa.