Can someone please explain to me the role of race in anthropology?

There is no such thing as "race" per sé

It's an effect of the innate pattern-recognition process that makes us human.

Human beings are hard-wired to recognize human faces, and then racial "type". (there is no such thing as "race" per sé). In fact, studies show that skin colour is categorized in the human brain before gender is. People know if someone is Black or Asian before they recognize whether they are a man or a woman.

This makes sense from an evolutionary point of view. The first thing that the human brain does when encountering another animal is decide if the other creature is a person, or not. It does this by looking for a human face. So prevalent is this processing that people see faces in all sorts of strange places, from trees and rocks to other planets.

As a survival mechanism, knowing whether that other creature approaching you is a person or a tiger has great value. Taking this a step further, one can see why the brain would then place emphasis on knowing whether the person was part of their tribe, or a stranger; and therefore posing a possible threat.

Skin colour of a markedly different shade than one's own would be an obvious signal that the person is not of one's own tribe, and might be dangerous. This explains why people are notoriously quite poor at recognizing faces amongst other races, and why the cliche that "they all look alike to me" has become trite.

Given then that racial characteristic recognition plays such a dominant role in our initial assessment of strangers, we can understand why naive and unsophisticated observers might allow this lower level processing to dominate the thinking part of their brain, and affect their behavior.

/r/AskAnthropology Thread