How Real Is Race?

A timely and much-needed update to a brilliantly clear integration of approaches to race and racism from biology, history, linguistics and social science that enables us to grasp human differences and commonalities across physical and cultural dimensions, while revealing how these are structured by and sustain hierarchies of power and privilege. Contentious debates about the very meaning of race rage across nearly every aspect of social organization and cultural life. How Real is Race? offers a wide-ranging and accessible account that deconstructs the concept of race and allows us to fully grasp its multiple and contradictory meanings. By doing so, it challenges the prevailing ""racial worldview"" and encourages us to move beyond it. Geneticists can only tell us what race isn't, but it takes anthropologists to tell us what race is. In the newest edition of their book, the authors explain race holistically, from biological, historical, legal, and cultural perspectives, with contemporary examples and a critical anthropological gaze. This is certainly an important and timely analysis for any reader in these confusing times, and one that I heartily recommend. How Real Is Race? is destined to be a leading anthropology text. It deepens our understanding of race and racism and clarifies many current debates over topics such as immigration, affirmative action, and even evolution. At a time when racism is resurgent in United States and beyond, this work explains key issues and themes in a very accessible and commonsense way and also draws on the most advanced knowledge from both the social and biological sciences. This valuable and much-needed teaching tool is highly recommended for adoption! How Real Is Race? is the essential volume to explain what race is -- and what it isn't. Its strength is its accessible presentation of biological, cultural, and historical perspectives on the racial worldview and its consequences. Updated with today's most compelling data and issues, this remains a necessary read. Race is the elephant in the room of American social life. In this masterful work, the authors continue their work of dismantling racial misconceptions and explaining how they act to influence society through false racial notions in culture, education, and health. This book provides us with a program to usher the elephant out the door. This is a critical read for our times. Race persists as a hierarchic classification, physically marked without biological basis, culturally constructed with real-world consequences. By showing race's deep, long-term rootedness in global, national, economic, legal, medical, linguistic, gender, and other social institutions and practices shaping culture, this invaluable resource methodically and comprehensively explains anthropological concepts underlying that rootedness. The third edition of How Real is Race? is better and more relevant than ever. The authors continue to frame their analysis with a biocultural, cross-cultural perspective on race. It courageously tackles how race shapes the wealth, health, and well-being of people as well as the lives, livelihoods, and DNA of social groups that have nothing to do with race as biology and everything to do with the construct of race impacting individual and collective bodies. With new and revised chapters, this edition focuses more on 'unraveling' the ideology and institutions of race while keeping its distinctive biocultural approach, which makes this a critical anthropological project. The authors intentionally open the conversation to a broad audience in and outside the academy. This book is needed now more than ever. How Real Is Race? is one of the most essential books about the intersections of race, racism, and human diversity. The authors' thoughtful, proven exercises help readers to think more profoundly and synthetically. I hope this new, updated edition is read and used widely by teachers, students, and everyone else. Carol Mukhopadhyay, Rosemary Henze, and Yolanda Moses are seriously engaged anthropologists whose co-authored book, How Real is Race? Unraveling Race, Biology, and Culture, is an important contribution. It is an exemplar of socially responsible scholarship committed to serving the public good. More than ever, a compendium of this quality and scope-enriched by a cross-cultural overview--is urgently needed for the life-long learning of a wide range of readers situated across many sectors of society. The contents of the third edition have been enhanced by evidence from the most recent research trends on the difference between the sociocultural life of race and the biology of human variation; the interplay among race, sex, and gender; the effects of racial stratification on public health; and the impact that the racial worldview and its accompanying practices have on academic achievement and immigration policies. At a moment when race has become deeply contentious and dangerously polarizing, we need this book. In a sociopolitical climate in which books on this subject are being censored and banned, we cannot afford to allow the potency and legitimacy of How Real is Race? to be repudiated.