Racial classification

Race is the classification of humans into groups based on physical traits, ancestry, genetics or social relations, or the relations between them. First used to refer to speakers of a common language and then to denote national affiliations, by the 17th century race began to refer to physical (i.e. phenotypical) traits. The term was often used in a general biological taxonomic sense, starting from the 19th century, to denote genetically differentiated human populations defined by phenotype.

Social conceptions and groupings of races vary over time, involving folk taxonomies that define of individuals based on perceived traits. Scientists consider biological essentialism obsolete, and generally discourage racial explanations for collective differentiation in both physical and behavioral traits.

Even though there is a broad scientific agreement that essentialist and typological conceptualizations of race are untenable, scientists around the world continue to conceptualize race in widely differing ways, some of which have essentialist implications. While some researchers sometimes use the concept of race to make distinctions among fuzzy sets of traits or observable differences in behaviour that has not been invalidated as a taxonomic construct, others in the scientific community suggest that the idea of race often is used in a naive or simplistic way, and argue that, among humans, race has no taxonomic significance by pointing out that all living humans belong to the same species, Homo sapiens, and subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens.

Since the second half of the 20th century, the association of race with the ideologies and theories that grew out of the work of 19th-century anthropologists and physiologists has led to the use of the word race itself becoming problematic. Although still used in general contexts, race has often been replaced by less ambiguous and emotionally charged synonyms: populations, people(s), ethnic groups, or communities, depending on context.

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