Physiological features categorize people into races

The argument

Proponents of this position argue that race is not an invention of recent politics but the recognition of differences that are visible, stable, and sorted in much the same way by societies that developed independently of one another. The historical claim comes first. Societies have racially categorized people by physiological features since antiquity, and they continue to do so. In countries as different as Brazil, the US and the UK, people routinely identify one another's race on the basis of skin colour. The argument's reading of that convergence is that a category appearing independently in widely separated societies is tracking something in the world rather than something local to one culture's history. In the US, identification based on skin colour is especially easy because of the migration and colonization history of North America, and the same idea — that outward physical appearance determines one's race — is prevalent in South Africa and the UK. The second strand concerns how early the sorting appears. The idea that physiological features such as skin colour determine race is woven into societies and taught to children at an early age, but on this argument the teaching cannot be the whole story, because the sorting begins before instruction could plausibly account for it. One study has shown that children as young as 3 months old in the US begin to racially categorize people. An infant of that age has no access to the social meanings adults attach to the categories; what it can register is difference in appearance. From the combination of the two — categorisation that recurs across unrelated societies, and categorisation that emerges in infancy — proponents conclude that what is being tracked is a set of real biological differences, and that race is therefore a biological reality rather than a purely social construction.

Premises

Counter-arguments

That societies sort people by visible features shows race is a social practice, not a biological fact. Skin colour and other traits vary continuously across populations and do not carve humanity into discrete genetic groups; geneticists find more variation within any so-called race than between them. Infants noticing differences demonstrates perceptual salience, not biological reality — children also categorise by clothing, accent and gender. The evidence the argument offers, that categorisation is learned and culturally embedded, supports the rival view that race is socially constructed rather than the claim that it is grounded in biology.

Rejecting the premises

People may categorize someone as a certain race by outward appearance, but that person may not identify with that race (e.g. golfer Tiger Woods)