You Can’t Tell Race by How You Look
2002-12-20
A new study shows that physical characteristics such as skin or hair color don’t necessarily reveal a person’s race. People who appear white may genetically be mainly African, while people who look black may genetically be European or Amerindian.
“There is wide agreement among anthropologists and human geneticists that, from a biological standpoint, human races do not exist,” says researcher Sergio Pena. “Yet races do exist as social constructs.”
Much of the research was done in Brazil, where the population comes from three separate ethnic groups: the original Amerindians, Europeans, and Africans. These groups have inter-married and inter-bred, yet some Brazilians are regarded as white, others as black.
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