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Race is classification of humans into large and distinct populations or groups by factors such as heritable phenotypic characteristics or geographic ancestry, but also often influenced by and correlated with traits such as appearance, culture, ethnicity, and socio-economic status. In the early twentieth century the term was often used, in its biological sense, to denote genetically divergent human populations which can be marked by common phenotypic traits. When analyzing skeletal remains, this sense of "race" is still used at times within forensic anthropology, biomedical research, and race-based medicine as proxy for geographic ancestry with some reliability. In addition, law enforcement utilizes race in their attempts to profile wanted suspects and to reconstruct the faces of unidentified remains. In many societies racial groupings correspond closely with patterns of social stratification, and for social scientists studying social inequality, race can be a significant variable. As sociological factors, racial categories may in part reflect subjective attributions, self-identities, and social institutions. Accordingly, the racial paradigms employed by different kinds of biological or social scientists may vary in their emphasis on biological reduction as contrasted with societal construction.

While biological scientists sometimes use the concept of race to make practical distinctions among fuzzy sets of traits, others in the scientific community suggest that the idea of race is often used by the general public in a naive or simplistic way. Among humans, race has no taxonomic significance; all people belong to the same hominid subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens. Regardless of the extent to which race exists, the word "race" is problematic and may carry negative connotations. Social conceptions and groupings of races vary over time, involving folk taxonomies that define essential types of individuals based on perceived sets of traits. Scientists consider biological essentialism obsolete, and generally discourage racial explanations for collective differentiation in both physical and behavioral traits.

As people define and put about different conceptions of race, they actively create contrasting social realities through which racial categorization is achieved in varied ways. In this sense, races are said to be social constructs. These constructs can develop within various legal, economic, and sociopolitical contexts, and at times may be the effect, rather than the cause, of major social situations. Socioeconomic factors, in combination with early but enduring views of race, have led to considerable suffering amongst the disadvantaged racial groups. Intergroup competition fosters ingroup biases against their outgroup. Accordingly, when groups find themselves in competition with their designated outgroups, the more privileged group may subject its disadvantaged counterpart to discriminatory treatment. Racial discrimination often coincides with racist mindsets, whereby the individuals and ideologies of one group come to perceive the members of their outgroup as both racially defined and morally inferior. As a result, racial groups possessing relatively little power often find themselves excluded or oppressed, while the individuals and institutions of the hegemony are charged with holding racist attitudes. Racism has factored into many instances of tragedy, including slavery and genocide. Scholars continue to debate the degrees to which racial categories are biologically warranted and socially constructed, as well as the extent to which the realities of race must be acknowledged in order for society to comprehend and address racism adequately.

Early modern concepts of race

Groups of humans have probably always identified themselves as distinct from other groups, but such differences have not always been understood to be natural, immutable and global. These features are the distinguishing features

1. See:
   • Lie 2004 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFLie2004 (help)
   • Thompson, William (2005). Society in Focus. Boston, MA: Pearson. ISBN 0-205-41365-X. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
   • Gordon, Milton Myron (1964). Assimilation in American life: the role of race, religion, and national origins. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-500896-8.
   • "American Anthropological Association Statement on "Race"". Aaanet.org. 1998-05-17. Retrieved 2009-04-18.
   • Palmié, Stephan (2007). "Genomics, divination, 'racecraft'". American Ethnologist. 34: 205–22. doi:10.1525/ae.2007.34.2.205. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
   • Mevorach, Katya Gibel (2007). "Race, racism, and academic complicity". American Ethnologist. 34: 238. doi:10.1525/ae.2007.34.2.238.
   • Segal, Daniel A (1991). "'The European'_ Allegories of Racial Purity". Anthropology Today. 7 (5). Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland: 7–9. doi:10.2307/3032780.
   • Bindon, Jim. University of Alabama. "Post World War II". 2005. August 28, 2006.
2. See:
   • Gill G. "Does Race Exist? A proponent's perspective". Pbs.org. Retrieved 2009-04-18.
   • Armelagos, George; Smay, Diana (2000). "Galileo wept: A critical assessment of the use of race in forensic anthropolopy" (PDF). Transforming Anthropology. 9: 19–29. doi:10.1525/tran.2000.9.2.19.
   • Risch et al. 2002 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFRischBurchardZivTang2002 (help)
   • Bloche, Gregg M. (2004). "Race-Based Therapeutics". New England Journal of Medicine. 351 (20): 2035–2037. doi:10.1056/NEJMp048271. PMID 15533852.
3. King 2007 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFKing2007 (help): For example, "the association of blacks with poverty and welfare ... is due, not to race per se, but to the link that race has with poverty and its associated disadvantages"–p.75.
4. Schaefer, Richard T. (ed.) (2008). Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity and Society. Sage. p. 1096. ISBN 9781412926942. In many parts of Latin America, racial groupings are based less on the biological physical features and more on an intersection between physical features and social features such as economic class, dress, education, and context. Thus, a more fluid treatment allows for the construction of race as an achieved status rather than an ascribed status as is the case in the United States. {{cite book}}: |author= has generic name (help)
5. Graves 2001 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFGraves2001 (help)
6. ^ Lee et al. 2008 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFLeeMountainKoenigAltman2008 (help): We caution against making the naive leap to a genetic explanation for group differences in complex traits, especially for human behavioral traits such as IQ scores
7. Keita et al. 2004 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFKeitaKittlesRoyalBonney2004 (help)
8. AAPA 1996 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFAAPA1996 (help) Pure races, in the sense of genetically homogeneous populations, do not exist in the human species today, nor is there any evidence that they have ever existed in the past.-p.714
9. ^ Brace 2000 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFBrace2000 (help)
10. Montagu, Ashley (2008 ). "The Concept of Race". American Ethnography Quasimonthly. Retrieved 26 January 2009. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
11. For example, a person who in the United States would be called "Hispanic" or "African American" might be called "Branca" (white) in the racial categorization system commonly used in Brazil.
12. Bamshad & Olson 2003 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFBamshadOlson2003 (help)
13. Sober E (2000). Philosophy of biology (2nd ed.). Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
14. For example, the following statement expresses the official viewpoint of the American Anthropological Association at their web page: "Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g., DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic "racial" groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes. This means that there is greater variation within "racial" groups than between them."
15. ^ Lee 1997 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFLee1997 (help)
16. See, for example, National Research Council (2004). Measuring racial discrimination (Ch. 2). Washington: The National Academies Press.
17. cf. Smaje, C (1997). "Not just a social construct: Theorising race and ethnicity". Sociology. 31 (2): 307–327. doi:10.1177/0038038597031002007. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |author-name-separator= (help); Unknown parameter |author-separator= ignored (help)
18. ^ Harris CI (1995). "Whiteness as property". In K Crenshaw; N Gotanda; G Peller; K Thomas (Eds.) Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (pp. 276 –291), p. 287.
19. ^ Morgan ES, cited in 1997 harvtxt error: no target: CITEREF1997 (help), p. 407.
20. Nobles 2000 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFNobles2000 (help)
21. Smedley 2007 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFSmedley2007 (help); presented at the conference “Race, Human Variation and Disease: Consensus and Frontiers”, sponsored by the American Anthropological Association (AAA). The views expressed are the author's.
22. ^ Sivanandan A, cited in Miles R (2000). "Apropos the idea of 'race' ... again". In L Black; J Solomos (Eds.), Theories of Race and Racism (pp. 125–143). London: Routledge.
23. ^ Crenshaw, KW (1988). "Race, reform, and retrenchment: Transformation and legitimation in antidiscrimination law". Harvard Law Review. 101 (7): 1331–1337. doi:10.2307/1341398. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |author-name-separator= (help); Unknown parameter |author-separator= ignored (help)
24. Conley D (2007). "Being black, living in the red". In PS Rothenberg (Ed.), Race, Class, and Gender in the United States (7th ed.), pp. 350–358. New York: Worth Publishers.
25. The notion of racial hierarchy has ancient origins: "It was Aristotle who first arranged all animals into a single, graded scale that placed humans at the top as the most perfect iteration. By the late 19th century, the idea that inequality was the basis of natural order, known as the great chain of being, was part of the common lexicon." Winfield AG (2007). Eugenics and education in America: Institutionalized racism and the implications of history, ideology, and memory (pp. 45–46, emphasis in original). New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.
26. Taylor DA, Moriarty BF (1987). "Ingroup bias as a function of competition and race". Journal of Conflict Resolution. 31 (1): 192–199.
27. See , Bobo L, Hutchings VL (1996). "Perceptions of racial group competition: Extending Blumer's theory of group position to a multiracial context". American Sociological Review. 61 (6): 951–972. doi:10.2307/2096302.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
28. Appiah KA, cited in Lee (1997) harvtxt error: no target: CITEREFLee1997 (help), pp. 407–408.
29. See also Muffaletto R (2003). "Ethics: A discourse of power". TechTrends(47)6 (pp. 62–66), p. 62.
30. A psychiatric instrument called the "Perceived Racism Scale" "provides a measure of the frequency of exposure to many manifestations of racism ... including individual and institutional"; it also assesses "emotional and behavioral coping responses to racism." McNeilly MD; Anderson MB; Armstead CA; Clark R; Corbett M; Robinson EL; et al. (1996). "The perceived racism scale: A multidimensional assessment of the experience of white racism among African Americans". Ethnicity & Disease 6 1–2, pp. 154–166. Abstract retrieved 15 October 2010.
31. See also Miles (2000).
32. Owens, K.; King, MC (1999). "Genomic Views of Human History". Science. 286 (5439): 451–453. doi:10.1126/science.286.5439.451. PMID 10521333.
33. ^ Gill GW (2000). "Does race exist? A proponent's perspective". NOVA Online. Pbs.org. Retrieved 14 October 2010.
34. "The very naturalness of 'reality' is itself the effect of a particular set of discursive constructions. In this way, discourse does not simply reflect reality, but actually participates in its construction" (Lee, 1997, p. 396). Therefore, as people define race in different ways, they help to create multiple realities of race (Lee 1997) harv error: no target: CITEREFLee1997 (help).