Quiz Results: What is Race?

I just finished grading the first quiz and wanted to note one of the questions that was incorrectly marked fairly often. 

What important fact about racial identity is key to understanding the social context of race?

A) Racial identity is genetically determined and a fundamental natural component of human social identity
B) Racial identity is set in infants as early as three months.
C) Racial identity can change according to the kinds of institutions with which we are connected.
D) Racial identity has no significance in modern America.

The correct response is C, though several of you selected A.  We'll dedicate an entire chapter to this later in the semester, but this is central to sociology, represents one of the disciplines major contributions to our understanding of the world and, from the quiz results, seems to be frequently misunderstood.

I'm going to try and be as concise as possible as many have written volumes on the subject.

Patterns of human genetic variation (i.e. differences) don't show clear boundaries between different human groups, or "races." Each human carries about 30,000 individual genes in their bodies.  Where could anyone draw the line as to which specific gene or genes define race?  Why is one more important than another? What proportion of "Caucasian" genes is enough? Put simply, genetic variation provides little basis for the racial categories we understand.

Also, definitions of race vary widely in time and space. In early US history, many European peoples weren't considered white by American elites. In 1751, Benjamin Franklin wrote:

All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth.

As you can see,  he considered many, who contemporary Americans would have no trouble classifying as white, as non-white.

Further, different parts of the world use very difference racial classification systems.  In recent American history, we have practiced a pattern of racial classification known as hypodescent.  This means that a person's identity is determined by any demonstrable heritage to a stigmatized racial group.  An easy example, President Obama is black, despite his mother being a very white woman from Kansas.  That wasn't important for how most saw him.  What was important was that his father was black, so he was black.  In many Latin American countries, particularly Brazil, such a system seems silly as their classifications, while still shaped by stratification and hierarchy, are more nuanced and accommodate a more diverse spectrum of racial identities.

I know this brief post doesn't do the idea justice, but I had to make some comment that there is very little genetic science that supports the existence of genetically defined races and sociology, anthropology and history clearly demonstrate that race is primarily the product of human belief and behavior.