Roundtable on Race and Racism -An Interdisciplinary Conversation

Nov. 13, 2004

OSU Memorial Union Rm 209, 1-5 PM

Sunil Khanna, Anthropology

"The biological (mis)constructions of race"

In this talk, I explain the biological basis of human variation and highlight that human beings come in a wide variety of sizes, shapes, colors, and forms -- or, because we are visually oriented primates, it certainly seems that way. On this basis, we have been told that we belong to larger, often confusing, units called "races." The history of the study of races is, to a large extent, the pursuit of those human races -- the attempt to identify the small number of distinct kinds of people on earth. In this process, we often use biology as a "scapegoat" for our racist explanations of human differences.