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Race, as a social construct, is a group of people who share similar and distinct physical characteristics. First used to refer to speakers of a common language and then to denote national affiliations, by the 17th century race began to refer to physical (i.e. phenotypical) traits. The term was often used in a general biological taxonomic sense,〔 starting from the 19th century, to denote genetically differentiated human populations defined by phenotype.〔 Social conceptions and groupings of races vary over time, involving folk taxonomies〔See: * * 〕 that define essential types of individuals based on perceived traits. Scientists consider biological essentialism obsolete,〔 and generally discourage racial explanations for collective differentiation in both physical and behavioral traits.〔〔 Even though there is a broad scientific agreement that essentialist and typological conceptualizations of race are untenable, scientists around the world continue to conceptualize race in widely differing ways, some of which have essentialist implications.〔 While some researchers sometimes use the concept of race to make distinctions among fuzzy sets of traits, others in the scientific community suggest that the idea of race often is used in a naive〔 or simplistic way,〔 and argue that, among humans, race has no taxonomic significance by pointing out that all living humans belong to the same species, ''Homo sapiens'', and subspecies, ''Homo sapiens sapiens''.〔〔 Since the second half of the 20th century, the associations of race with the ideologies and theories that grew out of the work of 19th-century anthropologists and physiologists has led to the use of the word ''race'' itself becoming problematic. Although still used in general contexts, ''race'' has often been replaced by other words which are less ambiguous and emotionally charged, such as ''populations'', ''people(s)'', ''ethnic groups'', or ''communities'', depending on context.〔 Provides 8 definitions, from biological to literary; only the most pertinent have been quoted.〕 ==Complications and various definitions of the concept== There is a wide consensus that the racial categories that are common in everyday usage are socially constructed, and that racial groups cannot be biologically defined.〔Templeton, A. R. "The genetic and evolutionary significance of human races". In ''Race and Intelligence: Separating Science from Myth''. J. M. Fish (ed.), pp. 31-56. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002.〕〔Steve Olson, ''Mapping Human History: Discovering the Past Through Our Genes,'' Boston, 2002〕 Nonetheless, some scholars argue that racial categories obviously correlate with biological traits (e.g. phenotype) to some degree, and that certain genetic markers have varying frequencies among human populations, some of which correspond more or less to traditional racial groupings. For this reason, there is no current consensus about whether racial categories can be considered to have significance for understanding human genetic variation. When people define and talk about a particular conception of race, they create a social reality through which social categorization is achieved. In this sense, races are said to be social constructs.〔See: * *〕 These constructs develop within various legal, economic, and sociopolitical contexts, and may be the effect, rather than the cause, of major social situations.〔See: * * * as cited in 〕 While race is understood to be a social construct by many, most scholars agree that race has real material effects in the lives of people through institutionalized practices of preference and discrimination. Socioeconomic factors, in combination with early but enduring views of race, have led to considerable suffering within disadvantaged racial groups.〔 Racial discrimination often coincides with racist mindsets, whereby the individuals and ideologies of one group come to perceive the members of an outgroup as both racially defined and morally inferior.〔 As a result, racial groups possessing relatively little power often find themselves excluded or oppressed, while hegemonic individuals and institutions are charged with holding racist attitudes.〔 Racism has led to many instances of tragedy, including slavery and genocide.〔 In some countries, law enforcement uses race to profile suspects. This use of racial categories is frequently criticized for perpetuating an outmoded understanding of human biological variation, and promoting stereotypes. Because in some societies racial groupings correspond closely with patterns of social stratification, 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.〔〔 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.〔 Accordingly, the racial paradigms employed in different disciplines vary in their emphasis on biological reduction as contrasted with societal construction. In the social sciences, theoretical frameworks such as racial formation theory and critical race theory investigate implications of race as social construction by exploring how the images, ideas and assumptions of race are expressed in everyday life. A large body of scholarship has traced the relationships between the historical, social production of race in legal and criminal language, and their effects on the policing and disproportionate incarceration of certain groups. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Race (human categorization)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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