Jack Miller was asked by SPEEDWEEK.com if he’s okay with this number of races. The Australian replied with his natural character: ‘Of course. I’m tired after the season, but I’m being paid to race 44 times a year’.[1]
‘Race’ is a synonym for ancestry but with added connotation of the study of biological and psychological difference. It's one of the most contested concepts of modern times. Race is not only a static thing either; its links to cognitive performance as measured by IQ are influenced by various things such as disease, pollution, or nutritional deficiency.
Indeed, in Dante's Italy razza was used only about animals; for people the word schiatta existed. [...] The English word was borrowed from French, and the speakers of many other European languages also added race to their vocabulary through French mediation, but its distant origin has been a matter of debate for more than a century. Only one fact seemed to be certain, namely that despite the success of race the story began with Italian razza. The debate raged only over whether, in Italian, razza was native (that is, going back to some Latin noun) or whether the Italians had taken it over from somewhere else. As a rule, the etymology of such intractable words remains unsolved forever, but in this case sufficient clarity seems to have been achieved for language historians to be able to give a satisfactory answer. A list of conflicting hypotheses is typical of the state of the art.[2]
The correlation of pigmentation with genetics is so high that pharmaceuticals are given specifically with regard to that difference, called "race" or not (in aspect the word means nothing but its ancestor ‘razza’ which is Italian for [biological] lineage).
"White" in this reference is a denominator, the actual pigmentation isn't white but the term is used to refer to a statistical demographic significance with a markedly fair complexion, which has been corresponded with bone morphology so that typically a professional doing autopsy will be able to designate with high accuracy the pigmentation of the individual from its bones alone.
If you would ask a professional "race?" it would e.g. answer "White" or "Black"; Caucasian being a synonym of the former.
A number of factors come together to form the concept of a race. It however became partly mixed in with 18th Century chauvinism in its historical formation and the heat has hardly left it since.
Research[]
A 2017 content analysis of social research papers found that "race/ethnicity is referenced in a substantial number of journal articles, however it is more frequently treated as a control variable rather than as a core construct." A 1992 study on the use of Race in Medical Research found that "publications about comparative racial research number in the thousands" and that a review of the English-language medical literature revealed "that there is a predilection for making comparisons between black and white patients."
Rhizomata[]
- Ethnicity; Ancestry; Heritage; Background; Locality; Antiracism; Racial politics; speed; graph; geopolitics; ethnic background
- Hyper-racism; Supremacism; Racism;
- Post-racism; Racial equity; Racial egalitarianism; Chinese ideas of race; Korean ideas of race; Jewish ideas of race
- Politicisation of Race