Race, Social Construction and Mortality

Thanks to many of the posts examining race over at Living Anthropologically , I got turned onto Lance Gravlee’s 2009 article, “Race Becomes Biology.” There are a lot of reasons to like the article, but in particular, he brings attention to a recurrent problem I have when talking about race to students. Students definitely do usually interpret the traditional anthropological critique of race as “oh, anthropologists say race doesn’t exist, so it’s not important.” And while that’s clearly not what I’m arguing in class, it’s painstakingly difficult to clearly articulate the nuance.