# Transcript

AZITA CHELLAPPOO

You might already have some intuitions about what kinds of criteria determine someone’s race. In the cases you’ll turn to after this activity, you’ll be able to test and explore those intuitions. For now, I’ll briefly talk through some possible criteria that have been used in the past as well as get you thinking about how people make judgements about other people’s race.

One criterion is physical appearance. This is readily available information that’s often used to make judgements about the race of other people. People form conclusions about what race someone is based on a combination of physical characteristics like skin colour, facial features, or hair texture. Historically, physical appearance was used by racialists to make supposedly scientific judgements about race. Nowadays, in some societies (including, perhaps, the US and the UK), physical appearance isn’t thought to be necessarily what makes someone a particular race in itself, but instead it’s often assumed to be reliable evidence of someone’s ancestry.

Ancestry is the second criterion I’ll mention. In the US and the UK, for example, ancestry is often taken to be both necessary and sufficient for racial membership. This means that knowing someone’s ancestry would allow you to determine what race they are. However, this view of the relationship between ancestry and race is not universal. In other places, such as some Latin American countries, physical appearance is more important in determining race – so, siblings with different physical characteristics might be assigned to different races despite their identical ancestry. Also, the rules for how someone’s ancestry determines their race will vary across societies.

For example, historically in the US, the so-called ‘one drop’ rule determined the classification of individuals based on ancestry. This was reflected in the passing of laws in some US states in the twentieth century that defined any individual with at least one Black ancestor as Black.

This had a huge impact on people’s lives, in the context of a racially segregated society where someone’s race determined what school they could go to, what jobs they could have, where they could sit on the bus, who they could marry, and so on. This history continues to affect the relationship between ancestry and race in the US today.

Studies have shown that many people in the US with mixed ancestry (for example, who have one white and one Black parent) self-identify as Black and are regarded by others as Black. Former US president Barack Obama is one such example. Despite equal contributions of European and East African ancestry, Obama’s race has often been designated as Black (and sometimes as mixed-race or multiracial, but never as white). He’s been consistently presented as the first Black president of the US, rather than the 44th white president. And, Obama himself revealed that on the 2010 census he had ticked only the box for ‘Black or African American’, rather than multiple boxes, or the box for ‘White’.

Alternative rules for the relationship between ancestry and race have been in operation in different places at various times. For example, in the Dutch East Indies, children of Dutch men and Asian women were counted as Dutch. There are also systems where ‘intermediate’ or mixed racial categories are formally recognised as separate races.

The third criterion I’ll turn to is self-awareness of ancestry. This is different from what someone’s actual ancestry is. For example, individuals might have one idea of what their ancestry is before taking a DNA ancestry test, and another after receiving the results. If self-awareness of ancestry can play a role in determining someone’s race, then it’s possible someone’s race might change after they have learned of the results of a DNA ancestry test. For example, knowing the results might change how someone sees themselves or which race they identify as. You might not have thought about this before, but this is something you’ll come across in the cases that you look at next.

The last criterion I’ll bring up is public awareness of ancestry. In some of the cases you’ll turn to, what people think someone’s ancestry is and what their ancestry actually is can come apart. When you think through your intuitions on these cases, you’ll be able to decide whether you think it’s actual ancestry that matters for determining someone’s race or if it’s what people think someone’s ancestry is. Physical appearance is what’s often used to infer information about someone’s ancestry, but this is not necessarily always reliable. So, someone could be regularly assumed by others to have certain ancestry based on their physical appearance (and therefore be assumed to be a certain race), but if their actual ancestry was known they might be classified as a different race.

Keep these criteria in mind as you go through the cases in the next activity. You might find some of these criteria more plausible than others, and your judgements might change as you work through the cases.