Anthropologist Jennifer Raff argues that race is culturally created, but has biological consequences.

人类学家珍妮弗·拉夫认为，种族的概念是由文化创造的，但也具有生物学的影响。

撰文播音：史蒂夫·米尔斯基（Steve Mirsky）

翻译：邱燕宁

审校：张清越

“So humans are really really good, or at least Western traditionally educated humans are really, really good at categorizing things into types.” 

“西方传统教育下的人类真的很擅长对事物进行归类。”

Jennifer Raff. She’s an anthropologist at the University of Kansas. Raff spoke last month at New York University’s Journalism Institute.

Jennifer Raff说。她是勘萨斯大学的人类学家。Raff上个月在纽约大学新闻学院发表了讲话。

“And if you go back through the history of physical anthropology, which we now call ourselves biological anthropologists to distance ourselves from that history, we as a discipline have a lot to answer for. Because we were the ones who measured crania, measured skulls, to try to come up with…we called it the Caucasoid, and the Negroid and the Mongoloid types, right, this ideal specimen of a cranium that fit these perfect measurements. And that was the type. And we tried to fit in then every other person into one of these categories, and that…really influenced eugenics. 

“如果你回顾一下人类生理学的历史就会发现，作为一门学科，我们需要对很多问题负责。我们现在称自己为人类生物学家，以便与那段历史保持距离。我们是那些测量了头盖骨的人，并基于此把人类分为高加索人种，黑人和蒙古人种，对吧，这个理想的头盖骨样本符合这些完美的测量，我们就把它称为一种类型。我们试着把每个人都归入这些类别，这直接导致了优生学的出现。

“We still have that notion, are you this group, are you that group, when in reality we’re mixtures, most of us are very mixed. We have lots of ancestry from lots of populations. So if we can stop thinking of these categories as these fixed entities, we’ll get somewhere.” 

“我们仍然有这样的想法，‘你们是这个群体吗?你们是那个群体吗?’而实际上，我们都是杂合体，我们大多数人都混杂了不同的血统。我们有很多来自不同族群的祖先。因此，如果我们能停止将这些类别视为这些固定实体，我们才能有所突破。”

Raff later noted that race does involve biology—but as an effect.  

拉夫后来指出，种族确实涉及到生物学，但这是一种对生物学的影响。

“But that doesn’t mean that these racial categories aren’t real in some sense. And what I mean by that is, yes, they are culturally constructed categories, but they actually have biological effects…when we create the race ‘black’ or ‘African-American’ or whatever we’re going to call it, we put people into that category regardless of their genetic background, right? 

这并不意味着这些种族类别在某种意义上是不真实的。我的意思是，是的，它们是文化建构的类别，但它们实际上具有生物效应。当我们创造出“黑人”或“非洲裔美国人”或其他我们称之为“黑人”的种族概念时，我们把人们归入这一类，而不管他们的基因背景如何，对吧?

“So, I always come back to this example: President Obama is just as much Irish as he is African-Am-, but we code him as black, right…, when we do that, when we categorize and classify people—that can have biological effects. We know that stress levels in African-Americans are chronically high, because of racism, because of structural racism, these categories that we’ve created, right? That is biological, that’s real. It may not be because of the genetic variants that they had or there may be some complicated interaction there, but these categories that we create, these social categories, have biological effects.” 

“所以，我总是会想起这个例子:奥巴马总统既是非洲裔美国人，也是爱尔兰人，但我们把他定义为黑人，对吧……当我们这样做，当我们对人进行分类和分类的时候，这些做法可能真的具有生物效应。”我们知道非裔美国人的压力水平长期处于高位，这是因为种族主义，因为结构性种族主义，因为我们创造了这些类别，对吧?这种影响是生物学上的，是真实的。这可能不是因为他们有基因变异或者可能有一些复杂的相互作用，而是因为我们创造的这些类别，这些社会类别具有生物效应。