Race

Race is a fluid term lacking a single agreed upon definition. It boasts a long history, inextricably linked to health, medicine, and the body. As it refers to the parsing of people into groups, tribes, or clans, race has origins rooted in medical antiquity. In his well-known treatise Airs, Waters, and Places, Hippocrates of Kos, the so-called Father of Medicine, apprehended distinct races of people and posited their differences in physical appearance as a product of their customs and the geography and climate of the places they inhabited (Hippocrates 1849, 213, 218; Painter 2010, 9). While the Hippocratic notion of race is very different from our modern version of the term, both versions of the word group people based on their physical features (though we no longer attribute physical features to climates or habits). Today, consciously or unconsciously, we rely on assumptions that certain races of people have shared characteristic skin color, hair texture, eye color, eye and nose shape, and other phenotypical features. This mapping of race onto a person’s body by virtue of their physical features can be a matter of simple observation, but it paves the way for oversimplifications about entire groups of people. More to the point, it can harm, for it facilitates racial profiling and stereotyping. For example, criminality and athleticism—traits that have been “associated with Black American men” are more strongly associated with people who have so-called Afrocentric features—dark skin, a wide nose, wide lips, and coarse hair (Kleider-Offutt, Bond, and Hegerty 2017, 28).