Question

Mixed Blood
JEFFERSON M. FISH
Summary This article illustrates how the American concept of race is a cultural construction, not a biological reality. Fish explains how there are no races among humans, because the concept of race relates to individuals who mate but can bear no fertile offspring. Clearly, this is not true of present-day humans. Human beings form a single species.
Our evident variations in physical appearance around the globe has occurred through the processes of random mutation, natural selection, and genetic drift (accidental selection). Most traits that Americans think of as racial, such as skin color, are adaptive to differences in environmental conditions.
If races are not biologically distinguishable groups, what are they? They are what are known as "folk classifications" of people based on culturally selected criteria. People everywhere classify things in folk taxonomies, but classifications of the same things may vary from society to society. For example, Americans classify avocados as vegetables and eat them in salads. Brazilians classify avocados as fruits and eat them with lemon and sugar for dessert.
Although there are many ways in which people could classify each other, such as by body shape for example, many Americans learn to group each other into "races" based primarily on skin color (largely "white," "Asian," "black," or "Latino") and that these groups are rooted in biological reality. Yet at the same time, there is a history of classifying people according to hypo-descent, another social construction that is more about perceived ancestry. Many Americans still tend to rank races; white is highest, followed by Asian, Hispanic (Latino), and black. Children are allocated the racial classification of their lowest- (hypo) ranking parent. If your mother is classified as black and your father white, you might still be classified as black no matter what you look like.
This is in stark contrast to Brazilians, for example, who classify people into tipos (types) on the basis of what they look like. Examples include loura (completely blond), preta (dark skin, broader nose), sarar (tight curly blond or red hair, blue eyes, broad nose, and thick lips), and cabo verde (straight black hair, dark skin, brown eyes, narrow nose, and thin lips). The children of a Brazilian couple could be classified into different tipos if each child looks different.
The American conception of race is beginning to change as more people of different "races" intermarry and immigrants whose racial identities are difficult to classify by the American system enter the country. "Other" is a fast-growing category of racial identity.
According to Fish in "Mixed Blood," North Americans fail in their attempt to classify people into races because they ignore important physical differences such as body shape (rounded and lanky, for example).

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