Race, as a social construction, involves persons who have similar distinctive features and characteristics. It was initially used to identify the speakers of a similar lingual tongue and also to identify their national affiliations. However, it was during the 17th century that it was used to refer to the specific physical traits. In the biological setting, it is a term that essentially was used in general taxonomy. This taxonomy use was initiated more so during the 19th century to classify the different genes as defined by the population’s phenotypes. The definition further grew and advanced as the Europeans ventured the various parts of the world and met more different people, they focused and analyzed their different cultural, physical as well as social practices.
The slave trade era, commonly referred to as the Atlantic slave trade, saw the rise of categorization of the various human groups and led to the justification of African slaves. In biology, race is used cautiously as it is a rather ambiguous word. It is used synonymously with the term subspecies as in the case of mammals whereby, it is the taxonomic unit right after the species unit (Anemone, 2011).
Population geneticists overtime have held debates on how the population concept can be a basis for the conception of a new race. In order to …show more content…
In the sense that, race is highly connected to the behavior and attributes of a given group of persons or population. It is such that, their cultural, social and physical differences are what sets them aside from each other thus enabling their classification in the various distinctive groups. In this token, the new definition of race is very much closely associated to the traditional view having opposed the biological concept behind the definition of race altogether (Imani,