How Real Is Race?: Unraveling Race, Biology, and Culture with Carol C. Mukhopadhyay and Rosemary Henze (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025)

Tune in to this discussion about How Real Is Race?: Unraveling Race, Biology, and Culture by Carol C. Mukhopadhyay, Rosemary Henze, and Yolanda T. Moses (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025)

Biologically speaking, there is no such thing as race. Yet this seems to contradict the experiences of people in the United States and other countries where racial classification is used daily, by individuals and institutions. Race still matters, whether in wealth accumulation, educational achievement, health, the legal system, or in personal safety. How can race not be real when we experience its effects every day?

Mukhopadhyay, Henze, and Moses systematically deconstruct the myth of race as biology and address the reality of race as a cultural invention, drawing on biocultural, historical, and cross-cultural anthropological perspectives. In doing so, they shed light on the intricate interplay among race, biology, culture, power, and stratification. Part I, “The Fallacy of Race as Biology,” unravels the myth that races are biologically valid divisions of humanity. Part II, “Culture Creates Race,” explores race as a social construction; the emergence of the racial worldview as ideological justification for inequality; and how social processes, especially restrictions on interracial sex and marriage, maintained visible markers of racial hierarchy. Part III, “Contemporary Issues,” examines current manifestations of racial stratification including the educational achievement gap, health disparities, and how the language of race embodies and reinforces a racial worldview.

Dr. Mukhopadhyay is a cultural anthropologist whose specialties are gender, family, sexuality, race, cultural diversity, multicultural education, cognitive anthropology, ethnographic decision-modeling, theory and methodology. Her research has focused on gendered activities, in households, politics, music, and science & engineering (STEM). This has involved fieldwork in both the United States and India.

Dr. Rosemary Henze is an educational anthropologist whose teaching, research, and educational projects seek to enhance social justice and equity in education. She applies concepts and methods from anthropology and linguistics to the study of race relations, immigration and multilingualism, Islamophobia, and the spread of English, among other topics.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

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