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

“所以人类真的很好，或者至少西方传统受过教育的人类真的非常善于将事物归类为类型。”

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

詹妮弗拉夫。她是堪萨斯大学的人类学家。拉夫上个月在纽约大学新闻学院发表演讲。

“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.

“如果你回顾体质人类学的历史，我们现在称自己为生物人类学家，使我们远离那段历史，我们作为一门学科有很多可以回答的问题。因为我们是那些测量颅骨，测量头骨，试图想出来的人......我们把它称为Caucasoid，而Negroid和Mongoloid类型，右边，这个理想的颅骨标本适合这些完美的测量。这就是那种类型。我们试图让所有其他人融入其中一个类别，并且......真正影响了优生学。

“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，你是这个群体，你是那个群体，当实际上我们是混合体时，我们大多数人都非常混杂。我们有很多来自很多人的血统。因此，如果我们不再将这些类别视为这些固定实体，我们就会到达某个地方。“

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

拉夫后来指出，种族确实涉及生物学 - 但作为一种效果。

“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?

“但这并不意味着这些种族类别在某种意义上并不真实。我的意思是，是的，它们是文化构建的类别，但它们实际上具有生物效应......当我们创造“黑色”或“非洲裔美国人”或我们将要称之为的种类时，我们会把人们放在一起无论其遗传背景如何，进入该类别吧？

“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，我总是回到这个例子：奥巴马总统和非洲人一样爱尔兰人，但是我们将他编码为黑人，对，......当我们这样做时，当我们对人进行分类和分类时，那可以有生物学效应。我们知道非洲裔美国人的压力水平是长期的，因为种族主义，因为结构性种族主义，我们创造了这些类别，对吧？这是生物学的，这是真实的。它可能不是因为它们具有遗传变异，或者那里可能存在一些复杂的相互作用，但我们创造的这些类别，这些社会类别，都具有生物效应。“

—Steve Mirsky

(The above text is a transcript of this podcast)