plural of race; competitions to see who is fastest, or groups of people sharing similar ancestry and characteristics (though this biological meaning is now considered unreliable).
From Old Norse 'ras,' meaning 'running' or 'a rush,' for the competitive sense. The 'race' meaning 'group of people' comes later from Italian 'razza,' possibly from Arabic or Berber origins, and became tied to pseudoscientific 19th-century classifications.
Modern genetics shows that 'race' as a biological category doesn't match how our DNA actually works—there's more genetic variation within racial groups than between them, so the word persists even though the thing it was supposed to describe doesn't really exist.
Colonial-era pseudo-scientific hierarchies gendered races differently; women of color faced compounded stereotyping and erasure of agency in racial taxonomies.
Use 'race' as social construct, not biology. Center voices of marginalized communities.
["ethnicity","ancestry","community"]
Black feminists (Angela Davis, Kimberlé Crenshaw) created intersectionality theory to challenge gender-blind racial discourse.
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