One striking contrast between gender and race centers around the question of whether these concepts refer to any real biological difference between people. Most observers are more inclined to consider gender real, based in the underlying biological reality of a natural difference between two sexes. By contrast, there is no underlying biological reality distinguishing races from each other.

The state of much social scientific thinking about racial difference is well summarized by a position paper published by the American Sociological Association in 2003: "Respected voices from the fields of human molecular biology and physical anthropology (supported by research from the Human Genome Project) assert that the concept of race has no validity in
their respective fields. Growing numbers of humanist scholars, social anthropologists, and political commentators have joined the chorus in urging the nation to rid itself of the concept of race. However, a large body of social science research documents the role and consequences of race in
primary social institutions and environments, including the criminal justice, education and health systems, job markets, and where people live." Contemporary scholars agree that race is at least sometimes a socially meaningful (and socially constructed) concept, but not one derived from a real biological difference between people of different races.

Not so with gender. Many analysts and laypersons insist that there is an underlying biology distinguishing women from men, in addition to the social and cultural constructs that divide persons according to gender. Claiming that women and men are naturally different can of course be controversial, as Larry Summers, former President of Harvard University, discovered. But a claim of natural sex differences is far less politically controversial than any similar claim about race, and it seems to many of us, such as Summers' apologist William Saletan, scientifically defensible too: "Sex is easily the biggest physical difference within a species. Men and women, unlike blacks and whites, have different organs and body designs."

Feminist scholars have made several important challenges to the assumption of natural sex difference, especially by considering the situation of people with intersex conditions. From the perspective of political scientists who learn that the US constitution has protected women's right to vote since 1920, the 1843 case of Levi Suydam, discussed by the biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling, is fascinating. Suydam's case resembles the confusion in the news about Olympic sex-testing.

People with intersex conditions have inspired feminist challenges to rigid biological determinism, but do not themselves necessarily want to eradicate gender. Similarly, biologists' skepticism about the existence of natural racial categories hasn't led advocates to insist on dismantling racial categories. What is the moral of the story here? Nature won't speak to us unambiguously about what race and gender really mean. That's something we'll have to decide for ourselves.

© Lynn M. Sanders

Recommended citation:
Sanders, Lynn M. 2008. "Two Sexes by Nature? What is Race?" An element of the course website for the University of Virginia Department of Politics course PLAP334, Race and Gender in US Politics, Fall 2008. http://faculty.virginia.edu/lsanders/racepol/RaceGenderNature.html.