Contemporary Views On Race - Political and Practical Uses - Law Enforcement - Forensic Anthropology

Forensic Anthropology

Similarly, forensic anthropologists draw on highly heritable morphological features of human remains (e.g. cranial measurements) to aid in the identification of the body, including in terms of race. In a 1992 article anthropologist Norman Sauer noted that Anthropologists had generally abandoned the concept of race as a valid representation of human biological diversity except for Forensic anthropologists. This lead him to ask "if races don't exist, why are forensic anthropologists so good at identifying them?" He concluded that "the successful assignment of race to a skeletal specimen is not a vindication of the race concept, but rather a prediction that an individual, while alive was assigned to a particular socially constructed ‘racial’ category. A specimen may display features that point to African ancestry. In this country that person is likely to have been labeled Black regardless of whether or not such a race actually exists in nature. C. Loring Brace echoed this answer stating that: "The simple answer is that, as members of the society that poses the question, they are inculcated into the social conventions that determine the expected answer. They should also be aware of the biological inaccuracies contained in that "politically correct" answer. Skeletal analysis provides no direct assessment of skin color, but it does allow an accurate estimate of original geographical origins. African, eastern Asian, and European ancestry can be specified with a high degree of accuracy. Africa of course entails "black," but "black" does not entail African."