More than one scholar has argued that as a concept, race should be “confined to the dustbin of analytically useless terms” (Miles, 1989:72) And yet it persists: race has been used to refer not just to physical features, but also to differences in “nationality, religion, ancestry, class and biological sub-categories” (McIlwain2011: pg.) The belief in race as scientific truth started in the 1700’s, with European colonialism, the slave trade, and pronouncements that Whites were the highest “race” of humans. By the twentieth century, advances in evolutionary theory and genetics utterly refuted so-called “racial science,” as scholars came to regard race not as biological fact, but as an ideological system for “thinking about, categorizing, and treating human beings” (McIlwain, 2011.)
Senft, T. and Noble, S. (2013). Race and Social Media. In The Routledge Handbook of Social Media. Eds. Senft, Theresa M., & Hunsinger, Jeremy. Routledge: NY.Â
