ABSTRACT
However, the notion that we belong to separate ‘races’ still retains a great deal of explanatory power in contemporary, non-academic accounts of culture. Indeed, the term still holds the status of common sense in many discursive arenas. The idea that people of different ‘races’ have different personalities and behavioural attributes is also often circulated in the media as common sense-but again, this has no scientific, biological or genetic foundation. It is now recognized that the ‘races’ with which we are familiar, and the characteristics which are associated with them, should not be understood as ‘essential’, but as ‘social constructions’: that is to say, we have moved from ascribing these roles and characteristics to a natural, biological difference, to understanding them as constructed within culture.
