Really? Is this the most intelligent response you have? What you've just concluded, and I'll refer back to my super hero reference, is that based on the fact that super heroes are not real the movies, comic books, costumes, etc. made in their image also do not exist. What kind of ridiculous azz logic is that? None of the Greek Gods ever existed but you had an entire country/nation of people living by their belief in them. Heaven or hell doesn't exist, none of the stories in the bible are real yet you have millions of people living under the belief system. So if the best you can reason or comment after the mountain of facts I've presented to you is some elementary azz logic about racism not existing then surely homothug gave you way too much intellectual credit.
The Traits That Races Are Based On Are Arbitrary
This argument postulates that you could come up with mutually exclusive groupings of people based on different traits and that, because there is no objective method of choosing which traits to use, which grouping you decide to go with is arbitrary. For instance, you could group people based on skin color and, as a result, Africans and certain groups of Indians might be grouped together. Or you could group people based on height, in which case Indians and Africans would most certainly not be grouped together.
Of course, populations are normally grouped based on sets of several characteristics. But the point remains: you can come up with different, mutually exclusive, ways of grouping people, and there is no obvious way of choosing which is correct. And, so the argument goes, if the basis for race is arbitrary then race itself must be arbitrary as well.
The problem with this argument is simple: races are defined by ancestry, not observable physical traits. As a consequence of being descended from different ancestral populations, the races differ in many characteristics. Such differences are correlated with race, but they do not define race. An albino African is still racially black. Thus, the argument that the characteristics that define race are arbitrary is based on a straw-man argument; again, observable traits do not define race, they just correlate with race.
A common line of response to this argument will be to say that the areas of ancestry that define race are also arbitrary. For instance, one might say that grouping together people that descend from Europe, as opposed to, say, southern Europeans and northern Africans, is an arbitrary decision.
This is wrong because the edges of the continents have historically restricted gene flow. In other words, people had a strong tendency to mate with people on the same continent as them and, as a result, they evolved together within a common gene pool. This is why, even when you take widely dispersed populations from throughout the world, when researchers have programs group people’s genetic data into 4-6 “clusters” which maximize the extent to which members of the same cluster are more genetically similar than members of other clusters, said clusters nearly perfectly align with traditional notions of race (
Rosenberg et al. 2002). (
Tang et al. 2005) (
Rosenberg et al. 2005).
Now, it is true that the exact lines of these clusters are somewhat arbitrary. Sometimes gene frequencies change very slowly across regions and so the exact line one chooses doesn’t have an obvious justification beyond it being a line on a map. But, in spite of these fuzzy boundaries, race is still a useful scientific concept. And, besides, at this point we’ve really just returned to the cline argument addressed above. Thus, the “arbitrary traits” argument does not in any way show that race is not a valid and useful scientific concept.
Racial Categories Change Across Time and Place
Race deniers sometimes argue that people in different places, or even Westerners just a few centuries ago, had radically different ideas about who was a member of which race and that, because of this, race is invalid. But if we look back to the 18th century, we can see that when Linnaeus came up with the first major racial system he posited three races: Asians, Whites, and Blacks. A few decades later, history’s most influential racial system would be devised by Johan Blumenbach who separated humanity into five races: East Asians, South Asians, Native Americans, Whites, and Blacks (
Hamilton 2008). Clearly, these systems of racial classification are highly similar to those used by most Westerners today.
Now it is true that, as exemplified by Linnaeus and Blumenbach, some authors posited the existence of more races than another. But these differences are not as serious as they might at first seem. Typically, such disagreements were the result of one author wanting to group humans into larger racial categories than the other. By the 20th century, this difference came to be seen as largely unimportant, because these racial schemes are not mutually exclusive (
Boyd 1950). We can easily utilize racial schemes which differ in their level of aggregation, saying, at different times,
Caucasian,
White, and
German, for instance, without contradicting ourselves or causing confusion. Thus, the seeming contradictions of traditional racial theories, upon closer analysis, fade away. Scientists have basically agreed on human races for a very long time.
A favorite talking point of race deniers is that the Irish weren’t considered white in early American history. This is false. If this were true, the Irish could not have immigrated here en masse, since the Naturalization Acts of the 1700s limited citizenship to free whites. And yet, millions of Irish were allowed to immigrate. Why? Because everyone has always known that the Irish are white.
It is true that the Irish were sometimes compared to blacks, but no one seriously thought that they were literally, racially, black. Any honest person who looks at 19th-century anti-Irish propaganda immediately realizes that the complaint was that the Irish were thought to be as bad as blacks in spite of them being white, not that they literally were black.
Still, it is true that some people around the world have come up with some pretty weird ideas about race. So what? What does that have to do with whether or not traditional European racial theories are useful in modern science? Nothing. And so it is irrelevant to the validity of race as a scientific concept.
Race is a Social Construct
Any time we categorize objects we decide to group things one way as opposed to another. In this sense, all categories are social constructs. If we wanted to, we could get rid of the category “table” and, in its place, invent two new categories: one for all “tables” that are brown and another for all “tables” that are not brown. Of course, it is more useful to have one single category which denotes all tables and so that is what we go with. But the point is that we choose to “go with” one category scheme and not the other. Thus, there is something “social” or “artificial” about all categories.
But this isn’t specific to race. All categories are tools and their validity must be determined by whether or not they are useful. And I have already shown that race is useful.
It is worth noting that most biologists have always known this about race. Some of the first biologists to talk about race, such as the previously referenced Linnaeus and Blumenbach, commented on the fact that racial categories were invented by culture and, to some extent, arbitrary (
Stuessy 2009) (
Blumenbach 1775). And yet both men knew that human races had real and significant biological differences.
Clearly then, race realists have long known that race is a “social construct” and pointing this out does nothing to refute the race realist position.
Conclusion
In summary, the races evolved separately for a long enough period of time to become subspecies. Moreover, their genetic differences are larger than those seen among subspecies in other species. It is true that there are no race genes, and that we share 99% of our genomes with each other, but neither of these facts excludes the possibility of important racial differences. Contrary to popular opinion, scientists can tell what your race is by looking at your DNA, and ideas about race have not changed as much as is commonly thought. It is true that, to some extent, human variation is “clinal”, but that has nothing to do with whether or not we should categorize people racially. And when we do group people racially, it is based on ancestry, not arbitrarily chosen traits.
These reasons, and others like them, are why many researchers around the world agree with the obvious truth that race exists and, in some contexts, such as medicine, social science, and forensics, is important.
