The Myth of Race

[Secular Sanity]

How does he manage to turn a normal conversation into a sexually charged one every damn time?   He annoys the hell outta me, writes with his intromittent organ, and you all know who I'm talking about.  

I have ink in my peter, sweet marie
There’s another color in my brother, can’t you see
There’s a dozen in my cousin
Am I stoned or just buzzin’
I have ink in my peter, sweet marie

Is miscegenation relatively recent? No.

Can science identify biological differences between ethnic groups? No.

How easy is it for you to determine someone’s heritage based on their physical features?

Begin Sorting

"One day in the 1980s, I sat in the front row in my first undergraduate anthropology class, eager to learn more about this bizarre and fascinating species I was born into. But I got more than I expected that day as I heard for the first time that biological races are not real. After hearing several perfectly sensible reasons why vast biological categories don’t work very well, I started to feel betrayed by my society. “Why am I just hearing this now? . . . Why didn’t somebody tell me this in elementary school?” . . . I never should have made it through twelve years of schooling before entering a university, without ever hearing the important news that most anthropologists reject the concept of biological races."—Guy Harrison

"Thus, given current scientific data, biological races do not exist among modern humans today, and they have never existed in the past. Given such clear scientific evidence as this and the research data of so many other biologists, anthropologists, and geneticists that demonstrate the nonexistence of biological races among humans, how can the “myth” of human races still persist?"—The Myth of Race by Robert Wald Sussman

[C C]

Ancient civilizations made cognitive distinctions between populations which arguably would have been translated into the later European idea of "race".[*] Though potentially without the latter's imperialist baggage, which itself was in turn an interpretative add-on of yet later Marxist-camp thinkers. ([*] Since "breed" is too animal slash crop related and degrading for humans. Breed as a "special variety within a species" is not scientifically kosher, and yet the practical and pre-scientific world could not do without this informal sub-classification.)

So the concept of "race" as cognition of outer differences between groups of people -- and as a social construct -- has a long history that precedes both science and specific knowledge of genetics (there was a time when even biology didn't reduce to or revolve around that molecular level). Accordingly, the contemporary belief that this multiply-defined idea's lack of foundation in genetics renders it obsolete would actually only render it defunct with respect to biology's former pseudoscientific "kidnapping" of the term in that precise area.

Whereas with osteometric analysis, forensic scientists still statistically map unidentified skeletal remains to "ancestry" classifications. Which before the rise of politically negative connotations would have featured "R-word" related racial, bi-racial, and mixed-racial determinations of forensic endeavors. (I.e., the original deed or function still transpires under a different name in sciences that deal with macroscopic morphological appearances, as opposed to the study and measurement of humans with respect to molecular patterns / genetics.)

"Race" and ethincity distinctions and self-declarations are ensured to remain an influential social-level construct due to racism slash ethnic discrimination's role as a vital tool / tactic for divesting opponents of power. (Regardless of whether an individual is truly racist or it's just reputation bashing.) The situation at least grazes Wittgenstein's philosophical observation that if a concept is meaningless or lacks valid function / purpose, then so is the opposite of that concept. IOW, when the latter is grounding its own identity in being the counterpart of something imaginary or expending effort challenging something which is poorly developed / lacking internal consistency (he occasionally employed realism / antirealism as an example pairing).

"Being against racism" at the very least requires racism to be a legitimate agency, but not necessarily that the supposed racist's belief in race is legitimate. Thus why it only grazes the above rather than falling into the scenario.

[Secular Sanity]

Whereas with osteometric analysis, forensic scientists still statistically map unidentified skeletal remains to "ancestry" classifications.

Osteometric Analysis
"The determination of an individual's ancestry is typically grouped into three historical groups, Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid. However, the use of these classifications is becoming much harder as the rate of interracial marriages increases and markers become less defined."

Miscegenation isn’t relatively recent, though. We’ve always migrated and shared our genes.

The Concept of Miscegenation

"Hereditary differences between human individuals are real and important, and there are significant average differences in various respects between some regional populations. Correlations between genetics and geography are a legitimate subject for scientific investigation. However, these facts do not oblige us to think of human variation in racial terms. Regional populations that differ significantly in one respect usually resemble each other, and contrast with some third population, in certain other respects. Many regional populations today (e.g., those of North America) have been largely formed by centuries of massive immigration from widely separate parts of the world. The sympatric "racial" groups conventionally recognized within such populations are neither geographically, phenotypically, nor genetically discrete. The aggregate variation within such populations encompasses the entire range of variation in all the immigrant groups combined, and any typological "racial" groups that we attempt to distinguish in the population will contain large numbers of individuals descended from members of the other groups.

If human races are geographically delimited populations characterized by regionally distinctive phenotypes that do not occur elsewhere in significant numbers, then races no longer exist and have probably not existed for centuries, if ever. And if races are not geographically delimited, then racial classificatory categories are merely labels for polymorphisms that vary in frequency from one part of the world to another, like red-headedness or Type A blood. If "Negroid" and "Caucasoid" people occur on every continent, it makes no more sense to describe these groupings as geographical subspecies than it would to describe redheads or people with Type A blood as human subspecies. In particular, it makes no sense to try to study differences between races by subdividing a sample of North Americans. Yet a lot of the existing literature on supposed racial differences offers to do just that. Structuring our samples using these chimerical racial categories often obscures the nature and causes of past and present human variation.

Like other social constructs, races are real cultural entities. For many people, membership in a racial group constitutes an important part of their social identity and self-image. But social facts are not necessarily part of the biological landscape. In multi-ethnic regional populations, races are merely ethnic groups linked to vague, inconsistent, and stereotypical ideal phenotypes. Growing awareness of the meaninglessness of racial taxonomy is currently leading increasing numbers of U.S. citizens to refuse to classify themselves racially, or to allow themselves to be so classified by others (Fish 1995). In the long run, we would probably be better off if we all followed their example."

http://pages.ucsd.edu/~jmoore/courses/an...pt1998.pdf

Interesting, isn't it?