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lucern -> RE: There isn't such a thing as 'races' in humanity. (8/2/2007 9:53:30 PM)
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I'm studying to be a sociocultural anthropologist (and you might say I'm approaching the end-game). I say this not for some cheap authority; I say it because anthropologists and scientific racism went hand in hand, and the product of some of their work shaped the very debate we're having. Anthropologists, particularly physical anthropologists, are being echoed in the initial claim, that race doesn't exist. Yet there is a distortion in this echo. Plus, the link in the initial post isn't helpful: I find little wrong, per se, but it's incomplete, outdated, and not trying very hard to actually let anyone learn anything. It's intellectual butchery, with old meat.
Here's the claim I would make, which is absolutely defensible in this discipline, from multiple angles: Race is not biologically meaningful. This is to say, race has been constructed in a plethora of ways, and there is simply no way to parse people into racial groups, whatever features we choose. Since some are hung up on this, and it does conflict with what many of us 'know' to be true, i'll cite The Emperor's New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millenium, by Joseph Graves Jr, which gives a thorough account of the history of scientific endeavors to assert race as biological (or 'real', after the OP) alongside simple to understand, and moreover, accurate accounts of the flaws in each. I can summon many other sources, but this is the most accessible and thorough (and imagine that, it's not online...).
In the meanwhile, these thought exercises get a couple of points across:
1) If you were somehow able to go back in time just enough for people to be all nicely divided, yet not yet as integrated as they are today, and if you could walk from the tip of South Africa to the northernmost point of Europe, what would you see? I'd think that you would see a skin color gradient ranging from extremely dark to extremely pale, in ways that you could probably correlate to sun exposure. Whether or not this is strictly true, what is obvious is that there is a great variation in skin tones that do not arrive from the mixing of purely black and purely white people. This is true of other physical features, and where one draws the line will always be arbitrary.
2) I also noticed that people were talking about lineage, more or less. Just realize all of the people you are directly related to biologically vs which part of your family is traceable. There are gaping holes, I promise you, and unless you're at risk of inbreeding, these people are diverse. There is a craze, thanks to Oprah, of African-Americans wanting to use their genetic heritage to trace where they're from in Africa. This is problematic, and often times whatever questionable method used to trace this genetics to geography turns up results of ancestry from Holland to China. In this one documentary, the stubborn African-American (self-identified) woman protested, paying the researchers to test other areas of whatever chromosome they were testing.until they found her a proper Cameroonian heritage when Europeans kept showing up. The fact of the matter is that we are comprised of an astounding number of people, and it is a narrow view of kinship that produces some of the confusion about race.
However, it's a bit short sighted to leave it at this original assertion, don'cha think? The science is no longer debatable enough to produce all of this debate. The elephant in the room, as I see it, is that race can (paradoxically, to some) not exist biologically and yet have a very real affect on people. This is because race, as always, has been socially constituted and re-constituted. We're arguing over something for which there is not a single meaning, but we have little problem doing so. Race is 'real' because the experiences of race are real. This can be documented and cited even more extensively.
In an evolution seminar, we came to a similar impasse as this. "So race isn't real, now what?", asked the geneticist and physical anthropologist. The whitest woman you can imagine stands up quickly and says "Then they should stop using it." She is then greeted with a verbal torrent from a medical anthropologist, of self-identified 'mixed' descent, indicating that we can't stop using it, because it's injustice, because race is still real. These were among a flurry of incomprehensible connections, that pretty much only communicated anger. My take is that ceasing to use it, now anyway, would play into the "I see everyone equally" lie that is so prevalent among people attempting to be politically correct without being ethically correct. The most honest thing, given more or less agreement with the major points in this post, would be to be able to walk the complicated path of knowing that race is biologically indefensible as well as aknowledging that it has a long history and remains extremely relevant in the social lives of people. I don't want to say that it's always negative, but I can't think of anything positive to come out of it. Ever.
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