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Feb. 13, 2010 The English word race , as referring to an ethnic group, was borrowed from the Italian word razza in the 15th century, and so we can assume that it denoted any of a number of populations not 100% clearly defined. But this sort of imprecision, which characterizes many generalizations in the real world, does not mean that the word is meaningless. Quite the contrary, if you are buying a house, you may be very interested in the racial makeup of neighborhoods you are considering. Shakespeare and other writers of that age used the word freely, and not necessarily in a pejorative sense: Sleep, Richmond, sleep in peace, and wake in joy; Good angels guard thee from the boar's annoy! Live, and beget a happy race of kings! Edward's unhappy sons do bid thee flourish. King Richard II, Act V, Scene ii The word came down to the twentieth century in the sense of a more-or-less identifiable body of people. People spoke of the Roman race, the Greek race, the Chinese race, and so forth. When I was younger, somebody had divided humanity into three races, white, yellow and black, or Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid, if you prefer. I was always a little uncomfortable with this threefold division, as I did not know exactly where Indians-from-India, American Indians, Polynesians and others fitted in, but it was no grave problem. Perhaps they were amalgams, I thought. At any rate, the word was in the public domain, and belonged to the popular lexicon, so to speak. Biological taxonomists organizing the classification of animals and plants adopted a number of words from the public domain, assigning them precise definitions based on painstaking criteria. Oh, how I hate this! Words like kingdom , division, class , order , family, variety and race were adopted and outfitted with new definitions. So if you conduct an image search for cardinal family, you may end up with a picture of a baseball player and his children, instead of Cardinalidae. The word race was made synonymous with subspecies, and inherited the same precise definition. I don’t see why biologists didn’t merely invent new words, as the US Department of Agriculture did for soil taxonomy. Anyway, biologists don’t run the world. They have misappropriated the word race , given it a very precise definition, and insist that everyone observe the new definition, as if they, biologists, were the ultimate authority on the vocabulary of the English language. Since, when you buy a house, the different populations in a neighborhood are not subspecies, you may no longer refer to them as races. Others argue that race is a social construct only, which is as much as saying that it is imaginary. But this is all chicanery and casuistry. They are trying to make race disappear by weaving a tissue of sophistries, all in the name of what is usually called political correctness. This is not science, this is trickery. Of course, race is a meaningful term, and not really so terribly inexact after all. Whether it should have been appropriated by biologists is another matter. Here is an excerpt from a recent article in World Science: The latest research to challenge the race-as-social-construct theory is a study of 3,636 people from across America and Taiwan, led by Neil Risch, then of the Stanford University School of Medicine and now at the University of California at San Francisco. It found that people’s self-identified race is a nearly perfect indicator of their genetic background, contradicting the race-as-social-construct view, Risch said. The study’s authors said it was the largest study of its kind. The participants identified themselves as either white, African-American, East Asian or Hispanic. For each participant, the researchers examined 326 DNA regions that tend to vary between people. These regions are not necessarily within functioning genes—some regions of the genome have no known use—but are simply genetic signposts that come in a variety of forms at the same place. Without knowing how the participants had identified themselves, Risch and his team ran the results through a computer program that grouped individuals according to patterns of the 326 signposts. This analysis could have resulted in any number of different clusters, but only four clear groups turned up. And in each case the individuals within those clusters all fell within the same self-identified racial group. “This work comes on the heels of several contradictory studies about the genetic basis of race. Some found that race is a social construct with no genetic basis while others suggested that clear genetic differences exist between people of different races,” a press release from Stanford said. “What makes the current study, published in the February issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, more conclusive is its size. The study is by far the largest, consisting of 3,636 people who all identified themselves as either white, African-American, East Asian or Hispanic. Of these, only five individuals had DNA that matched an ethnic group different than the box they checked at the beginning of the study.” So the popular conception of race is actually superior to the scientific conception, at least as it applies to human affairs. If people like Craig Venter and Jared Diamond want to pretend elsewise, it is perfectly legitimate just to ignore them. http://www.world-science.net/exclusives/050128_racefrm.htm ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Visit my website here. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! 
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