race is strongly correlated with major continental population groups; e.g black-identifying americans have roughly 400x african genetic markers vs white-identifying, forensic anthropologists can identify the continental ancestry of skeletons at ~80%, etc. it is of course a human and particularly bureaucratic taxonomy so it breaks down at the margins, but it points to something that exists in reality and can be used to establish useful correlations (for instance, medical issues) on average.
Nobody argued that country-of-origin isn't real, or that there aren't physical attributes related to the physical location of one's ancestry.
The Irish used to be a "race" unto themselves. Jewish people still are according to many people (I wonder if an Ethiopian Jew is of the Black race or the Jewish race?). Ukrainians were called their own race in my part of the world, Western Canada, during an immigration wave 100 years ago.
I suppose it's possible that all those old guys had it wrong and used "race" improperly, but we're doing it right now because we use skin tone as a proxy for race instead of other factors.
yes, as i mentioned 'race' is mostly used as a bureaucratic (and hence political) taxonomy, and under different conditions the lines may be drawn differently, but this doesn't mean that all categories are arbitrary. there is a deeper biological reality that our categories grope towards.
All of that is true, but it has little to do with why race exists as a persistent meme. We don't segregate ourselves by blood type, height, or BMI, even though they have certain genetic and medical correlates.
The purpose of race is social differentiation, not medical. That's why identifying himself as mongrel got the author in trouble. He was punking the social order. That's what needed to be upheld, not their data codes. Doubtful they would've grilled him for hours for writing an EBCDIC-incompatible circumflexed vowel in his surname.
That's also why identifying oneself as mixed-race can be problematic. People don't know where to place you in the pecking order, and if you're on their team. It's not like people are concerned for your health, "B-b-but if you put the wrong race you might get a contraindicated blood pressure medication in 30 years!!!"
There are severe height biases in medicine. Taller (and thus larger) people fall well outside most "norms" of medical statistical analysis.
For example, did you know a large male human will have a larger prostate, which itself will generate a larger PSA number than a "normal" human? This in and of itself, at a certain age, will cause some doctors to attempt to stick a needle assembly you know where to sample the prostate. If one just goes along with this statistical oddity, instead of demanding the other (more modern) tests out there, one could literally end up fighting a nasty infection, or worse a spread of cancer if it was actually found.
I would say fighting hidden biases is more frustrating that fighting obvious ones, but both need to be fought and fought well.
Yes, however they aren't clearly delineated, which is the point OP is trying to make. You can have categories, but you can't assign individuals to them because they have lots of overlap.
But this "aren't clearly delineated" gets pedantic sometimes. The same issue is true for assigning hours into morning/day/evening/night, yet no-one talks about issues there. Stratifying something continuous into categories suddenly becomes bad when talking about ethnicity.
That's because the hours don't get personally affected by their classification. I suspect it would suddenly be a big deal if the minimum wage for day vs. night work was different.
And anyways, is 4am morning or night? You'll get different answers in a city compared to on a farm, for example.
What makes you think that doctors are correct about this?
Do doctors ask this question in countries besides the US?
>Unlike sex, race is not firmly biologically based but rather is a “construct of human variability based on perceived differences in biology, physical appearance, and behavior” (IOM, 1999). According to Shields and colleagues (2005),
>>with the exception of the health disparities context, in which self-identified race remains a socially important metric, race should be avoided or used with caution and clarification, as its meaning encompasses both ancestry … and ethnicity …
>Both race and ethnicity can be potent predictors for disease risk; however, it is important to emphasize the distinction between correlation and causation and to explore interactions among factors, while rejecting a unidirectional model that moves from genotype to phenotype.
as other people pointed out, it's an imprecise proxy. It doesn't have no scientific or empirical basis, but it's very imprecise. The scientific community moved on to using the term "genetic history" which makes more sense.