[logjam]

> Human races are not a matter of belief....

Oh. Then please provide the list asked for, and while you're at it, list the genes and loci you use to classify members of a "race".

I mean, if human "races" are not a matter of belief but are a matter of science, that should be really easy for you and the parent commenter.

Right?

[SiVal]

Ask any admissions officer at any elite university for the list he uses when defending the need for race-based admissions policy. Ask him what racial categories his major, world-class scientific research institution has chosen to put on their admissions application.

Ask any university humanities department whether their African-American Studies program isn't just as bogus as a Unicorn Studies program since neither group actually exists, and see what they say.

Ask the US federal government what categories they include on the census under "race".

Ask a liberal supporter of minority business set-aside programs for a list of who these so-called "minorities" are. Are they proposing setting aside contracts for businesses run by left-handed people, or do they have a different set of categories in mind? Ask them for their list of who should be given preference over whom.

[arjie]

African-Americans (or blacks, in the context given) certainly exist as a group. The question is whether you can define them as a race.

To top it off, your first example is incredible. Universities usually lump all Asians into one category though most people would consider an Indian and a Japanese person to be of different race. If that is your list, you have done your argument a grievous injury.

[SiVal]

Well, here at Stanford they put Indians and Japanese in different categories, but that's hardly the point. These groupings represent political categorization based on racial categorization. I had thought the tongue-in-cheek nature of my reply would have been more obvious, but I'll make it more explicit: those who most strongly advocate the "no such thing as race" position tend to most strongly advocate race-based preferences when it suits their political agenda without, apparently, seeing a hint of irony. When someone who denies that races exist demands to see my list of races, I suggest he try using the list of races used by his own political allies.

There are different races in the sense that there are different colors on the visible electromagnetic spectrum. There is no "correct" categorization on the spectrum itself, but you can observe clearly different clusters in many situations. Take all the red, green, and blue elements from several video monitors and graph their frequencies and despite that fact that there is a lot of diversity, there won't be a uniform distribution. Three clusters will be easily visible, and you can call them clusters red, green, and blue. In the application, unlike the theoretical spectrum, these categories do exist.

History has clustered human beings, too. Nobody here really denies that humans have descended in a complex tree with lots of crossovers. There is no right way to categorize all leaves of the tree itself into sharp "races". Even so, historical accident has resulted in a lot of clustering of genetic affinity where members of a cluster share lots of relatively recent common ancestors but have mostly very distant common ancestors with members of other clusters. The fact that there are individuals of all sorts on the human tree doesn't mean that there is no clustering.

So Han Chinese, Central American Indians, Northern Europeans, and West Africans diverge long ago and don't intermix genetically for a thousand generations, then history brings them together recently in the Americas where they begin to interbreed.

Nothing wrong with that (at least IMO). Eventually this interbreeding may reduce the clustering to mere random clustering, but today there are still strong, clear clusters of genetic affinity. You can call the clusters races or call them foo, but they aren't just figments of the imagination. The admissions department at Stanford has no difficulty in most cases distinguishing an Indian from a Japanese by genetic affinity with other members of these groups. Whether they then make that two different racial preference categories or assign them to the same "Asian" group is just identity politics.

[mikeash]

I recall a story of an expat living in South Africa with his black wife and their daughter, during Apartheid. I believe the very confused racial classification officials finally decided their daughter was "Indian".

[sublimit]

You're setting me up for a trap with the list thing - if I linked somewhere you'd simply say it was racist data and question the validity of the sources.

Instead I'll go for the route of scientific analogy. If dogs have races, why wouldn't humans? After all, humans are not biologically above or separate from animals. Why would basic evolution stop applying with humans?

Mind you, the existence of races doesn't have to imply inferiority or superiority between them. People seem to be afraid that would happen, so they throw the baby out with the bathwater by denying the whole concept of race altogether. Much like the article says.

[lukifer]

Evolution does not work that way. It is a purely pass/fail system.

Also, since the invention of boats and planes, humans have been interbreeding like crazy, so it's pretty much ceasing to matter.

[SiVal]

So any justification for race-based admissions and government minority preferences programs is coming to an end, you'd say?

[lukifer]

Frankly, I consider it a different issue that has more to with history than evolution. I do believe such programs should end, but whether now or later is up for debate.

Of all the injustices in the world, extra scholarships for racial minorities hardly seems like a high priority, though. I'd rather cut through the Gordian Knot with free education for all (not as an entitlement, but rather as an investment).

We're about 1.5 generations away from race not mattering at all; young people simply don't care. Like so many vestiges of the old world, race-based entitlements will eventually disappear.