An academic view of races

I cannot resist the temptation to return to the issue of race.  I am responding to an essay I recently found on the internet.  The quotes are in blue text, and I respond in black text.

The worst error in the history of science was undoubtedly classifying humans into the different races.

Rather than stray into a lengthy digression, I will merely observe that there are many errors in the history of science which could be classified as the worst.  Also, the fact that the author uses the term the different races suggests to me that he secretly accepts that races do in fact exist.

... race theory ... has wreaked untold misery and been used to justify barbaric acts of colonialism, slavery and even genocide. Even today it's still used to explain social inequality, and continues to inspire the rise of the far right across the globe.

Was race theory used to justify the millions of murders committed by the armed forces of the United Kingdom and the USA over the past hundred years or so?  I merely ask.

The human races were invented by anthropologists like Johann Friedrich Blumenbach back in the 18th century ...

This is utter garbage.  Anthropologists may have identified the concept of races, but races themselves were never invented.  They exist as a fact of science.

As an aside, I have recently found out that the word race derives from the medieval Italian word razza, and that it can be used to mean a breeding stock of animals.  The different races we see in the world today are basically different breeding stocks.  They have tended in the past to be determined largely be geography, but even in present day multiracial societies they can be determined by culture.  For example, fewer than ten percent of marriages in Britain today are inter-racial.

From the very beginning, the arbitrary and subjective nature of categories was widely acknowledged.

This is misleading.  It may well be true that there are some situations where racial definitions become blurred, but there are also many situations where the classification of animals into species and subspecies become blurred.  Does it follow that scientists who indulge in such classification are charlatans?

Most of the time races were justified on the grounds of cultural or language differences between groups of people rather than biological ones.

Even if this is true, it proves nothing.

Their existence was taken as a given right up until the 20th century when anthropologists were busy writing about races as a biological explanation for differences in psychology, including intelligence, and educational and socioeconomic outcomes between groups of people.

While the author does not want us to believe in races, he nevertheless acknowledges that there are different groups of people, and that they can differ in terms of intelligence and socioeconomic outcomes.  Maybe he’ll be telling us next that they can also differ in terms of propensity to criminal acts.

But buried within the survey results were some troubling findings like that anthropologists from privileged groups — in the US context 'white' males and females — were more likely to accept race as valid than non-privileged groups.

The author now accepts that white people exist as a group, and also as a privileged group.  Notice also that he does not explain what he means by privilege in this context.

These privileged scientists represent 75 per cent of the anthropologists surveyed. Their power and influence reaches right across the field. They are the main people determining what research is done, who gets funding ...

The author appears to hint at the possibility that access to funding in the academic world may not always be decided strictly on the basis of merit, but rather on the basis of adherence to an accepted point of view.  That does not surprise me in the slightest.

Related previous posts include:
Is there really just one race?
Are you a racist?