The race myth

For many years, we've periodically pointed out that "race" is actually a term of racist origins. We try to use ther term "ethnic" because it implies more culture and less genetics. So we were please to come across this article.

National Georgaphic - There's more diversity in Africa than on all the other continents. That’s because modern humans originated in Africa and have lived there the longest. They’ve had time to evolve enormous genetic diversity—which extends to skin color. Researchers who study it sometimes use Africa’s linguistic diversity—it has more than 2,000 languages —as a guide.

“There is no homogeneous African race,” says geneticist Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania. “It doesn’t exist.” The prehistoric humans who left Africa some 60,000 years ago—giving rise over time to the other peoples of the world—reflected only a fraction of Africa’s
diversity.

... Of course, just because race is “made up” doesn’t make it any less powerful. To a disturbing extent, race still determines people’s perceptions, their opportunities, and their experiences. It is enshrined in the U.S. census, which last time it was taken, in 2010, asked Americans to choose their race from a list that reflects the history of the concept; choices included “White,” “Black,” “American Indian,” “Asian Indian,” “Chinese,” “Japanese,” and “Samoan.” Racial distinctions were written into the Jim Crow laws of the post-Reconstruction South and are now written into statutes like the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race or color. To the victims of racism, it’s small consolation to say that the category has no scientific basis.