1 In 7 People Are 'Some Other Race' On The U.S. Census.

Sam Smith – This story points to something that neither right nor left is willing to face: race is a misleading term.  

One my ethnic problems is that, having been an anthropology major in college, I don’t believe in race, which is why I call it an ethnic, and not a racial, problem. Here’s how I described it in The Great American Political Repair Manual,  a book I wrote back in 1997:

[The evolutionary biologist] Julian Huxley suggested in 1941 that "it would be highly desirable if we could banish the question-begging term 'race' from all discussions of human affairs and substitute the noncommittal phrase 'ethnic group.' That would be a first step toward rational consideration of the problem at hand." Anthropologist Ashley Montague in 1942 called race our "most dangerous myth."

Yet in our conversations and arguments, in our media, and even in our laws, the illusion of race is given great credibility. As a result, that which is transmitted culturally is considered genetically fixed, that which is an environmental adaptation is regarded as innate and that which is fluid is declared immutable.

Many still hang on to a notion similar to that of Carolus Linnaeus, who declared in 1758 that there were four races: white, red, dark and black. Others make up their own races, applying the term to religions (Jewish), language groups (Aryan) or nationalities (Irish). Modern science has little impact on our views. Our concept of race comes largely from religion, literature, politics, and the oral tradition. It comes creaking with all the prejudices of the ages. It reeks of territoriality, of jingoism, of subjugation, and of the abuse of power.

DNA research has revealed just how great is our misconception of race. In The History and Geography of Human Genes, Luca Cavalli-Sforza of Stanford and his colleagues describe how many of the variations between humans are really adaptations to different environmental conditions (such as the relative density of sweat glands or lean bodies to dissipate heat and fat ones to retain it). But that's not the sort of thing you can easily build a system of apartheid around. As Thomas S. Martin has written: “The widest genetic divergence in human groups separates the Africans from the Australian aborigines, though ironically these two 'races' have the same skin color.”

Racists and their vigorous opponents both act as though race is a genetic determinant of fixed character and thus the actual science of the matter hardly gets mentioned in the media or in our discussions and disputes. This is sad, because if we would recognize ethnicity as mainly culturally and environmentally created, we might find it easier to change some of our relations for the better.  Yet, for the most part, even those who share this view mostly just keep quiet about it all.