So if you spend any time reading the semi-popular scientific press, listen to NPR or are exposed to the skeptical community you will eventually run into the claim that (human) races don’t exist. Sometimes it’s phrased as a scientific discovery other times the idea that there are different races like Caucasian, oriental etc.. is ‘debunked’ but almost always there is a pretty transparent underlying motivation to scold those bad racist people who make claims about comparative racial abilities or at least to demonstrate just how different we mature objective scientists types are from the people who try and link race and ability. The recent debate over a racist sounding (without context) personal email by a Harvard law student has triggered another round of these supposedly scientific absolution.

Now if one was really looking to be scientific or skeptical rather than merely seeking to affirm membership in a certain social/political group this claim should set off two sets of alarm bells. The first set because it’s such a convenient thing to be true. After all if science has proven their aren’t really races then you don’t have to worry about troubling questions like the relationship between race and intelligence so you can go on thinking of yourself both as a good liberal¹ and a critical thinker. Indeed, as soon as one acknowledges the notion of race then the sheer number of correlations between racial background and various gene sequences makes it downright absurd to insist that there isn’t some statistical difference in genetic predisposition to intelligence between different races². Of course we have good evidence that any such correlation will be small compared to environmental effects and individual differences and (to my knowledge) have no particular reason to suspect that the result won’t be ‘favorable’ for traditionally disadvantaged groups but subtle qualifications like this won’t eliminate the suspicion the admission draws. So like belief in an afterlife, trust in homeopathic remedies, or credence in the Loch Less monster there are obvious reasons people would believe the claim regardless of it’s truth giving us cause to be suspicious.

The other alarm bell is the fact that this claim contradicts what we see so plainly with our eyes. People from difference regions of the world look different. People with an African background have a different skin color than those from a European or Oriental background. Kenyan runners seem to do disproportionately well in marathon races³ and hair color/type highly correlates with what part of the world your family comes from. These differences are too obvious for the people claiming that scientifically race doesn’t exist to simply brush off so they try to explain it by saying that there is indeed a socially constructed notion of race it’s simply the genetic notion that doesn’t exist.

This response can’t possibly fly. The differences in skin, eye and hair color aren’t socially constructed. They are determined (largely) by your genetics. It’s a simple and obvious fact that there are substantial correlations between one’s genetic makeup and where your ancestors come from and these genetic differences are surely not only superficial. A child’s risk of sickle cell anemia is highly dependent on the parent’s racial background and we are slowly discovering that race significantly alters one’s susceptibility to many other afflictions and the probable effectiveness of various drugs. In light of this facially compelling proof of the existence of racial genetic variation what kind of scientific result could possibly be described as showing that there is no such thing as race?

Well the true scientific claim in the background is that the boundaries we draw between various racial groups are arbitrary and purely a matter of social construction. In other words if we analyzed everyone’s genes they wouldn’t group into a small number of tidy piles and certainly not ones that match our (culturally) standard categories like black, white, oriental, Indian, etc.. Instead of black/white/oriental/Indian/Native American it might make just as much sense to have Native American & Oriental/White & Indian/Northern African/South African instead. These racial categories might not be as useful in describing the social and cultural fault lines in American society but they (or some alternative like them) would be no less correlated with various genetic risks and just as useful in medical recommendations.

While it’s important to point out that we draw racial boundaries in (genetically) arbitrary places this no more shows that scientifically speaking race doesn’t exist than the fact that light comes in a continuous spectrum shows that scientifically speaking color doesn’t exist. Indeed, we know that different cultures break apart the visible spectrum in different ways but that doesn’t mean that science disproves the fact that blue and green are distinct colors. To illustrate just how much this claim distorts the truth just imagine someone insisting that scientifically speaking baldness didn’t exist because just how few hairs you need to qualify as bald is culturally determined.

It’s bad enough when scientists advance this claim but I understand that they may be trying to balance accuracy with other concerns such as their career, combating racist distortions of the truth in soundbites, and keeping the trust of various political and social coalitions. I still think that in the long run the failure of scientists to reign in this kind of political pandering risks compromising the public’s trust in their objectivity but at least I have some sympathy with their misrepresentation. However, it particularly galls me when skeptical groups participate in this kind of distortion while claiming to exist primarily to oppose just this kind of wishful thinking.