Types of Human Race
On his radio show, Glen Beck recently objected to the term “African American being included with the terms “black” and “negro” on a census form:
African-American is a bogus, PC, made-up term. I mean, that’s not a race. Your ancestry is from Africa and now you live in America. Ok so you were brought over — either your family was brought over through the slave trade or you were born here and your family emigrated here or whatever but that is not a race.
Technically, Beck is correct in this isolated statement. “African American” is not a race, but he does not object to “black” or “negro”, appears to consider people who immigrate to America from Africa “African Americans” (contradicting the above statement), and admits he doesn’t know what to call those Americans who were kidnapped, enslaved, and treated as secondary citizens up until just 35 years ago. While coherency isn’t why people become fans of Glen Beck, he does deserve some leeway on this one. The term “race” as we apply it to classifying human beings is itself an incoherent concept (from Wikipedia):
The term race is often used in taxonomy as a synonym for subspecies, in this sense human races are said not to exist, as taxonomically all humans are classified as the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens. Many scientists have pointed out that traditional definitions of race are imprecise, arbitrary, have many exceptions, have many gradations, and that the numbers of races delineated vary according to the culture making the racial distinctions. Thus, those rejecting the notion of race typically do so on the grounds that such definitions and the categorizations which follow from them are contradicted by the results of genetic research.
“Race” in the way the American government uses it and to what Beck is objecting is purely a social construct, subjective and devoid of scientific validity. The scientific definition of a “race” is “any inbreeding group, including taxonomic subgroups such as subspecies, taxonomically subordinate to a species and superordinate to a subrace and marked by a pre-determined profile of latent factors of hereditary traits. Every human being on this planet is capable of breeding with one another; therefore, we are of the same race.
So what are Americans referring to when we checkmark “white”, “black”, “asian”, or “other” on our census and equal opportunity forms? I myself can claim to be white, Arab, Persian, or black depending on which of my hereditable traits you wish to focus on. Some critics argue that Barack Obama isn’t the first black president because he’s half white, but, because our American “race” isn’t based on genetics or ethnicity, we make it a matter of self-identification. There is nothing to prevent a white person from identifying themselves as black on a census form, and, in fact, the opposite has not been uncommon.
While we are all Americans, our government must deal with the fact that some Americans have endured centuries of oppression as a result of their skin color and ethnic origins, people who are at a severe disadvantage today from such oppression, and our society has a responsibility to make amends. There is only one human race, but our civilization has been plagued by “racists,” people who believed their “race” was different from that of other human beings, and our census forms reflect this ignorant and destructive government-sanctioned heritage, just as our Constitution will always remind us of a time when slaves counted for 3/5ths of a person.
Previously on ideonexus: The American Anthropological Association says There’s Only One Human Race.