What response would you get were you to ask almost any college student or member of the current, self-identified American intelligentsia, “What is this society’s most serious problem?” Almost certainly, a large proportion of your eligible interviewees would give this answer without hesitation: “Race!” But here is an oddity: The same interviewees who answer your question with “Race!” will assure you, also without hesitation, that there is no such thing. They will maintain that for humans the concept of “race” is meaningless: that there are no biologically significant human group differences, hence no human races.
This is a public catechism: it is recited regularly, with conviction and feeling, in the media and in the social sciences. The au courant, including well-known scientists and a good many official voices of science, insist that race is—speaking of biology or genetics —a recent illusion, fostered by European imperialism and triumphalism. If pushed, most respondents will try to invoke some authority on this, although of course the vast majority has not understood or even heard of the relevant science. The reference is usually to “modern biology.” Or, if the respondents have actually read some popular writing on the subject (or watched The Power of an Illusion, the much admired 2003 PBS documentary), they will appeal to some such visible scientific name as “Gould” or “Lewontin,” or to one of the leaders of the Human Genome Project, or to a science journalist at, say, The New York Times.
Why then do governments set so bad an example? Why do they appear to insist that race does exist—as evidenced by the requirement that we specify, inter alia, our race (choose one of three? of nine? of seventeen?) in responding to the census-taker, or when completing an application for admission, bidding for a contract, being tested for a job? The answer you get, if you get one at all, will take this form: “Well, there is no such thing as race. We’re all the same, and the little differences in various competences noted among us are due to upbringing, lifestyle, unequal social services, and the like. The differences we see are no more than skin deep; any difference we can measure is socially constructed. But: bad people argue that we are not all the same. Therefore we must assemble and keep data and records on this false category—race—so as to defeat the racists and to undo the social evils they propagate.” MORE
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