J. Fuerst writes: It is frequently asserted: firstly, that the word “race” is meaningless; secondly, that races are not, biologically speaking, real; thirdly, that while there do exist biological races in other animal species, there are none in ours; and finally, that any biological differences between the human races are meaningless in the grand scheme of things.
It is infrequently acknowledged that the first through fourth statements can not all be true at the same time: if “race” is meaningless, it makes no sense to say that it is non-biological; if it is nonbiological, it can not exist in nonhuman animals; and so on and so forth. Nevertheless, these four contrary claims, individually flawed as they are, are thought by many to constitute, in composite, an ironclad argument against any attempt to characterize certain divisions of Homo sapiens as biological races. (Presumably it is not yet considered ‘scientifically racist’ to study biodiversity in other animal species, though we can not be sure.
There is, of course, an element of truth to all four of the stated claims: the word “race” indeed has no unique definition; anyone can deem that whatever genetically based differences exist between human populations are unimportant; there are race concepts which are fundamentally non-biological; and there are biological race concepts (frequently made of straw) by which there are no human biological races. All of this is true, and rather trivial, but since the statements are so often taken to mean something true and nontrivial – that there is no robust sense in which human biological races exist – we feel compelled to provide a precise conceptual framework for
biological race.
