In 2023 America's national science academies formally dropped race from genetics
America's national science, engineering and medical academies officially renounced using race in genetics research in 2023. It capped a long shift in which scientists came to regard racial categories as socially constructed labels rather than meaningful biological divisions, since every person alive today is a member of one subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens.
The word's meaning has wandered. In the sixteenth century race referred to many kinds of group, including close kin. By the seventeenth it had started pointing to physical traits, and later to nations or supposed ancestry. Since the latter half of the twentieth century it has been linked to discredited scientific racism, and in many contexts has given way to terms like population, ethnic group or community.
Societies draw the lines differently, which itself shows how constructed they are. South Africa's Population Registration Act of 1950 recognised only White, Black and Coloured, adding Indian later. Myanmar's government lists eight major national ethnic races. Brazil's census uses categories for white, multiracial, black, Asian and indigenous people, though many Brazilians describe themselves in other terms. The U.S. Census Bureau proposed then shelved a Middle Eastern and North African category for 2020 amid dispute over whether it should count as white or separate. The nineteenth-century American one-drop rule excluded anyone with any African ancestry from being classed as white.
Scientists still debate what, if anything, the concept captures. Geneticist David Reich has written that even if race is a social construct, differences in genetic ancestry that correlate with some modern racial categories are real. A group of 67 scientists replied that his framing was flawed, because the meaning of such groups is produced by social forces. Others use race loosely for fuzzy clusters of traits, while some call it inherently simplistic.
Physical features such as skin colour, facial shape and hair texture form part of popular ideas of race, but the link is social rather than inherently biological, and groupings also rest on shared history, traditions and language. By naming and talking about races, people create a social reality, and these categories may be the result of major social situations rather than their cause. Combined with economic disadvantage, enduring racial views have caused great suffering.
Source: Race (human categorization)
