Race Does Exist--New York Times

An important New York Times' op-ed page essay recently appeared, vindicating the existence of human races. ["A Family Tree in Every Gene"—Armand Marie Leroi, March 14 2005]. Leroi, a biologist at Imperial College in London and author of "Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body," was so blunt and direct that he eerily parallels my own writings on VDARE.com (as I remarked on i.Steve.com).

That the Times dared to print Leroi's demolition of the reigning "Race Does Not Exist" cant is not a total surprise. As I have previously noted, the newspaper's genetics reporter Nicholas Wade has been conducting a brave crusade against the conventional wisdom for several years.

Leroi's essay is slightly weakened, however, by lacking a viable definition of what is a racial group and what is an ethnic group.

He seems to define race as a group of people who "have a set of genetic variants in common that are collectively rare in everyone else." Yet, people who suffer from Huntington's disease share a (fortunately) rare malign genetic variant, which pops up apparently at random. Nobody thinks of them as a race. Similarly, there may be randomly-occurring sets of genetic variants that cause left-handedness or homosexuality or the ability to wiggle your ears. That wouldn't make left-handers, gays, or ear-wigglers their own different "races,"—except in the most metaphorical of senses.

No, people use the word race to imply a "lineage." In my Random House Webster's College Dictionary, the first definition of "race" is "1. A group of persons related by common descent or heredity."

I've devised highly reductionist definitions of race and ethnicity that fit the way the U.S. Census Bureau uses the terms:

• A "racial group" is a partly inbred extended family. (A racial group is a special kind of extended family that has greater coherence and duration due to partial endogamy. Frequently it inhabits a specific region.)

• An "ethnic group" is a set of people who share non-genetic traits or characteristics, for instance, surnames, language, accent, religion, culture, cuisine, national origin of nominal ancestors—Lincoln's "mystic chords of memory," in fact.  Often, but not necessarily, these are passed down within biological families.

Not all ethnic groups are racial groups. Most notably, since 1970 the Census Bureau has treated Hispanics as an ethnicity, not a race, noting that Hispanics can be of any race.

One excellent point that Leroi makes is that racial groups can be of any size: