Ask the Scholars

No, not in the least. Populations are not all the same. You do find gene variants that occur in some populations and only rarely or not at all in other populations. But that's not the same thing as saying that you can define large groups of people, millions of them, by genetics. The problem is there's a whole spectrum of genetic variation, but we impose simplistic racial categories on this spectrum. We ought not to believe that because people are of the same race, they are genetically si...

It's very important to recognize that when you talk about populations, you're talking about local clusters of people or statistical clusters of people. But when you talk about races, you're presumably talking about a couple of billion people on a continent. And it's very hard to characterize that large a number of people with a small sample derived from one or a few localities.

I think it's so embedded in genetic research - that it inevitably happens. Research is done on whites from Washington, D.C. and they come to represent the white race without taking into account how much variation there is. I think a classic example are the studies that have been done on blacks in Brazil, which all of a sudden are interpreted as representing blacks in the United States and Africa as well. I think the Japanese are a great example of the confusion of "race" or even "Japanes...

 I think that also ties in, again, to the idea of race as a metaphor. We continue to use race to be the large group that some tiny group is the embodiment of. And that becomes a metaphorical association between, as Alan was just saying, the Japanese and this much larger group characterizing all Asians.