American Anthropological Association's Rejection of the Concept of "Race"

[Facial_King]

An interesting read, for sure:

http://www.aaanet.org/stmts/racepp.htm

 

[Namreg]

*waits for camembert to start foaming at the mouth about why the "american race" is better than all the rest of world, which should not even exist*

 

[Shindekudasai]

Certainly interesting, but some things stated in this article are discussed among European scholars for a long time now. It's quite typical, that along comes an American institute or association with some "new conclusions" and state-of-the-art-knowledge, that for a lot of the scholars elsewhere in the world aren't really that new.
And it also shows (characteristic for many anthropologists) an alarming lack of historical knowledge. The concepts of race and stereotype discussed in this article (race as a concept used to create social differentiation, sociocultural hierarchys, man-slave-relationships, etc.) already existed in Ancient Rome, Greece (Sparta, Athens, etc.), Carthage and other civilizations. They were not created in America, as this article again and again implies, and then reimported into Europe. Most European and Asian powers were just smart enough not to let this kind of slave-ownership or the slaveholder-society itself become a definitive quality of their nationstates.
And the article manages again and again to let its own declared concept of race become too blurred and diffuse. For example when suddenly homosexuals or the handicapped are included in the concept, just to be able to talk about Hitler and "the Nazis" again. (And I urge you, scientists and scholars of America, use the proper terms when talking about a subject in a scientific or scholarly way. Everytime an American scholar starts talking about "the Nazis", other scholars from Germany, Britain, Japan or elsewhere have to restrain a smirk, because "the Nazis" is a colloquial term indicating bias, prepossession and flippancy (or scientific/scholarly superficiality) and is hence unfitting for serious scholarly or scientific conversation.)

But all in all certainly worth a read.

 

[D-rock]

Umm...most people's definition of race, or at least almost everybody I have ever known has delt with the issue of differences in physical appearance not just differences on pure genetic level. The term race was around a long time before the understanding of genetics we have now. That article seems to want to change the definition of race more for political reasons then it does with the definition being wrong. There are claear differences in phyisical appearance between people of different races, just as there are obvious similar phyiscal traits between people of the same race. It just doesn't make sense not to pretend like those don't exist for some reason becase all people are close to being simliar. Most people are also relitivly very close to chimpanzies comared to any other animal yet we are not them. Most dogs are genetically very similar to each other yet nobody pretends that a Chihuahua is a German shepard. It seems some people on a practicle sense don't want to except obvious differences in appearances even though anybody can plainly see them.

 

[ChefChiTown]

Historical research has shown that the idea of "race" has always carried more meanings than mere physical differences

Well, yeah...some people (throughout history) have looked at different religious denominations as being different races.