The term “race” has emerged to categorize people based on their visible physical differences. Although the concept of race originated as a folk ideology associated with different populations brought together by European exploration and colonization, it has become a powerful social construct. Consequently, its social and political consequences are wide-ranging and profound. It is used to justify a variety of policies, from segregation and slavery to quotas and affirmative action (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, viii; Hannaford 1996). It also has served as the basis for discrimination against specific groups in many fields of inquiry.
In the United States, police departments frequently employ racial categories to identify suspects and to help apprehend them. These racial classifications are not scientifically valid, but they provide a convenient and easily recognizable means for police to distinguish one group from another.
Nevertheless, there is much controversy regarding the nature and origin of race, especially in light of recent scientific developments. Many scholars reject the idea that human races exist on a biologically or genetically meaningful level, and argue that racial distinctions are solely socially constructed (e.g., Foucault 1996; Cornell and Hartmann 1998). Others, however, believe that there is some valid scientific basis for the idea of race.
To this end, a number of theories have emerged that attempt to link specific characteristics with different racial categories. Some of these theories are based on genetic clustering, which may seem to offer an objective scientific basis for a racial taxonomy. The problem is that the differences between individuals within a cluster are continuous rather than discrete, making it difficult to determine where to draw the line between one cluster and another.
Other scholars have proposed cladistic race, which defines racial categories by groups that share a common geographic or ethnological origin. Whether this theory is viable, however, remains unclear. The problems with these theories are twofold. First, they are vulnerable to the same type of mismatch that plagues eliminativism: phenotypes and genotypes do not correlate well with the visible traits that are usually associated with a given racial category; blood-type variations, for example, have nothing to do with skin color or hair texture, and genealogy cannot serve as a basis for race because gene pools are not necessarily discrete (Mallon 2006, 533).
Ultimately, it seems unlikely that any of these theories can overcome the conceptual mismatch that is eliminativism. Nevertheless, greater attention must be paid to how racial data are collected and reported. When studies of racial disparities in health care, education, and other areas show differences between certain groups, it is important to consider how those differences are being explained in order to avoid perpetuating harmful social stereotypes and misspecifying complex risk factors. Moreover, studies that compare health outcomes by racial category should routinely stratify them by SES within those racial categories in order to reduce the possibility of false positives or negatives due to uncontrolled confounders. This would ensure that any differences are not simply the result of genetic or phenotypic variation, but that they are rooted in social and economic status.