The concept of race is a potent one and an important part of people’s identities. However, it is a social construct, meaning that it exists only because of how society is organized and operated. This is evident in the disproportionately high levels of inequality that exist between groups defined by race. For example, the African American population suffers from a legacy of racial discrimination that has disproportionately impacted their lives in terms of access to housing, education, and health care. This is a result of built environments and systems that were not designed to equitably include and support them.
It is also true that the scientific definition of race—a biological distinction based on differences in skin pigmentation and other physical characteristics—has been discarded by most scientists today. In reality, the underlying genetic variation that defines a person’s race is much less consistent and distinct than we might think. In addition, migration histories and intermarriage make it difficult to categorize people based on their ancestral origins. In fact, the racial categories used in censuses and other surveys are defined by self-identification rather than descent.
Nevertheless, some science writers have proposed alternative ways of thinking about race. Some have embraced the notion of social constructivism—a theory that states that differences between people are largely cultural and not caused by inherited traits. Others have embraced political constructivism, a view that asserts that racial differences exist only because of differential power relations. Finally, some have adopted cladistic race theory—a minimalist conception that assigns different genes to clusters of individuals whose ancestry is linked.
This approach does have some advantages. It can overcome some of the problems that have arisen with other methods, such as phenotype-based taxonomy. It can also avoid some of the conceptual mismatches that plague eliminativism. For example, cladistic race can distinguish between people with black and those with brown skin, but it may generate counter-intuitive cross-classifications, linking, for instance, northeast Asians to Europeans rather than more phenotypically similar southeast Asians.
Some researchers have also created new concepts that attempt to combine the best of these three approaches. The most promising of these is called socially isolated race, which seeks to capture in a value-neutral way the idea that people with common ancestry do not have a shared racial identity. It can also incorporate some of the features of cladistic race, such as geographically separated and reproductively isolated origins.
The problem with these alternative approaches, though, is that they all still have the same fundamental flaw. They do not capture the true impact of racial categories on people’s lives, which is that they have been used to distribute resources unequally and set up different standards for protection under the law. They also do not address the way that racial categories have shaped people’s daily experiences, including the fact that some groups suffer from fiendish burdens because they are forced to navigate systems and structures that were designed with racial discrimination in mind.