Anthropology and Race Concept it

¶ … Anthropology and Race Concept It may be argued that by rejecting the race concept, anthropologists are ignoring obvious human biological variation; however, a more accurate statement would add that anthropologists may not be ignoring, but rather renaming and clarifying human biological variation. The move away from a so-call "race concept" is essentially an attempt to deny that the politically and socially loaded concept of race is a legitimate one.

Race, as it has been traditionally defined, is narrowly limited by a small number of characteristics in which the single most important biological feature is skin color. Of course, skin color is a tiny percentage of overall human biological variation, and even the entire constellation of "racial" characteristics (including facial features and skin color) represent less than a tenth of total human variation. Yet this small variation has historically been used to justify genocide, slavery, and many other atrocities. For this reason, the idea of "race" has become unsavory.

Anthropologists cannot legitimately ignore the fact that biological variation occurs. Moreover, this variation is not merely based on skin color, hair texture, or facial features, but may expand to include muscle structure, physical strengths or weaknesses, size and weight, life span, and a host of genetic peculiarities such as sickle cell (which may be deadly to some while providing insurance against malaria to others).

It would be easy to assume, then, that biologists are making a mistake by rejecting the race concept because that rejection would force them to also ignore such biological variation. However, this assumption would be false. Most intelligent anthropologists are not rejecting the idea of biological variation or a geographical/genetic component to that variation.

On the contrary, they reject the idea of "race" specifically because it is not flexible enough to accurately model the full range of biological variation and therefore lumps all geographic/genetic variable populations together based on a small subset of their traits. The race concept would lump together, for example, both the small and slightly darker Mediterranean body build with the robust, blond Nordic body build as both "White" while.