> I thought you already had "Anglo-Saxons" and "African Americans" for these.
Those are not the same things. For one, "Anglo-Saxon" is English ancestry. It doesn't include all White people. Second, I'm asking about what you should call the specific classification system the US use(d/s) to label people as Black and White. The US classified people on "race", which isn't exactly the same as Blumenbach's categories but did evolve out of them.
> Even imperfect concepts and approaches have their utility.
What is the utility of the idea of an "Ethopian" race? Are racial categories a useful tool in Anthropology and Biology (beyond the historical consequences of the idea of race)? For each any such examples, are there better tools?
> For one, "Anglo-Saxon" is English ancestry. It doesn't include all White people.
From what I can tell, the US notion of "white people" at one point did basically coincide with "Anglo-Saxon"/"Nordic" ancestry - in the broader sense, since OF COURSE there's even several meanings of the former term; for example in the abbreviation "WASP", the "AS" most certainly does not refer solely to English ancestry. So in this case think of "Anglo-Saxon" as of the "AS" in "WASP".
> Second, I'm asking about what you should call the specific classification system the US use(d/s) to label people as Black and White.
It sounds a lot to me like a caste system, as I already said.
> Are racial categories a useful tool in Anthropology and Biology
Absolutely, how else would you for example conceptualize large-scale population movements once you start to analyze population genetics in both current populations and archeological remains? Those groups are racial categories.
> large-scale population movements ... population genetics ... Those groups are racial categories.
The tool that you're using to map population migrations isn't race, it's genetic similarity of geographically close populations. What specifically is the definition of race, and how does that definition help with mapping population movement?
Furthermore, those are not "categories" because they exist on a spectrum. You measure similarity as a continuous value. There doesn't happen to be natural demarcation lines between different "racial categories". Populations are composed of lots of different people who tend to be similar, but who don't fall into categories. Genetic similarities cross populations, and human populations don't tend to have neat boundaries.
For example, check out this plot of genetic differences in Europe. The differences smoothly smear out over the geography. The other anchors of Beijing, Tokyo, and Yoruba are indeed separate, but that is because they are far away. You'd continue to have a spectrum connecting those geographies if the chart also measured the genetics of the connecting geography.
> What specifically is the definition of race, and how does that definition help with mapping population movement?
Quoting from OED, 2nd Ed., a race is "a group of persons, animals, or plants, connected by common descent or origin".
> they exist on a spectrum.
Possibly, but that doesn't tell you anything useful about whether there are useful categories or not. It depends significantly on the shape of the distribution whether useful categories arise in the first place, how many and so on. Fixating on the connectivity of the kernel would be ditching an awful lot of information. That this connectivity exists is a trivial consequence of the fact that we're not talking about different species.
> For example, check out this plot of genetic differences in Europe. The differences smoothly smear out over the geography.
Yes, and that tells you a lot about the population of Europe. So clearly this is useful.
You're picking a single definition of race from the OED, but there are multiple definitions. They somewhat overlap, but they aren't all the same concept.
> A group of people sharing the same culture, history, language, etc.; an ethnic group.
> A group or set of people or things with a common feature or features.
> literary A group of people descended from a common ancestor.
> archaic mass noun Ancestry.
https://www.lexico.com/definition/race (Lexico uses the OED). Language and culture can be correlated with ancestry, but they are not the same thing. You can pick ancestry as the definition of race, but why not use the already existing term "ancestry"? The definition of words can change over time as we gain knowledge, but I just don't think it's useful to pretend that the most common and best definition of race is genetic rather than social.
This is what I said originally: "Race is correlated with and impacted by ancestry/genetics, but it is not how race is defined." I believe this is an accurate description of how the ancestral posts used "race".
> These texts contain statistical associations between politically sensitive terms, negative terms, (and so on). However they are not racist, are not born of any racist project, and most humans reading them would be moved to more positively regard racial terms.
This is discussing the social racial classifications. This would be referring to Black as the US racial category, what you would call the US Black caste. It's not discussing genetics at all.
> alcohol or milk ... Europeans, North Siberian and Alaskan peoples, and East-Asian peoples
These are ethnic groupings of people. You can find statistical genetic differences between these groups which we have socially defined, but they are not defined in terms of genetics. Are you not European if you are lactose intolerant? Are you not Alaskan Native if you can drink milk? Measuring a difference between categories does not mean that's how the categories were defined.
(Side note: please don't assume native people metabolize alcohol differently. There are strong sociological factors which make it difficult to pin on biology, there are mixed results with genetics, and heritability encompasses genetics, culture, and sociological status https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_and_Native_Americans#C... )
> That is not the common way to determine race (visible differences). Genetic markers are generally the indicator (eg Ancestry.com).
This is the same assertion you're making, but it's not the same definition which was used in the ancestral comments.
> originally actually craniometric definitions ... Even imperfect concepts and approaches have their utility
> population genetics in both current populations and archeological remains? Those groups are racial categories.
The trouble with your definition is that you're defining race as any useful distinction based on genetics. Were the craniometric definitions of race useful? Did they help with discovering/communicating new scientific findings, or did those categorizations hinder progress with arbitrary categories? You can't say that categorizing data is useful, race is a categorization, therefore race is useful. You have to specify which metric you're using to form the racial categorization because there are an infinite number of ways to categorize data.
>> For example, check out this plot of genetic differences in Europe. The differences smoothly smear out over the geography.
> Yes, and that tells you a lot about the population of Europe. So clearly this is useful.
What were the pre-genetic racial categories which helped the analysis? Why should clusters in population genetics be called racial categories?
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Those are not the same things. For one, "Anglo-Saxon" is English ancestry. It doesn't include all White people. Second, I'm asking about what you should call the specific classification system the US use(d/s) to label people as Black and White. The US classified people on "race", which isn't exactly the same as Blumenbach's categories but did evolve out of them.
> Even imperfect concepts and approaches have their utility.
What is the utility of the idea of an "Ethopian" race? Are racial categories a useful tool in Anthropology and Biology (beyond the historical consequences of the idea of race)? For each any such examples, are there better tools?