Most of us know a white person, a black person, an Asian or American Indian when we see one. We say we can spot them by their skin color, their hair texture, or by the shape of their eyes, or nose, or lips.
And many people, consciously or unconsciously, will leap from the perception of race to assumptions about a stranger's genetics, biology, behavior and abilities.
They'd probably be wrong.
Advances in genetics are undermining some of our oldest notions about the nature and biology of race. And the scientists whose intellectual forebears helped establish those notions say it's time to set the record straight.
"Race as an explanation for human biological variation is dead," says Alan H. Goodman, president-elect of the American Anthropological Association.
The truth emerging from modern genetics, scientists say, is that we're 99.9 percent identical. Thanks to our common origins, and our natural eagerness to exchange DNA, our genes are thoroughly scrambled. And what patterns do emerge bear little resemblance to our traditional, geographically rooted notions of "race."
Researchers say this new, deeper understanding should silence those who argue that some innate inferiority -- or superiority -- lies behind persistent racial disparities in such things as school achievement, poverty or incarceration rates, or infant mortality.
"That just doesn't wash," says Goodman, a professor of biological anthropology at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. "It takes ... a gun out of the hand of racists."
`Race has real effects'
But it doesn't end the discussion. Race still exists as what scientists call a "social construct," an invention of society which we begin to learn by the age of 3 or 4.
"Race has real effects. It has material effects," Goodman says. "If you talk of differences in voting patterns in the U.S., differences in health care, education, housing, differences in school behavior -- that structure between racial groups is real. But it's not biological."
These realizations sparked anthropologists, who gathered recently in Alexandria, Va., to begin what they see as a badly needed public conversation about the biological and social realities of race in America.
They also want to put to rest some ghosts in their own history. It was one of their own -- German scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, often called the father of physical anthropology -- who proposed in 1795 that mankind was divided into five races based on geography, physical attributes and traits. He called them Caucasian, Negro (or Ethiopian), American, Mongolian and Malayan.
