Hier past een toelichting over de opvatting van de wetenschap over "mensenrassen".
Anthropology van William A. Haviland is een veelgebruikt antropologie-handboek. De vijfde editie bevat een achttal bladzijden over
The Meaning of Race waaruit hier een klein stukje (p.258). Het is typerend voor wat je in andere wetenschappelijke handboeken zal vinden.
Samengevat: er zijn geen manieren om mensenrassen wetenschappelijk (biologisch) te onderscheiden. En het dient uit wetenschappelijk oogpunt ook nergens voor.
The Concept of Human Races
As a device for understanding polytypic variation in humans, the biological race concept has serious drawbacks. One is that the category is arbitrary to begin with, which makes agreement on any given classification difficult. For example, if one researcher emphasizes skin color, while another emphasizes blood group differences, it is unlikely that they will classify people in the same way. Perhaps if the human species were divided into a number of relatively discrete breeding populations, this wouldn't be such a problem, but even this is open to debate. What has happened, though, is that human populations have grown in the course of human evolution, and with this growth have come increased opportunities for contact and gene flow among populations. Since the development of food production, the process has accelerated as periodic food shortages have prompted the movement of farmers from their homelands to other places (see Chapter 9). Thus, differences between human populations today are probably less clear-cut than back in the days of H. erectus, or even the Neandertals.
If this isn't enough of a problem, things are complicated even more because humans are so complicated genetically. Thus, the genetic underpinnings of phenotypic traits upon which traditional racial classifications are usually based are poorly understood. To compound the problem, "race" exists as a cultural, as well as a biological, category. In various different ways, cultures define religious, linguistic, and ethnic groups as races, thereby confusing linguistic and behavioral traits with physical traits. For example, in many Central and South American countries, people are commonly classified as "Indian," "Mestizo" (mixed), or "Ladino" (of Spanish descent). But in spite of the biological connotations of these terms, the criteria used for assigning individuals to these categories consist of such things as whether they wear shoes, sandals, or go barefoot; speak Spanish or some Indian language; live in a thatched hut or a European-style house; and so forth. Thus, an Indian, by speaking Spanish, wearing Western-style clothes, and living in a house in a non-Indian neighborhood, ceases to be an Indian, no matter how many "Indian genes" he or she may possess.
This sort of confusion of nonbiological characteristics with what are spoken of as biological categories is by no means limited to Central and South American societies. To one degree or another, such confusion is found in most Western societies, including those of Europe and North America. What makes it worse is that it is frequently combined with attitudes that are then taken as excuses to exclude whole categories of people from certain roles or positions in society. In the United States, for example, it has frequently been asserted that "blacks are born with rhythm," which somehow is thought to give them a "natural affinity" for jazz, "soul music," and similar forms of musical expression. The corollary of this is that blacks are unsuited "by nature" for symphonic music. Hence, one does not find a black at the head of any major symphony orchestra in the United States, even though black conductors such as James de Priest, Paul Freeman, and Dean Dixon have had distinguished careers in Canada and Europe.
