Stop Talking Race

__"Bred in the Bone?" by Alan H. Goodman, in The Sciences (Mar.–Apr. 1997), New York Academy of Sciences, 2 E. 63rd St., New York, N.Y. 10021.__

Most anthropologists agree that race is an unscientific concept, that distinct biological races simply do not exist. Yet even scientists themselves fall into the race trap, observes Goodman, an anthropologist at Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Anthropologists and medical and health professionals use race "as a shorthand to describe human biological variations," he says, even though those variations "blur from one race into the next, and are greater within so-called races rather than among them." Whether racial shorthand is employed in police work, medical studies, or public health situations, Goodman argues, the fact remains that "race science is bad science" and can be misleading, even dangerous.

Take forensic anthropologists, for example. They maintain that while race may be "socially constructed," the people in one racial category still tend to look enough alike to make "race" useful in police forensics. To back this up, Goodman says, the anthropologists often cite a study done in the early 1960s suggesting that it is possible to correctly identify the "race" of a skull between 85 and 90 percent of the time. But, he writes, in three of four efforts to replicate the study, "the formula proved less accurate than a random assignment of races to skulls—not even good enough for government work."

Race thinking, Goodman contends, sometimes leads criminal investigators needlessly astray. That happened in the aftermath of the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. A forensic anthropologist concluded that a leg found in the rubble that did not match any of the recovered bodies probably came from a "darkly complected Caucasoid" male. But the leg eventually turned out to belong to a woman who was, according to one forensics expert, "obviously black."

The use of race as shorthand in medical work provides similar miscues, Goodman maintains. For example, when public health and medical professionals list race as a risk factor in osteoporosis (a progressive loss of bone mass), which disproportionately afflicts whites, they are encouraging the mistaken assumption that blacks do not get the disease—and therefore are not in need of preventive care or other help.

The way for scientists and others to avoid the confusion and false leads—and the encouragement to racism that race thinking provides—is simple, says Goodman: stop using racial classifications and refer to specific traits instead. Why say black or white when "darkly complected" are the truest words?