While rejecting the idea that race is a valid biological or "natural" category, he also states that care must be taken not to "abstract the physiognomic rule of racial determination out of racial categories altogether. Racial categories are not natural, but they are not for that reason "purely social" in all respects either. The racial standing of individuals is not decided solely by the biography of persons as social beings, but by biologically inherited natural physiognomic marks. Thus, nature does get enlisted..." (p. 38).
Arbitrarily selected physiognomic characteristics are assigned social significance. Categorization of humans into races according to physiognomic traits makes discrete categories out of what is in fact a continuum. This why the same individual could be "black" in the US (where historically the "one drop of black blood" policy was in place, "coloured" under the apartheid categories of SA, and "white" in parts of the Carib. and South Amer. I believe that SA also had an "honorary white" category for Japanese?
Madness.
On Mon, 1 Jun 1998, Charles Brown wrote:
> Race is a valid, scientific politicaleconomic and historical category,
> and not a valid scientific biological category. As Carrol quoted a while
> ago, Marx said in"Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of the Law -
> Introduction", "when an idea grips the masses it becomes a material
> force." The concept of "race" has gripped many masses and is a material
> force, a social reality.
>
> There are physical differences between groups within the species homo
> sapiens sapiens. But skin color, hair texture and facial feature size
>and shape, the current significant physical features in the European
>concept of race (discussed at length on this thread), are not correlated
>with socalled intelligence, rationality, ability to do abstract
>reasoning,"moral uprightness", laziness/enterprisingness, enthusiasm for
>sex etc, etc.