> race is a _biological_ category
No, it is not. There is no biological definition of "race," anywhere. Biologically, it doesn't exist. It is entirely socially constructed.
You can't consider superficial biological characteristics (skin color, the size of lips, the shape or color of the eyes, etc.) as "biological" definitions of race, because there's social differentiation in the way "race" is defined from country to country. The classic example is the existence of the "one-drop" rule in the US as compared to the fine gradations of race in much of Latin America. Light-skinned black people in the US are still black. People who are objectively much darker in skin tone in Latin America are not black.
Chris is correct when he tries to make the distinction between older forms of religious and tribal hatred on the one hand and racism on the other. Classic Christian anti-Semitism vs. modern "racial" anti-Semitism, for example. But it remains an important empirical and political point that racism as such, which is tied to the global system of capitalism and white supremacy, is about 500 years old at the oldest.
Other forms of ethno-religious enmity are also much more recent than generally supposed; in many cases there is a religious identity that is indistinguishable from an ethnic one even if individual members of the ethnic group are not religious at all (e.g. Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs, Muslim Bosnians, all of whom speak the same language; ditto for Muslim and Christian Lebanese of various kinds). Chris may or may not be correct in trying to draw a distinction between global racism/white supremacy on the one hand and these forms of ethnic enmity on the other, but each kind is socially constructed, often relatively recently (in Europe that means maybe 150 to 200 years ago, with the birth of nationalism; in the former colonial world, where, e.g., the Tutsi/Hutu distinction in Rwanda was basically created by Belgian colonialism, it's even more recent), and none of these distinctions have any claim to "biological" significance.
- - - - - John Lacny
People of the US, unite and defeat the Bush regime and all its running dogs!