I just found an interesting discussion on race HERE .

Here are some excerpts from that discussion:

as the NYTimes Ed Board points out, race is not an easily described concept genetically:


"[A]t Pennsylvania State University, where about 90 students took complex genetic screening tests that compared their samples with those of four regional groups . . . [m]any of these students thought of themselves as "100 percent" white or black or something else, but only a tiny fraction of them, as it turned out, actually fell into that category. Most learned instead that they shared genetic markers with people of different skin colors.

Ostensibly "black" subjects, for example, found that as much as half of their genetic material came from Europe, with some coming from Asia as well. One "white" student learned that 14 percent of his DNA came from Africa - and 6 percent from East Asia. The student told The Daily Collegian, the student newspaper, earlier this year: "When I got my results I was like, there's no way they were mine. I thought it was just an example of what the test was supposed to look like. Then I was like, Oh my God, that's me."..."

-snip-

"Ramblings of a pediatrician.

In my job, I have to make a statement of the race of children. It grinds me to no end, for the reasons raised, and for others, which I will not get into. Maybe another day on that last.

It has been suggested to me "not to worry about it, just use the race of the child's mother." Talk about begging the question.

The argument goes that we need to classify people in order to compile data, to calculate whether or not races are treated equally? Maybe that is valid, as long as classifying them doesn't lead to discrimination, which I think it sometimes does.

As a doctor, I recognize that certain genetic conditions vary according to race, and that these variations can result in an increased risk of certain diseases, and now we actually have one medication which seems to have different actions which can be correlated with "race". But those questions, to this point, are almost never an issue.

But in spite of this, I come back to the question of how one determines race without taking a complete genetic history (which is often impossible or very time consuming and usually incomplete, inaccure or downright false); and in pursuing that thought, I get boggled by the issue of trying to determine whether someone is 12.5% or 8.33% (% of what?) white, black, brown, or yellow, I realize that this effort is hopeless. Further, for some purposes, one cannot classify a person successfully just by doing a family history. Certain races demand phenotypic (appearance) purity for membership.

The question for a doctor treating a child is increasingly going to be not what the mother thinks her own race is, but what the child's DNA says at certain loci that control certain synthetic/metabolic pathways. A self-described brown person can have a "white gene."

Which raises the issue of consequences of medical treatment: What will happen to a "white" person if it is revealed by her medication that he/she has a "black" gene? Will certain races demand genetic "purity' as well as pure racial appearance, for membership?

Too much information. Isn't it tempting to just get rid of all attempts to classify racially?

But we can't deny discrimination still exists....what would happen to efforts to prevent discrimination, if we drop all racial descriptors? What about proving voter intimidation, what about being able to document "separate but equal?"

I don't have any easy answers but I do know that the more we can educate our kids about what makes up our genes and how they mutate and vary and that all of us are polyglots, the better off we will be.

Truth, science and education are what we need in our schools and in our society, not faith, prejudice, manipulation, myth, and lies.

Just a pediatrician's ramblings."