‘Race’ having any connection to DNA gives some folks the willies. But there is an obvious DNA link to skin color and a VERY LARGE number of small adaptations to life where that group initially lived, ‘initially’ being in the last thousand-odd years.
‘Race’ is also a matter of nurture. Steve Martin made a movie three or so decades back featuring a dorky white guy named Navin who grew up as an adopted child of poor Southern black parents. The movie proved nothing whatsoever, but in a back-handed way tried to guess at how much nurture has to do with adult behaviors.
The United States’ history of enslaving people stolen wholesale from Africa between the early 16th and middle 19th Centuries, plus a war fought because the industrial north tried to impose economic slavery upon the agrarian south – not many people reflect on the fact that Lincoln declared slaves to be free when the war was already half-over – shows that it was the north’s deeply ironic imposition of slavery on the south that led the south to do what their black slaves didn’t have the wherewithal to do for themselves – revolt – and it didn’t end any better for the south than it did for most of the people they enslaved.
One who persecutes another winds up demeaning, belittling, and hating the one being persecuted. That’s the way persecutors lull themselves to a sound slumber every night. The north hasn’t shed any tears about the privations that war forced on the south, and sleep well ditto. Those who think blacks ‘have a place, and should learn it’ also sleep well at night.
We have most of the world’s supply thereof, or at least it seems that way. Those are the ones who, by their actions, reinforce and help define the idea of race in the U S A. While they hold those learned-at-my-mama’s-knee corrupt ideas, the working definition of race won’t go away.
Oh, and Another Thing 