According to "The Myth of Race," which I've been reading, these things are regurgetations of propaganda for racism and racial hatred which have bee put out there for many, many years. They have no scientific validity or value to anthropologists and scientists who have studied and debunked such efforts. Many things that reputable publishing houses have always refused to print because of their bogus claims, are now easily published on the internet. Does not make them true.
Race is not a myth. That book you're reading is commie propaganda.
The book was suggested to me by Jane Elliott and it basically says that there is only one race, and that is the human race. This is the finding of an international panel of anthropologists, geneticists, sociologists and psychologists.
If race doesn't exist, how come these experts who tell us race doesn't exist, like anthropologists, and geneticists, can in fact tell the race of an individual by close examination?
What they are able to tell is physical characteristics and since most have been taught to categorize humans into races, that is what they continue to do. Evidently some refute recent findings because they contradict their long held beliefs. I've been re-reading The Myth of Race to get a better understanding, and I also found this article:
From The Origin of the Idea of Race by Audrey Smedley, in the Anthropology Newsletter 1997:
Contemporary scholars agree that race was a recent invention and that it was essentially a folk idea and not a product of scientific research and discovery. This is not new to anthropologists. Since the 1940’s when Ashley Montagu argued against the use of the term “race” in science, a growing number of scholars in many disciplines have declared that the real meaning of race in American society has to do with social realities, quite distinct from physical variations in the human species. I argue that race was institutionalized in the beginning of the 18th century as a world view, a set of culturally created attitudes and beliefs about human group differences.
Race and its ideology about human differences arose out of the context of African slavery. Until the 18th century the image of Africans was generally positive. They were farmers, cattle-breeders, they had industries, arts and crafts, governments and commerce.
Towards the end of the 18th century, the image of Africans began to change. As a consequence of a powerful anti-slavery movement, pro-slavery forces found it necessary to develop new arguments defending the institution. Focusing on physical differences, they turned to the notion of the natural inferiority of Africans and thus, their God-given suitability for slavery. Such arguments became more frequent and more strident from the end of the 18th century on, and the characterizations of Africans became more negative. All anthropologists should understand that race has no intrinsic relationship to human biological diversity, that such diversity is a natural product of primarily evolutionary forces while “race” is a social invention.
Educator Jane Elliott said this to me in an e-mail: “Race is a myth made up after the Spanish Inquisition for the purpose of establishing dominance and power over groups, depending on the color of their skin. It was, and is, just as ridiculous as the Greek myth that said the sun was a god in a golden chariot that flew across the sky every morning.” She told me that it is time for us to unlearn what we have been taught.