Commercial DNA ancestry tests reify continental race categories as fixed biogeographical types

Evidence

No biologist has ever been able to provide a satisfactory definition of “race”—that is, a definition that includes all members of a given race and excludes all others. Attempts to give the term a biological foundation lead to absurdities: parents and children of different races, or the well-known phenomenon that a white woman can give birth to a black child, but a black woman can never give birth to a white child. The only logical conclusion is that people are members of different races because they have been assigned to them. — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 27 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Race-thinkers needed anthropology to classify Europeans into distinct hereditary types — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 914; Roots-style genealogical ancestry distorts Caribbean identity — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 411; Racial categories capture only 7% of human genetic variation — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 315 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Race categories result from social assignment, not biology #complicates (0.82) — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 27