Van den Berghe isolates one useful scientific meaning of race among four confused connotations.

Evidence

The most systematic brief in favor of a sharper distinction between “race” and “ethnicity” may be the one advanced by Pierre L. van den Berghe in Race and Racism (1967), a work comparing the United States and South Africa. Van den Berghe argues that four principal connotations of “race” make it confusing. First, there is the dated and no longer tenable context of physical anthropology that once classified all human beings into customarily three to five races, that is evoked when scholars now speak of “race.” Second, the term has been and still is applied to numerous groups such as the “French race” or the “Jewish race” - and in these cases, van den Berghe recommends the use of the terms “ethnicity” or “ethnic groups” as synonyms for only this meaning of “race.” Third, the polysemous word is also synonymous with “species” when one says, “the human race.” Only the fourth sense of “race” is the one van den Berghe proposes we should use; it refers, as defined by social scientists, to a “human group that defines itself and/or is defined by other groups as different from other groups by virtue of innate and immutable physical characteristics” (van den Berghe, 1967:9). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 707

Categorization

• DEFINE: Manages the four senses of ‘race’ and preserves only the socially-defined innate-physical-characteristics sense as analytically usable.
• XREF: Connects to vault treatment of pre-scientific physical-anthropology racial taxonomy and to Omi & Winant’s critique of race-as-biology.