UF Researcher: Race Has No Place As An Official Category In Census

September 8, 1997

GAINESVILLE — Racial categories have no scientific validity, despite their political importance, says a University of Florida anthropologist whose group is asking that census takers ax such references altogether.

The American Anthropological Association (AAA) issued a first-of-its-kind recommendation today that the U.S. government scuttle race as an official category in favor of classifications based on ethnicity.

“In any population, you can find people who look like they belong somewhere else,” said John Moore, a UF anthropology professor who also is an AAA fellow. “My favorite example of the meaninglessness of race is Charlie Chan, who in the movies was the paradigmatic Chinaman with the spindly mustache and racial characteristics that were associated with being Mongoloid,” he said. “What many people don’t realize is, Charlie Chan was a Swede; he just happened to look like he was Asian.”

Anthropologists say racial categories fail to take into account the gradual transition of genetic and visual characteristics that emerge across continents, Moore said.

“There’s no place between Paris and Beijing where suddenly the people stop looking European and start looking Asian,” he said. “And if you travel up the Nile and were to stop at every village along the way, you would not discover that there’s one place where the people are no longer white, but black.”

Ironically, the major objection to eliminating racial categories has come from minority groups who fear losing money and programs driven by Affirmative Action. But the AAA’s position is that identifying people by ethnicity instead of race would be just as effective in redressing past discrimination, Moore said.

In fact, Moore said, For many people, ethnic categories would be more relevant than race anyway. Many dark-skinned people from Puerto Rico, for example, might more readily regard themselves as Puerto Rican than black, he said. And some Americans who may not look black have some African ancestry, which they’re proud of and wish to be identified by, he said.

The reason people believe race can be determined lies in some of the dramatic movements of population that have occurred during the last 500 years, Moore said. The shuttling of Africans as slaves to the United States, for example, created a sharp juxtaposition of populations, he said.

But recent statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau show more people are intermarrying and causing a gradual blending of populations, Moore said. Between 1970 and 1995, the number of reported interracial couples more than quadrupled, from 321,000 to 1.5 million, he said.

“The other objection that anthropologists have to racial categories is that they are based on superficial and trivial characteristics, as far as evolution is concerned,” Moore said.

Factors such as skin color, which can change dramatically in just a few generations, and nose breadth are inconsequential compared with differences in the immune system or in how food is metabolized, Moore said. “Those are real distinctions that make a life or death difference in the success or failure of human populations,” he said.

The use of races as labeling devices grew out of white people’s desire to dominate and exploit other so-called races, Moore said. “They were invented as a rationale for the conquest and the colonization of the world,” he said. “And we’re still stuck with these in an era where we should be a lot more knowledgeable and educated about variation in the human species.

“Foreigners tell me that we’re the only country in the world in which we’re required as a matter of law to say what race we are,” Moore said. “The only other comparable country that ever required this was Nazi Germany.”