There Are No Races

"There are no races, there are only clines." -Frank Livingstone

Race: "An arbitrary classification of modern humans based on any or a combination of various physical characteristics, as skincolor, facial form, or eye shape (dictionary.com)."

This, I suppose, would be my non-AmCon related post for the week.  So it turns out, one of my majors is Sociology/Anthropology, so I'm a bit passionate about some of the things involved with those fields, specifically Cultural Anthropology.  One of the things that is a common misconception about mankind is the idea of races.  Even anti-racism campaigns use the idea of them, even if it's with good intensions.  However, Anthropology as a field refuses to use the term.  Why? Because heres the thing: races don't exist.

A cline is a single trait that is mapped out over the entire species, showing trends in variation.  For example, eye color is a cline.  So is hair type.  Skin color. Height.  Facial shape.  Any single genetic trait.  These traits are mapped to show how the traits differ in people around the world.  Two clinal maps could be compared to see if perhaps there are any overlap in trends, to see if any groups of people share the same clinal distribution.  For the idea of race to exist, all clines would have to align a certain way, showing that certain groups of people all share the same clines and are therefore biologically blueprinted.  But they don't.  No such overlap has ever been discovered.  Basically, "clinal analysis tests the biological concept of race and finds nothing in nature to match it (Schultz and Lavenda, 95)."