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I'm curious... what term would you use instead of 'race' to describe people? It's not a bad word in itself... I think maybe you don't like it because racists have sullied it?

Variety within the human species needs SOME kind of descriptive language... it's not something that we can just pretend doesn't exist. It's not inherently 'racist' to recognize that we are of different ethnicities (is that your preferred term?)

Steven Colbert often employs the joke that he doesn't know he's white because he doesn't 'see race'. What he's mocking are the conservatives that pretend they are inclusive.

I think more than anything this illustrates how ordinary, un-'loaded' words definitions can be twisted into carrying meaning that IS loaded with negative connotations.

When James Brown sang 'I'm Black and I'm Proud', he was embracing the term 'black'. And I don't know about anyone else, but the deliberate changing of that to 'African American' seems to me more a milquetoast technical description than an affirmation.

Having racial pride... now that's a loaded subject. It can mean totally different things depending on what color you are... most infamously, 'white pride' is usually a code word for racism. Even 'pride', itself, can mean something positive or negative, completely outside the context of ethnicity.

The idea of dividing the human race into races in the way we currently do was born of european anthropological studies done during a historical period where this terminology was defined based on the modernist philosophy that the kind of research being done was neutral in values and factual in output. Imo no research is neutral and the supposed factual output has in many ways been superceded by contemporary genetic research about genetic diversity etc.

Also think that the term race encourages polarised thinking and division. Whereas I prefer the view of humanity based on the Pogo cartoon which concludes "I have seen the enemy, and they are us" (an eco cartoon I know) but the sentiment is applicable elsewhere. Seems to me a better way to regard race is that there's one race, the human race. So the only interracial progeny are mermaids or centaurs etc.

I used the term race at times, but I prefer describing difference between people, I tend to describe what the difference is and/or use the self descriptive phrase used, so my kids are black people in some contexts, even though they're actually light brown skinned, but mostly they're an emo/indie/rock girl and a footie/xbox fanatic :-)

Racial descriptive terms such as black, asian, mixed race, arab or jewish aren't actual terms to define a race are they, they're a socially constructed piece of shorthand to enable us to describe what might be a historical location, religious or cultural tradition describe skin colour or physical features but when you delve into it defining this or that person as being of this "race" becomes virtually impossible with any kind of real logical or scientific basis.