I'll be adding it alongside other such books on Racism in my library, with its both physical and virtual shelf space. Like if I wanted to read in Ashley Montagu's The Fallacy of Race: Man's Most Dangerous Myth, I'd go online (like to archive.org), as my physical copy, if I have one, is likely buried in a box somewhere (or is that one on my Kindle?).
I signed up for an eye doc appointment the other day, and as a new patient was given the standard race boxes to check in with. I was never asked my nationality, but did get to specify a preferred language.
One sees the usual list of checkboxes, but then Hispanic is set off by itself, as not-a-race. I'm welcome to check some boxes there as well (or not).
I followed my usual "when in Rome..." compliance algorithm and dutifully checked Caucasian for race, although my DNA ancestry doesn't trace to the Caucasus very directly, if at all. We don't all have to trace to the same Caspian Sea area do we, we of pale complexion?
I do feel greatly influenced by Hispanic language and culture but I don't want to imply that my Spanish is any good, so I decline that identification, artificially impoverishing my recorded heritage ("when in Rome...").
In my private egoic narrative, I'm thinking these check boxes reveal a lot about the ethnicity of the bureaucracy in charge. They think of ethnicity (e.g. Caucasian, e.g. Armenian) as rooted in one's genetic profile, with "race" meant to establish not only bio-physical boundaries but psycho-social ones as well (as in "Jewish race" and/or "Ukrainian race" -- USA federal forms would not have those).
The concept of "race" is elusive, including to machine learning. That's a topic of much research of course: not how to be "race blind" but how to identify someone's race (e.g. Samoan) simply based on facial features, including but in no way limited to skin coloration.
The "ethnicity versus physical type" divide is akin to the mind-body duality. A body is a result of "breeding" although we discourage the animal husbandry mindset from overthinking our mating practices.
A persona (personality) is a result of "breeding" too, meaning acculturation post graduation to autonomous eating and breathing (i.e. birth). Some say we start acquiring language well before birth in some cases. Then we go on to finishing schools (the schools of life, which eventually finish us).
It was long recognized that the number of categories is arbitrary and subjective, and different ethnic groups were placed in different categories at different points in time. François Bernier (1684) doubted the validity of using skin color as a racial characteristic, and Charles Darwin (1871) emphasized the gradual differences between categories. Today there is broad agreement among scientists that typological conceptions of race have no scientific basis.
In free liberal nations, we tend to actively undermine what other types of nationalist consider most intrinsic to their nationality: their genetic makeup. Liberals think the mark of a successful melting pot is experimentation and cross-fertilization. People marry or otherwise hook up across class lines, as well as race lines, as it's enshrined in principle that these lines are meant to be crossed, if not erased all together (ending all diversity then?).
The historically mostly white US Navy has a long tradition of such liberality in the Pacific theater. The US Navy is less segregated than ever these days, including among its nuclear and extended families (not just among crews).
The eugenics groups see "races" on the analogy of "primary colors" such that all humans are an admixture of these constituent lineages, such as "Caucasian" i.e. the American version of "Aryan". The actual picture is far more complicated and is continuing to evolve, such that DNA tests now talk about Neanderthal ancestry, not just Cro Magnon. People still speak in terms of "blood" but largely know that's metaphorical i.e. DNA in the blood is not different from DNA in any cell of the body (excepting gametes).
My own ethnicity is far less enamoured of the old racial typology, which appears to trace to the Book of Genesis, story of Noah. Those hoping to think simplistically in terms of Black, Brown, White, Yellow (did we lose the Red?) or BYWB, are guilty of the kind of groupthink God worried about.
These days though, given few take such thinking seriously, we're free to move on. Besides, few are really so bigoted as think in terms of "Yellow" and say "Asian" now, and Black and Brown should be capitalized ("white" not so much as it goes to their heads), whereas Hispanic is not really a race. So they tell us, until they tell us something else.
Wikipedia again (minus the footnotes):
The other three self-designated races are not labeled by color. This is due to historic negative associations of terms like "Yellow" (for East Asians) and "Red" (for Native Americans) with racism. However, some Asian Americans and Native Americans have tried to reclaim these color terms by self-identifying as "Yellow" and "Red", respectively.
The great flood in Genesis serves as a pinch point in human evolution, such that Noah's progeny suffered from too much inbreeding. The resulting mono-culture was also subject to debilitating forms of groupthink, which is what the Tower of Babel was all about. Humans were imprinting on the landlubber construction industry as the be all end all, losing their native maritime skills. Bummer.
Without some external intervention, humans would misguidedly think that certain way (in terms of a "tower towards God" i.e. "God is in the up direction") and never get on with fulfilling their true destiny.
God's solution, to confuse tongues, was brilliant as it pushed the tribes apart into Diaspora Nations, where they'd finally discover the Whole Earth (the real WE).
