Race is a social construct

EDIT: this is a criticism of race as an "objective" biological categorisation. I do have arguments against (or at least about) race as a social phenomenon, but they are outside the scope of this "short" post. Sorry for being unclear!

A while ago there was a post on debunkingwhite challenging people to talk on their ljs about how race has no basis in biology. I added it to my "queue of topics to make thinky posts about" (I find it best to let things stew for a while there, and anyway was feeling sick and stupid ¹) and today got around to reading other people's responses.

Anyway, I reserve the right to make a long thinky post later, but this post and comment in particular really helped crystalise it for me personally:

So. Human beings are not genetically uniform. Different populations have observable genetic differences in their average makeup (ie the percentages present of various genes) and these result in observable differences (and presumably, also more subtle ones we haven't noticed) in things like skin colour, susceptibility to particular diseases etc.

There is also the historical/social concept of "race", which divides the world into fairly strict categories (asian, african etc) based on physical, geographical, and cultural markers, and which associates various traits (intelligence, criminality etc) to each race.

These two divisions, the genetic and the racial? Have pretty much no relationship to each other what-so-ever.
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