Most philosophical work on race concentrates on two questions. The first is the question of whether race is real. Are there really kinds of people corresponding to racial categories like “white” and “black,” or is this merely an illusion? Suppose that races are real.

This takes us to the second question: if races are real, what makes them real? Races might be biologically real (analogous, perhaps, to breeds of dog). Alternatively, they might be real for purely social reasons. After all, money is real, and so are days of the week, but their ostensible reality depends on our social conventions. Perhaps racial categories like “black” and “white” are more like Mondays and Tuesdays than they are like beagles and corgis.

I’m going to concentrate on the biological question. I think that this is important because most people think that it’s just plain obvious that race is something that’s rooted in people’s biological make-up. I stress this because (in my view) the whole point of philosophizing about race is to contribute to the ongoing struggle for social justice. Getting clear about what race is (or, more accurately, what it isn’t) means getting rid false, oppressive, ideologically-infused conceptions and replacing them with a more accurate account of human diversity.

In particular, I want to tackle the issue of whether genetics can settle the question of whether races are real divisions of the human family. Rather than going over scientific objections to the claim that race is, in some sense, “in the genes,” I’m going to approach this issue from a philosophical perspective. I’m going to try to convince you that there’s something fundamentally confused about attempts to use genetics to prove the reality of race.

So, here goes….

Let’s begin with the ordinary, vernacular notion of race. The idea that there are human races is so stubbornly entrenched in our thinking that it’s difficult to recognize thatwe don’t see race. What we see is a profusion of biological diversity. We see that people come in different shapes, sizes, and colors. Some have very dark skin, and others are pale as ivory. Still others are every shade in between. Some have tightly curled hair, and others have straight hair. Some have eyelids with an epicanthic fold while others don’t.

种族和多样性不是一回事。“多样性”这个词是指我们观察到的这些外貌上的变化。In contrast, “race” is atheoretical概念——一个我们用来理解这些变化的概念。当我说种族是一个理论概念时，我并不是说它是一个正式的科学理论(我们在科学教科书中了解到的那种)。种族是多样性的一种民间理论。民间理论是一种非正式的理论——我们只是通过成为支持它们的文化的一部分而吸收的理论。我们在母亲的膝上，从电视和电影，以及与他人的偶然互动中学习它们。Because such theories are thoroughly ingrained in our ordinary ways of thinking—so taken for granted in everyday life—it’s hard to recognize that theyaretheories.

The folk-theory of race has three basic components.

首先，它指出只有少数纯粹的人类类型(种族)起源于某些地理区域。目前只关注肤色的民间理论认为，有纯粹的黑人(来自撒哈拉以南的非洲)和纯粹的白人(来自北欧)。也有棕色皮肤的人，他们的肤色比纯白色更深，比纯黑色更浅。这些棕色人种是通过黑人和白人的杂交产生的。民间理论将同样的一般模式应用于其他种族化特征(如头发质地或面部形态)。

其次，它表明种族不只是关于人们的长相。It’s about thekindof people that they are. Even though each race is supposed to have a certain stereotypical appearance, the folk-theory allows that it’s possible for members of one race to “pass” as members of another race in virtue of being outwardly indistinguishable from typical members of that race. If race boiled down to having a certain sort of appearance, passing wouldn’t be possible. According to the folk-theory, a person’s appearance is supposed toindicatetheir race rather thanconstitutingit (just as, for example, running a fever is a symptom of having the flu but isn’t what itisto have the flu).

Third, the folk-theory states that being a member of a certain race means that one possesses a bunch of inclinations, preferences, abilities, virtues, and vices that are stereotypically associated with that race. These characteristics are imagined to be rooted in some “deep” inner property that’s shared by only and all members of the race. Philosophers refer to this as the idea of aracial essence—a kind of inner blackness, or whiteness, or Jewishness, or Asian-ness that’s the causal bedrock of all the other racial traits.

It used to be thought that the racial essence is located in the blood (hence, the notorious “one-drop rule” of racial purity). Nowadays, this silly idea has been largely replaced with the notion that race is located in one’s genes. People who don’t know the basic science, but who have the vague conviction that race in our DNA, often believe that there are genes “for” race—that is, genes that only and all members of a given race possess. This isn’t true and no scientifically literate person gives it any credence. However, there is another, more sophisticated strategy for to appealing to genetics to underwrite race. This second strategy focuses on analyzing gene frequencies in human populations. To explain how it works, I’ll first need to present a little background information.

All human beings are practically identical at the genetic level. However, there are some places on our genome where two or more alternative “versions” of a gene can be present. These variants are calledalleles，它们解释了我们可以观察到的人与人之间的许多差异。例如，一个人的头发是金色的，另一个人的头发是黑色的，这是由基因组中控制头发色素沉着的等位基因的差异决定的。

等位基因不是随机分布在世界各地的。有些疾病在某些人群中比在其他人群中发生得更频繁。当多个等位基因在一个群体中频繁出现时，这被称为等位基因的“群集”。基因研究人员使用一种名为STRUCTURE的计算机程序来识别这些集群。他们输入从不同种群中采样的遗传数据，然后告诉STRUCTURE在数据中找到特定数量的集群(确切的数量由研究人员决定)。然后，STRUCTURE分析数据并将其分类到指定数量的集群中。It’s important to understand that STRUCTURE doesn’t identify alleles that areuniqueto the population. Rather, it paints a statistical picture of allelic frequencies in that population—a picture of what might (very loosely) be called thepopulation’sgenotype.Some individual members of the population will have a genotype that conforms precisely to this picture, but the clusters identified by STRUCTURE aren’t meant to represent the genotype of individual members of the population. They are statistical constructs representing allele frequencies in the population considered as a whole.

What does all this have to do with race?

If STRUCTURE is provided with genetic data sampled from individuals worldwide and told to partition this data into five clusters, it sorts the data into clusters whose distributions correspond to the five “continental races”—whites, blacks, Native Americans, East Asians, and Australasians.

这说明了什么?

It’s easy to leap to the conclusion that it proves that the everyday notion of race is vindicated by science. But that’s not warranted. To see why, we’ve first got to consider a more general philosophical issue: the distinction between characteristics that belong to individuals and those that belong to populations.

秃顶是一个只有个人才有的特征的例子。There are lots of people who are bald, but baldness isn’t a characteristic of anygroupof people. Speaking loosely, one might call the sum total of bald people the “bald population”, but it’s not really thepopulationthat’s bald—it’s the individuals that make up the population who are bald. To be bald, a thing has got to have to head, right? So anything that doesn’t have a head can’t be bald. Individuals have heads. Populations don’t. So, a population composed entirely of bald people isn’t itself bald. Or consider the population consisting of American philosophers. It would be ludicrous to say that this population is an American philosopher!

Other characteristics belong to populations but never to individuals. According to the United States Census Bureau, the median age for American women in the year 2012 was 38.1 years. It would obviously be ridiculous to ask what the median age of any individual American woman was in the year 2012. Individuals don’t have median ages: only populations do. Of course, an individual woman might be 38.1 years old. But the fact that her age conforms exactly to the statistical median doesn’t mean thatshehas a median age! Statistical constructs like “median age” give us information about whole populations but, very importantly,don’t tell us anything about individual members of that population.

To say that a population is bald, or that an individual person has a median age, would be to commit what philosophers call acategory mistake. The British philosopher Gilbert Ryle invented the term “category mistake” to describe a particular sort of confusion that people sometimes fall into. A person commits a category mistake when she attributes a characteristic to a thing that things of that kind just can’t have. For I’d be committing a category mistake if I were to say that Thursdays are green, because days of the week aren’t the kind of thing that can be colored, or if I were to say that the number 37 was in my kitchen last night, because numbers aren’t the sorts of things that can occupy spatiotemporal locations.

Now let’s use these conceptual tools to examine the notion of race.

首先，很明显，种族应该是属于个人的特征，否则就没有任何意义说任何人她是白人，黑人，亚洲人，或任何东西。种族也可以是人口的特征吗?乍一看，答案似乎是肯定的。像“白种人”这样的表达在概念上似乎没有什么问题。但让我们更仔细地看看。When people use the term “white race” they don’t literally mean to say that there’s apopulation皮肤白皙的那个。不可能是这个意思，因为人口没有皮肤。是个体组成了有皮肤的群体。很明显，“白种人”应该被理解为一种简略的表达，意思是“全部由白种人组成的人口”。

This simple point highlights a deep problem confronting any attempt to use facts about allele frequencies to justify race.If race is a characteristic of individuals then allele frequencies can underpin race only if allele frequencies are characteristics of individuals.但是我们已经知道等位基因频率并不是个体的特征。它们是人口的统计特征。由此可见，等位基因频率不能与种族划等号。

To conclude, let’s recap. We’ve seen that a person’s race can’t be reduced to their bodily form (phenotype) because that’s inconsistent with the phenomenon of passing. We’ve also seen that race can’t be located in a person’s DNA (genotype) because there aren’t any genes that are specific to races and because equating a person’s race with allelic frequencies entangles one in a category mistake. Since there aren’t any other options for grounding race in biology (genotype and phenotype are all that there is, biologically speaking), we have to conclude that race isn’t biologically real.