Jeff Goldstein over at Protein Wisdom has a nice disquisition on race as a social construct.

Well, yeah. What else could it be? There’s certainly no (modern) scientific basis for the concept, or any objective way of determining what the races are, or who are members of them. However, we’re reluctant to abandon it because there is now so much rent seeking involved in it.

I always find it amusing to see the political left get caught up in “the contradictions inherent in the system.” This came to something of a head in the last census when, after much protest and heeldragging by the bureaucracy, people were allowed to select multiple categories for their race on the census form. When one believes in “group rights,” confusing and intermingling the groups becomes anathema.

If I were a little more iconoclastic, and willing to put up with the bureaucratic and possibly legal battling, I (a person of mostly northern European and semitic descent) would put down “black” on the little box, whenever anyone asked my race. After all, how could anyone prove otherwise? If everyone would revolt in this simple way, we could quickly get this race madness behind us.