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.

Thanks for the link, Rand.

Often when I'm teaching this stuff, I extrapolate it out to questions of gender identity, too. "Today," I tell my classes, "I am a woman trapped in a man's body. Tell me I'm not." For kicks, I add that on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I'm going to adopt the "culture" of an Asian woman.

When the terms of the argument fail the dual tests of logic and consistency, all that's left is the insistence (sound, fury, blah blah blah) -- typically on the part of those who have built their lives around this insistence -- that the Emperor is indeed clothed, and that what he's wearing is some ethnically "authentic" ensemble...

Spectacular idea. However, might I suggest that given the grim redounds of the Law of Unintended Consequences, that putting down Pacific Islander might have more interesting -- and less havoc-wreaking -- effects?