I'll agree that it can be really hard to talk about complicated things in public. If I was asked the question implied above I would say it was more the case that race genuinely is a social construct, but that ethnicity shows human variation from shared history and genetics. So, 'Black' is a racial category but is never going to be an ethnic grouping, because there are dozens or hundreds of ethnicities with wildly differing histories and genetics that are lumped into that category; but Ashkenazi Jews are in contrast an ethnicity with a shared history and gene pool, as are say Telugu Hindus. So there is biology of ethnicity, but it's more difficult to have biological facts about the broader categories referred to as race.
An example of this that I can think of is health outcomes of South Asians or people from the Indian subcontinent, in Britain. There are high rates of predicted genetic problems if you're of South Asian descent, which can affect how likely a woman is to be referred for certain tests in pregnancy or a child for certain tests in infancy, because some South Asian groups have favoured kinship relations such as cousin marriage for cultural reasons. Other sub-populations within the South Asian heritage groups favour exogamy and are hence very much less likely to have the same rate of birth defects. But it's less acceptable for your midwife to sit down and enquire, "So, is the dad a first cousin of yours, are your mum and dad first cousins to each other?" than it is to have you check a 'race identity' box where you indicate you have heritage from the Indian subcontinent and they then refer you for additional tests on the basis of that racial category even though it's a broad category amongst whom many will not have any elevated risk.
p
I'll agree that it can be really hard to talk about complicated things in public. If I was asked the question implied above I would say it was more the case that race genuinely is a social construct, but that ethnicity shows human variation from shared history and genetics. So, 'Black' is a racial category but is never going to be an ethnic grouping, because there are dozens or hundreds of ethnicities with wildly differing histories and genetics that are lumped into that category; but Ashkenazi Jews are in contrast an ethnicity with a shared history and gene pool, as are say Telugu Hindus. So there is biology of ethnicity, but it's more difficult to have biological facts about the broader categories referred to as race.
An example of this that I can think of is health outcomes of South Asians or people from the Indian subcontinent, in Britain. There are high rates of predicted genetic problems if you're of South Asian descent, which can affect how likely a woman is to be referred for certain tests in pregnancy or a child for certain tests in infancy, because some South Asian groups have favoured kinship relations such as cousin marriage for cultural reasons. Other sub-populations within the South Asian heritage groups favour exogamy and are hence very much less likely to have the same rate of birth defects. But it's less acceptable for your midwife to sit down and enquire, "So, is the dad a first cousin of yours, are your mum and dad first cousins to each other?" than it is to have you check a 'race identity' box where you indicate you have heritage from the Indian subcontinent and they then refer you for additional tests on the basis of that racial category even though it's a broad category amongst whom many will not have any elevated risk.
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