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I'm generally a fan of "blurry" definitions where something can qualify as X if it fulfills a few of many criteria. I think trying to create hard rules around blurry areas like race and culture is fool's errand, and Scott does a great job laying out how overly strict definitions can go wrong.
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Scott seems to not understand. Race is still a social construct. There are genetic variations among different populations, but this doesn't mean the categories of race are not socially constructed. Who decided we are going to define one race white and another black, based on skin color? He uses the example with Jews, but this makes no sense since their categorization of race is different from the Western categorization. These racial categories have a purpose and are useful for a variety of reasons, but he's not making a convincing point that racial categories are not socially defined. Certain racial categories are fuzzier and an American invention: whites and blacks.
Scott agrees with you, except for the assertion that biological race is entirely useless. Biological race is what ancestry.com identifies you as when you do a DNA test. It's different but has substantial overlap with cultural race. Biological race is, usually, less useful than cultural race, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist like how, say, a biological Star Wars fan doesn't exist. There are lots of genes associated with certain geographic regions and cultures, there aren't genes particularly associated with liking Star Wars.
I think Scott is opening with a straw man (or is it motte and bailey? I don't know). There probably are people who will deny that there is some genetic variation in different populations if you cherry pick for radicals, but just because something is a social construct doesn't mean it has no utility. I am not sure where this claim of his is coming from. It's understood that money is a construct, but we don't deny it's utility. Saying something is a social construct was never meant (in a serious discussion) to mean it is useless.
There are lots of people who deny that race has any biological basis. If you grill them on what exactly they mean by it they might eventually realize that obviously race has some biological basis, but otherwise, they'll be pushing HR policies and going to the ballot box working under the assumption there is no such thing as biological race.
He concludes with essentially saying that the social construct definition, where race is based off lived experience, is more meaningful anyways.
As I understand, what the professional geneticists mean by "human racial classifications have no basis in biology" is something like the claim
(1) "Inasmuch as there's a sensible biological phenomenon of "race" or "subspecies" that we can talk scientifically about all across biology (not just humans), we've broadly agreed to define this phenomenon in terms of ratios of genetic variation within and between populations. Morphology and behavior isn't enough. If you want to tell me that you've discovered a new subspecies of gray flycatcher, the distinctive markings on its tail feathers and the distinctive song that it sings aren't going to cut it -- you have to show something about the ratio of overall genetic variation within vs between candidate populations of gray flycatchers.
Many biological "subspecies" that were previously identified based on morphology and behavior don't hold up to modern genetic analysis. This is not to say that your candidate subspecies of gray flycatcher can't be reliably identified by genetic analysis -- maybe it has a handful of mutations that always appear in it but not in the rest of the species, and maybe those mutations underlie the distinctive behavior and morphology -- but those distinctive differences may be located in too few genes to make the cut overall. Maybe the genetically-mediated differences in morphology and behavior will drive true subspeciation in the future, but it's not there yet.
Applied to human races, the genetic differences between human racial groupings fail to stand out against the backdrop of human genetic diversity sufficiently, across the whole genome, to make the cut as biological subspecies, at any threshold of "sufficiently" to be useful across the rest of biology (not that biology has a lot of use for subspecies in general -- species are fuzzy enough already)."
What some people seem to want this to mean is more like
(2) "Observed average morphological and behavioral differences between members of different human races are not genetically mediated."
This is absurd on its face, and is not implied by (1).
There's plenty of room for different socially-defined and approximately ancestry-tracking racial groups of humans to exhibit genetically-mediated differences in morphology and behavior without qualifying as biological subspecies. There's plenty of room for greyhounds and pitbulls to do so as well, also without qualifying as biological subspecies.
I've never seen the claim that different human races should be considered sub-species, at least not by anyone who isn't absurdly racist.
I honestly don't entirely know what people who say "race is 100% socially constructed and not biological" are thinking. I usually give people the benefit of the doubt, but in this case I think it's really just double think.
Maybe the geneticists are just knocking down a straw man when they say humans don't have subspecies and therefore there aren't biological races of humans, but it is a thing they do. See Biological Races in Humans:
This guy goes on to argue that by the broader race/subspecies criteria, there are biological races of chimps, but not of humans.
I also have no idea what people who think race is 100% socially constructed and not biological mean. Do they think a baby born to self-identified black parents is not likely to have noticeably darker skin than a baby born to self-identified white parents? There's something to be said for "racial classifications are not cross-culturally consistent", such that in Brazil people might be called "white" while having a large percentage of African ancestry than many people in America who are called "black", but that just reflects how the map is socially constructed, not the territory -- which is a truism.
There are admittedly an handful of absurd racists out there, so at some point I think scientists do have to knock those down. Like how scientists also have knocked down flat earthers; they're hardly a serious position, but they do exist, and occasionally you need to remind the mainstream population why they're absurd.
Yeah, I really think this is just pure doublethink. I'm not sure if there's any other political issue where doublethink is as common; usually I think people just hold regular false beliefs instead believing two contradictory things at once.
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