As I'm reading the article on race and social identity, one thorn sticks into my side. Wood outlines the three "races:" negroid, caucasoid, and mongoloid. The problem is that these designations are almost entirely arbitrary and certain peoples don't fit cleanly into one group or another. For example, say you walked from South Africa all the way to Sweden, observing the local populations as you went. Would you be able to pick a specific point as the line between black and white? Or consider the Hindi-speaking people of India. Their language can be traced back to the Caucasus mountains along with English etc., so they might be causcasian but not white. Additionally, there are the Saami people of Finland and Scandinavia who are certainly white but whose non Indo-European language identifies them as not being caucasian. And there is the concept of Hispanic, used as a racial term here in America even though it could feasibly include all three of the broader definitions mentioned earlier.
My point is that race is such a convoluted idea that any sort of objective categorization is a wasted effort. How a person is racially defined in a specific circumstance is context specific and not based in science or logic.
Mike, Do bear in mind that Wood is describing a set of categories used by someone other than himself. That said, you have come upon the difficult matter of categorization. If one (or a generation) expects that the world's people can be divided into clear-cut groupings, then that one is likely to find that it is possible. There will be forced choices, of course. So, the change from earlier thinking to current thinking is both about the possibility of making this sort of scheme and in the validity of its use. LDL
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