No one is saying it has absolutely no meaning. They're saying that its meaning has its basis in culture rather than in biology.
If you were to collect the DNA of every living human today and send the information to an alien species, would they say "aha, this clearly falls into five (or however many) pretty distinct categories"? Would anyone be able to tell them how to delineate those categories? Based on what I've read, I don't think so, which implies that what is meant by "race" is more cultural than biological.
> No one is saying it has absolutely no meaning. They're saying that its meaning has its basis in culture rather than in biology.
And that is 100% false. It's obviously biological in basis. It has useful meaning outside of "culture". We just don't have a reductive definition that satisfies the people who aspire to police our thoughts and language...and science.
I'm not naïve about this. There's obviously this bad history where bigots tried to come up with "biological" arguments that some races were superior to others. It's ugly and wrong. But it's just as wrong to go to the opposite pole of the debate, and try to pretend that race is not a thing at all. Both positions are soft-minded extremism.
We can accept that race is a real, biological thing (however fuzzy), and still say that race isn't a value judgment.
The overwhelming impression that I'm getting every time I look into this is that the concept of "race" is outliving biological meaning or usefulness when applied to humans. Fine if you think that's "obviously" false, but science has a very long list of things that initially appear obvious but are dropped as understanding grows and/or terminology becomes more precise. Invoking obviousness isn't very convincing at this point.
It feels like this need to over-moderate use of this word is projection from people who grew up with a specific light/dark skin divide that also mapped nearly perfectly onto actual prejudice and inequality. The USA is like that episode of star trek where people were white on one side and black on the other.
People use the word like "are the dutch racially tall or is it their diet?" and nobody means or takes offense.
I doubt this has much to do with US culture or any specific country. Nature is a German/British enterprise. The trend away from using "race" in genetics research appears to be a global thing.
If you were to collect the DNA of every living human today and send the information to an alien species, would they say "aha, this clearly falls into five (or however many) pretty distinct categories"? Would anyone be able to tell them how to delineate those categories? Based on what I've read, I don't think so, which implies that what is meant by "race" is more cultural than biological.