Blake, if you have a different way of viewing race where there’s a concrete number then good for you. Personally, the way I view race is distorted by knowing about haplogroups, populations, loop species, evolution and other such things.
Life evolves. As it does so, various of these life forms tend to clump together creating towns, kingdoms, and whatnot. The odds that an individual will breed with someone else from the same culture, language, and region are higher than that they won’t. And so, the population of this group will generally evolve along with each other, developing certain traits particular to themselves.
As time goes on there might, for instance, be a tendency for this population to migrate East. And while it may seem intuitive that the further away from their origin any new clumps might be that they’ll differ more from people back West, there’s no particuar guarantee of this. It would be entirely thinkable that people at the far Eastern end appear more similar to people at the far Western end than they do to people in the middle even though they were the earliest to split away. The randomness of life just makes things end up that way.
More time passes and there are new calls to migrate. Three general paths come into existence, people from the far Western end go North, the middle go North, and the far East end go North, but each along a separate path that doesn’t touch–there’s just unlivable barrens between them, so the only path for them to breed is to travel back South and loop around to a different Northern path.
Again, due to the randomness of life, any two people at any distant places along these paths might be more similar to one another than they are to people relatively near–due to the randomness of life. But, one can still draw general arrows of migration. And along each path, there will be general clumpage such that people are more likely to breed within the clump than with people of another, even nearby, clump with a different culture. And so the people of any one clump will be more likely to share common features of others of their clump.
So now we might organize all these various clumps of people by three methods. We could say that there was the original migration, which we will call group E, and then there were the three secondary migrations, which from West to East we’ll name N1, N2, and N3. And along each of these is three clumps–kingdoms–for a total of nine, like so:
A3 B3 C3
| | |
A2 B2 C2
| | |
A--B--C
But of course, the problem comes that if you wanted to reference any particular grouping of people, how do you split them? It might be that in terms of appearance people who live at A3, B2, and C seem to look about the same, as do A2, A, and B, and B3, C3, and C2. This would give you three groupings of people who appear similar: Alphas = {A3, B2, C}, Betas = {A2, A, B}, and Deltas = {B3, C3, C2} Alternately, you could simply say that each clump is its own group and so there are nine different groups. Or lastly you could refer to–as we did before–people of particular chains of migration, giving you E, N1, N2, and N3.
In total we have three ways of classifying our relative groups, one gives us three subgroups, another gives us nine, and the last gives four.
Now, traditionally, the word race was meant to–and most favorably to most people in this thread–refer to the system that goes entirely by appearance. In my example, this would be the Alphas, Betas, and Deltas system. In the real world it’s the white, yellow, black, and red system.
To me, personally, I would view “race” as being an umbrella term for any of these methods of organization. Though quite obviously it is best that you put a footnote down saying which one you mean. Or, indeed, just don’t use the word that way. But still, to me, any system of classifying people in a method like this would be splitting people into races, I would just generally lean more towards the path (haplogroup) and clump (population) methods than to simple appearance. But if you don’t like me viewing it like that then well, so it goes–but getting mad at me for it doesn’t accomplish anything. Still, if you ask me for how I view race all I can answer is that this is how I was brought up to view it, and in that way of viewing it there isn’t an end-all-be-all set of divisions that seem good enough to use for all situations.
ETA: And thank you, Indistinguishable. I’d misrecalled.