Since this is the Pit, it’s convenient to fling epithets and babble nonsense, but I think this particular statement of yours is at the heart of your confusion, and so let me step in and help just a bit…
For a simple way to think about the issue, see see here.
For a practical application of the fact that gene pools differ even by Self Identified Race/Ehtnicity, see [url=http://genomebiology.com/2002/3/7/comment/2007] here.
“Race” is just one more way to lump. It’s not an especially accurate way, but then we could say that about any lumping. However when we talk about “group” averages, that’s a lump.
So, for example, the “black” race has, on average, more individuals with SS hemoglobin than the “asian” race even if both lumps are ill-defined genetically and even if some populations of “asians” might have a higher incidence of SS Hb than some populations of “blacks.” Ditto with thousands upon thousands of gene variants, many of which are almost completely unrepresented within one “race” category or another.
Gene variants do cluster by race, for reasons of human migration patterns throughout the last few hundred thousand years.
I’d be all good with getting rid of “race.” But the problem we would be left with here in the US is how to drive good social policy when there are such markedly different performance outcomes that clump by self-identified “race.”
As a medical educator, I want to get blacks into medical school and higher education. But on the performance evaluations required for admission, blacks from well-educated parents and wealthy backgrounds still woefully underscore their equally privileged peers, and they can’t even outscore their white and asian counterparts from poverty stricken and uneducated families. Yet the best black students come from these privileged backgrounds, and I want the best students. So I have to support a race-based affirmative action privilege to admit the highest scoring black students.
We should be careful flinging around too carelessly the idea that mother nature has wired all of us the same, even at the crude grouping level of “race.” If we accept that unconditionally, then we will decide that only background privilege separates our ability to succeed, and the consequence of that will be the elimination of race-based set aside here in the US.
When we get rid of race-alone preferences, blacks will have to compete based solely on socioeconomic background, and every single study ever done shows that within the same SES strata, blacks are at the academic bottom (with asians on the top).
Clinging to the idea that “race” has no genetic basis is the greatest threat to the black middle class in the USA. For example, without substantial race-based consideration for medical school admission scores, we would have almost no black physicians in the US even if we continued to adjust admission preferences for socioeconomic background privileges.
Underneath my surly and “racist” posts here on the Dope lies a deep concern that we create as great an opportunity as possible for every group to have a chance of success. We are able to find ways to get women into traditionally male pursuits without pretending they are genetically identical. We have found ways to bring the mentally and physically challenged into mainstream society without pretending that they are genetically identical. And there is no moral a priori requirement to pretend–against every scientific study–that genesets are equivalent at a “race” level.