Defining Race

Although I found much of the information about the correlation between race and incidents of low birth weight presented by Conley, Strully, and Bennett in The Starting Gate to be useful and compelling, I was plagued by one nagging question in the back of my mind while I was reading: What do they mean when they say race? To the best of my knowledge, a specific definition of race was never put forth in the book, and this left me feeling a bit confused.

Depending on the context, race may mean many different things to different people. In some instances it may refer to skin color, while in other instances it may refer to common ancestry, however these two things are not necessarily related. For example, sub-Saharan Africans and Australian Aborigines have similar skin colors, but very different ancestries. Also self-reported race may be different from either skin color or ancestry. For example, a person may classify himself or herself as black, but have a significant percent of ancestors from Europe or have a fair skin tone. This makes the term “race” rather vague unless it is specifically defined.

Race is also a tricky term because the divisions between races, whether in skin color or ancestry, are not always clear-cut. Because there has been so much racial mixing, especially in the United States, a person may have characteristics of more than one race and this makes it difficult to define them as one or the other. According to the latest U.S. census, approximately 2.9 percent of Americans, or 9 million people, define themselves as multiracial and that number is rapidly growing.

When we are not sure exactly what the term race means, it becomes difficult to make inferences based on the data presented in the book. Although I think that looking at differences in certain diseases among different races is a useful tool for determining both social and biological factors contributing to the disease, it has to be well defined otherwise it becomes less meaningful.