To the Editor:

Re: “Professors: Concept of ‘Race’ Biologically Moot,” Science, Feb. 18

In yesterday’s Sun, Erin Sulzman describes a panel of biologists and other scientist discussing race and the fact that race is no longer a viable scientific category, despite the fact that it remains a social category. The piece is informative, but one statement leaps out to me, a graduate student in anthropology, as inaccurate: “While race is standard fare in anthropology classes, it has become an uncommon word in science.”

The statement has as its assumption that anthropologists typically concern themselves with race, an assumption which has not been true for nearly one hundred years. While anthropologists in the 19th century were indeed concerned with measuring skulls and categorizing their owners as this or that race, anthropology since Franz Boas (1858-1942) have been aggressively challenging the idea that what we think of as races are anything but a social construct, quite often long before other social sciences did so. Indeed, according to cultural anthropologists, race, like “ethnicity,” “faith” or “civilization,” is simply one way in which people divide themselves, not a natural category. The refutation of race is, I suppose, one way that anthropologists try to absolve themselves of this old 19th century idea that they are the scientists of race: we challenge the concept in order to flog the (carefully weighed, measured and examined) skeleton in the closet.

Andrew Johnson grad