ABSTRACT
A relief map of North America will show the Rocky Mountains, the Great Plains, the Sonoran Desert, and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, but no political entities, no Mexico, no United States, no Canada, and no Sonora or California or Yukon Territory. (For those you will need a political map.) In this way, maps represent the world in a manner that helpfully captures the difference between geological entities and political entities. Even when we isolate an island, or a collection of islands, that perfectly aligns with a political state, such as New Zealand, the islands and the state are two different things. In short, political entities are not items in nature’s suitcase. We can point to a line in the ground and say, ‘This is where Mexico begins and the United States ends,’ but such lines are written upon nature by us. The claim of this chapter is that the concept of race is similar to political concepts to the extent that it is written onto the world by us (cf. Kitcher 2007). If this is correct, then perhaps, on the one hand, race is real in some other, non-biological way. Maybe it is a real social construction in the way that political entities, like California, are real social constructions. Or perhaps, on the other hand, it just isn’t real. These two options will be considered later. For now, our task is to see whether race is biologically real.
