Race: real or imagined?

Race is indeed a bunk category, but politically a very real one.

It is bunk because the invented categories of "race" appear to be based on 
obvious
physical differences.  An alleged racial group is distinguished by the 
frequency of
certain hereditary traits.  However, no "group" has an exclusive set of 
traits;
invariably there are traits that are shared by all other humans and some by 
a few
other humans.  Thus any set of traits that are singled out to define a 
group are
purely arbitrary -- a social construct.  This is obvious if one travels 
around the
world.  In doing so, one cannot find clear cut groups, but rather 
gradations in a
geographically circular spectrum, a spectrum that historically has always 
been
changing.  In fact "race" creation and exploitation has been a key process 
of the
accumulation process of capitalism as we all know.

Colonization, for instance created all kinds of new mixes out of old mixes. 
 But
since some of the old mixes -- "white" and "black" -- were plucked out of 
spectrum
and juxtaposed, it appeared to some groups that were not part of a 
spectrum, but
entirely different "races."  And so we get, for example in the US, entirely 
reified
statistics that most African Americans have between 25-75% white genes -- 
as though
either "whites" or "blacks" were "pure" to begin with!

But "race" is also real because historically elites decide what set of 
traits
determines a "race" and which do not, and they make such decisions to 
protect their
benefits (like southern US "whites" protecting their interests against the 
"black
race"), and as a result, other groups accept the racial category as a 
defensive
strategy to protect themselves from discrimination by the dominating 
"racial" group
(as when African Americans used "black" to define themselves as a group -- 
a very
real group -- in need of civil rights).  It is in this sense that "race" 
becomes a
real factor in "race-class" struggles, for an appearance which is real in 
people's
heads becomes a real force in history.

In Brazil, for example, I'm told that the government has created 40 
official "racial"
groupings, while in US today, which contains at least as much variety as 
Brazil,
categorizes only about five racial categories, or a few more if one can 
figure out if
the categorization hinges on "race" rather than place, e.g. Chinese, or if 
the person
making the decision, whether government official or the individual in 
question, even
"knows."