Race and Racism: Biology, Ethics, Politics

Following the last war, after the revelation of Nazi crimes and the Holocaust, a powerful school of thought, championed by “a small but vocal group of researchers” (who have become increasingly numerous and vocal), attempted to definitively discredit racism by arguing that the concept of race had no biological basis and therefore that racism was nonsensical.This has been called “an absolute paradigmatic shift”.However, many scientists today continue to use human continental populations as units of analysis (“proxies”) in numerous studies, particularly in the biomedical field, resorting (not always) to unsatisfactory euphemisms (“ethnic groups,” “ancestry groups,” “geographic populations”) to avoid the term of “race”.A recent trend (David Reich, Harvard University, Pierre-André Taguieff, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France) is to consider that the dismissal of the concept of biological race was premature and could be challenged by current genomic data (“race realists”).