John B. Judis: How The Census Misleads On Race

I'll just note this bit:

“'Races' are defined not by biology but by cultural convention."

As you know: no. Races are mainly natural kinds, with many sub-kinds. Which kinds people think are significant does change, partially on the basis of factors one can reasonably call social or cultural. White is a funny one, though. Caucasian used to be the more common category in serious discussions. Don't know what happened to that. 

   Anyway. It's always easy to say that a category is "social". Less easy to make sense of such claims. Obama is half black and half white. In such cases we generally say: Eh, you get to basically pick one as shorthand and go with that. Rachel Dolezal isn't black at all. She isn't granted the authority to make the call, because there's no call to make. She's white. Progressive principles, such as they are, entail that RD should be able to make the call, because all "identity" is "identification." Nonsense, of course...but anyway, they just double-standarded their way out of the problem, decreeing her to be a horrible, horrible racist because reasons. So via dumb ideas and irrational exceptions, they managed to at least get things partially right in that case: RD: not black.

   Blah, blah, blah.