Of course all the initial commenters are going to declare that this is political correctness gone amok who haven't actually read the article (it was behind a pa

Of course all the initial commenters are going to declare that this is political correctness gone amok who haven't actually read the article (it was behind a paywall for me), but here are some things that I know from my own reading: 1. "Black" is a not especially useful categorization as there are multiple genetically distinct strains of ancestry within Africa. It's likely that there's a greater difference genetically between an African-American (who is likely of Western African origin mixed with European genetics) than, say, a recent immigrant from South Africa or East Africa. 2. As a sociological term, most people would consider Indians and Europeans to be of different races, but it turns out that genetically they're very similar (which should not be surprising to anyone who's made it through a 100-level course in anthropology or linguistics). 3. That said, the peoples of the Indian sub-continent are also genetically diverse within themselves as there were multiple waves of in-migration there (so you might find some Indians who are not genetically similar to Europeans, and yet, they would end up being treated as the same race as their neighbors who are genetically similar to Europeans). 4. Many of the markers of race end up being selected out in a surprisingly short period of time. Lactose tolerance, for example, evolved in just 2,000–20,000 years and it's likely that a lot of things that we consider fundamental to race similarly appeared in relatively short time frames like this.