I had a sociology professor a few years ago who repeatedly made the point that "race is a social construct"; she would, virtually every day, restate the phrase, "There is no biological backing to the notion of race." However, she would never satisfactorily expand upon exactly what this idea meant. From the way she presented the concept of race, she made it seem as if a woman of African descent and a man of European descent were just as likely to have children who appeared Asian as they were to have children more visibly related to their biologic backgrounds. Clearly, there is a relationship between what could be termed "race" and human biology; specifically what my professor never made apparent was that precisely where people draw the lines between races is what is arbitrary. Yet, the evident result of this, to my professor, was that "race is a scientifically groundless conception." Although the first two statements made by her could undoubtedly be understood as accurate-from a certain point of view-her last point is simply too broadly declared to be true. Just because the definition of a race must, necessarily, be subjective, does not suggest that race itself is an invalid or useless concept.

             Essentially, my professor seemed unable to grasp that just because something may be arbitrarily defined does not demand that its definition is groundless. For instance, in her office there was a piece of furniture that had four legs and a hard wooded top; she called this piece of furniture her "desk." However, the particular make of this piece of furniture was such that if it had been placed in, for example, a dining room, some people might have been more prone to identify it as a "table." Obviously, the division between what is a desk and what is a table has something to do with what they are used for and where they are positioned. Yet, if my professor's desk had been left on a curb somewhere and used for nothing, certainly, it could have been defined as either a table or a desk simultaneously.