Is there really an argument as to whether or not race should be a decisive factor in the identification of an individual? The fact of the matter is that race can still be used as an identifying factor today in narrowing down the missing. The majority of the population can still be classified into one of the major categories of what is termed as "races". This paper will include arguments against identifying categorizing individuals into racial categories based on biological assessment, teaching race identification, and why forensic anthropologists are so good at identify the unknown.
Why are people classified into racial categories instead of ancestry categories? The majority of the worlds people can be separated into four major "race" groups which include white, black, Asian and American Indian. People of white ancestry can be of German descent, Irish descent, or even of unmixed Spanish blood. The Asian ancestry is much larger than white, including individuals from Polynesia, Hawaii and Chinese descent. What about those individuals that are mixed white and black but consider themselves as black? In a forensic case, this person remains could be misidentified as white because of overwhelming white traits in the skeleton. The identifying characteristics of individuals can be very misleading. The percentage of people identified correctly is very low and even lower in males than in females. A passage from Sauer's article reads, "From whatever viewpoint one approaches the question of the applicability of the concept of the race of mankind, the modalities of human variability appear so far from those required for a coherent classification that the concept must be considered as of very limited use . (T)o dismember mankind into races as a conventional approximation requires such a distortion of the facts that any usefulness disappears" (Sauer 107). The ancestry of a person can be an extremely useful tool for persons of pure roots, but how many individuals are of an unmixed ancestry.
