I adopted an African girl. What "race" is she? What determines this?

What determines it? Ancestry. Race is basically a way of asking "who were your ancestors?" and accepting a blurry answer because, well, each person has a lot of ancestors!

That is not what "race" means when people use the word. Race is a division of humanity into categories. Who determines the categories? Do those categories naturally occur? On what does the "race" category depend? Can "race" be identified visually? Can it be genetically determined?

Yes, if you divide people up into "races," or into geographical population groups, and study their genetics, you can find statistical significance, but the two divisions will produce differing evaluations for individuals.

The classic way to identify someone's "race" involves identifying one's own group visually (and sometimes behaviorally, perhaps through dialect or language), and then lumping together those who don't seem to match "my race" into other groups. That is why someone who is "mixed race" will be lumped into the "other group," until the mixture becomes small enough to not be visible. How people perceive themselves is irrelevant to this process.

"Race" is a racist concept, naturally. The word "racist" is hot, and gets mixed up with racial chauvinism, but that's distracting. I use "racism" to refer to the belief in race as an objective reality.

That version of race is obviously a biological reality, because people have different ancestries, even going back long distances, and the ancestry distribution can be geographically plotted.

I wrote that population genetics was a reality. Race is not. It's arbitrary, and race is not scientifically defined. The conclusion is a non sequitur. Race has been totally discredited academically, and that's not just political correctness.

Knowing she was adopted from Africa, odds are good that she's mostly African.

Odds are entirely that she is African, i.e., she was born in Africa. I know that her grandparents were born in Africa, in her tribal region. Beyond that, I don't know. Probably it goes back further, but there are always strays.

If her ancestry plot maintains "African" location, say entirely, back, say, 20 generations, does that mean that she is racially "African"? I hope you'd know that this could give results that might seem preposterous to those who depend on visual identification of "race."

The basic question is being ignored. How is "race" identified? As used, my "race" does not depend on where I was born. It depends on ... what? Where someone else was born? Who, specifically? What lumps all these people together? And separates them from others, who might look quite the same?

That's only one step more informative than "human," since it only gives you the archaic racial category- Negroid- which tells you as much as "Caucasoid" or "Mongoloid."

"Archaic racial category." So race is being used to define race? Those are just as you stated, "racial" categories, which assumes some identity based on ... what?

Ethnicity would give a much narrower picture- about one person in six is African, but only about one person in four thousand is Gurage.

Adding on the data that she's Ethiopian muddies the picture- due to its northeastern position, Ethiopia has been the site of significant mixing, and there's quite a bit of ethnic diversity: the primary ethnicity, Oromo, is only a third of the population- your Chinese daughter, though, most likely has significant Han ancestry (92% of the population of mainland China).

Lucky guess about my Chinese daughter. The one-child policy impacts Han Chinese the most.

However, "Ethiopian" tells you almost nothing about "race." Let's start with this: Each tribal grouping in Ethiopia, by default, considers itself to be very different from the others. There are over seventy such groupings in Ethiopia, if we mark them by language.

So, using the archaic terms and assuming she's from one of the more prevalent ethnicities, your daughter probably has about 60% Caucasoid ancestry and 40% Negroid ancestry.

Unlikely, in fact. She's from the Kambata-Timbaro Tribal Region, her native language was Kambatigna. It's a minor ethnicity, there are maybe a few hundred thousand Kambata.

In the U.S., she is readily identified by people as "Black." She doesn't look "Ethiopian" (which is popularly known through high-Arab ancestry general appearance). Is "Black" a race? What defines it?

I once had a friend tell me that my Chinese daughter was, of course, going to be more intelligent than the Ethiopian girl.

So, good IQ estimates in Africa are generally hard to come by, but Ethiopia supposedly has the world's lowest average IQ, at 63 (administered in 1991, sample size of 250), and China is estimated to have an average IQ of 100. Working off that data (and assuming both groups have a standard deviation of 15), that gives a 96% chance that the Chinese daughter is smarter.

Was that a test administered racially, or was it according to how and where the child was raised and tested?

What kind of intelligence was measured? Intelligence generally confers survival value, but the form of intelligence selected shifts with environment.

Garbage in, garbage out.

Of course, given that they're your daughters, there's not much reason to guess; you could just get them both tested, which would be way cheaper and more informative than sponsoring another test of Ethiopian national IQ.

Ethiopian "national IQ" is totally irrelevant. Somehow, Ethiopia, with that supposedly low IQ, managed, almost uniquely in Africa, to avoid extended outside control, with an ancient and literate culture.

What I personally know is that, possibly contrary to stereotypes, the Ethiopian girl is highly competitive, she stars at whatever she does, the Chinese girl -- raised here since she was under a year old -- is shyer and suffers from the shadow of her younger sister. Both girls have no difficulty figuring out how to do what they want on computers. I have no confidence that IQ tests would tell me much of value, though at some point both girls will be tested to determine if they belong in "gifted" programs.

My racist friend knew nothing about my daughter's ethnicity, he was judging entirely on "African," based on his early experience with "Blacks" on the street in America (are they "African"?) , which wasn't, shall we say, "positive."

It's probable there's many people out there who share none of my ancestry for a full thirty generations back,

Yep. The most recent common ancestor of living humans lived at least a couple millennia (i.e. about seventy generations) ago. (EDIT: I'm not fully convinced that that implies that for any time t later than that, there's at least one with you no ancestry at time t. I'm too tired to trust my cognitive abilities right now.)

and there's one who (probably) shares it completely.

Do you have any reason in particular to suspect that you and your sibling may have different biological fathers, or is the “probably” a 1-is-not-a-probability self-nitpick?

Now, the Ethiopian data is spotty,

It's also not clear what selection effects adoption has;

Also, probably the effects of nurture contribute to keeping their average IQ that low; it seems unlikely to me that the fact that the average IQ of African Americans is 22 points higher is entirely due to the European genetic admixture in the latter. (EDIT: And I hadn't even noticed you mentioned Ethiopians have lots of Caucasoid ancestry too!)

The input is the claim 'Race is a cultural convention.' You output the interpretation: 'None of the phenotypic variations associated with any racial schema are physically real; they are hallucinations or figments.' Given how transparently ridiculous the assertion is, one must at least take a moment to pause and reconsider whether the anthropologists' claim is really what you take it to be.

Perhaps what is being denied is not the existence of morphological variation between human populations, but rather the conceptualization of these differences under the traditional concept of Race, with its assumptions of discreteness and of other markers of cultural and bio-diversity strictly mapping on to a small set of physiognomic markers. Perhaps what is also being asserted is that the precise boundaries between races, and how large or small a 'race' gets to be, is culturally constructed and varies across different groups possessing 'race'-like categories. Is it more likely that anthropologists are speaking somewhat loosely and infelicitously, or that they think the existence of darker and lighter skins in different parts of the world is a Grand Alien Conspiracy?