That is a definitional argument -- it's all about how one would define the word "race".
Very much so, yes.
I don't think so. You can look at genetic clusters at different levels of aggregation. At some level each person is unique. At another level a family is similar. One level higher inhabitants of a certain region are similar. Going up, just before the level of "all humans are similar" you encounter race.
I'd argue, as our culture defines race, you really encounter a large number of different and distinct ways of classifying groups of people, of which skin color is just one which gets disproportionate attention owing to historic cultural reasons combined with extreme visual salience (black skin is much easier to notice than eye color). In other periods of time, other ways of grouping people by race got more attention.
That's why I'm suggesting classifying people not by their skin colour, but by the genetic pool / cluster their ancestors belonged to. Of course it's an imprecise, statistical classification that talks mostly about population averages and priors. That classification, however, is correlated with skin colour.
The classification is correlated with a whole bunch of things, skin color being just one. You're right to say we can update our priors on somebody having such-and-such ancestry - but we could do the same thing with any number of other characteristics which we almost entirely - but not quite entirely - ignore. Because we do see hints of that - blondes are ditzy, red-heads are angry, blue eyed people are less trusting of others (this is, as I understand, a German stereotype) - but we don't elevate it to the level of -race-, and indeed treat it more like astrology.
[Edit]Because[/Edit] once you arrive at this point, you're left with a foundation which completely fails to hold up the weighty edifice that is "race"
This sort of thinking seems bad:
This sort of thinking seems socially frowned upon, but accurate:
Similar points could be made by replacing a/b with [group of people]. I think it's terrible to say something like:
But to me, it doesn't seem wrong to say something like:
Credit and accountability seem like good things to me, and so I want to live in a world where people/groups receive credit for good qualities, and are held accountable for bad qualities.
I'm not sure though. I could see that there are unintended consequences of such a world. For example, such "score keeping" could lead to contentiousness. And perhaps it's just something that we as a society (to generalize) can't handle, and thus shouldn't keep score.