WASHINGTON: A hundred social scientists and geneticists gathered this week in Alexandria, Va., to sort out the meaning of race, and didn't, quite. They gave it a game effort.

They tackled every thorny question stretching across their academic disciplines, the historians hearing about clusters of genetic alleles and the geneticists hearing about race as a power relationship.

They explored the distinction between race and geographic variation. They pondered replacing the word "race" with "ethnic group". They talked about racism, multiculturalism, college diversity goals, racial self-identification in the US Census, micro-ethnic groups, the racialization of Mexican-Americans and how come no one ever asks why all the white kids sit together in the cafeteria.

When Leith Mullings, an anthropologist from the City University of New York, sardonically said that "only people of colour have race, and only women have gender", everyone knew what she meant.

A professor who argues that race is a biological myth sat next to a professor who wants the US government to pay reparations to African-Americans. Their positions are not inconsistent, but they require a bit of explaining. Race is complicated. Nothing in the discussion is black and white.

"It doesn't exist biologically, but it does exist socially," said Alan Goodman, incoming president of the American Anthropological Association, which sponsored the meeting at a hotel.

The event served as a brainstorming session for a $4 million project, funded by the National Science Foundation and the Ford Foundation, to create a travelling museum exhibit on race.

If all goes well, the exhibit will debut in two years at the Science Museum of Minnesota, in St. Paul. The working title is "Understanding Race and Human Variation". Beyond that, things get fuzzy.

If there was a consensus that emerged from two days of conversation, it's the notion that race is a cultural construct. Investigations into the human genome have so far failed to turn up any evidence that there's such a thing as, for example, a Caucasian.

Human beings are genetically rather homogeneous compared with other animals. But the lack of biological support for traditional categories of race does not change the fact that race is a lived reality. The exhibit should discuss this "paradox of race/no-race", in the words of anthropologist Micaela diLeonardo.

It will take a long time for people to grasp the illusory nature of race at the biological level, Goodman said. It's like understanding that the Earth isn't flat. It looks flat when you're walking around, but if you go up high enough in an airplane you can see the curvature. Someday, he said, people will no longer be flat-Earthers about race. They will see with different eyes.

He identifies himself, incidentally, as a white person. "Culturally I'm white-ified," he said. "People see me as white. That has something to do with how I look, but it has nothing to do with biological variation."

The revolution won't happen overnight. Americans in particular are socialized to notice race immediately, to put people in rigid categories, not always with the best of intentions. Race might not exist biologically, but, on the flat Earth, it's very noticeable. -Dawn/The LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post.