Quayshawn Spencer, University of Pennsylvania

Are OMB Races Biological Populations?In a recent paper, I argued that one ordinary racial discourse in the current US is the Office of Management and Budget's (OMB) racial discourse. In this discourse, the races are American Indians, Asians, Blacks, Pacific Islanders, and Whites. I also argued that the meaning of 'race' in OMB racial discourse is just the set of races used in the discourse and that this set happens to be the K = 5 level of human population subdivision: {Africans, East Asians, Eurasians, Native Americans, Oceanians}. Thus, my theory claims that OMB races are biological populations. However, Roberta Millstein (2015) has recently questioned whether it¿s appropriate to call continental groups of humans like Native Americans ¿populations¿, since, in her view, biological populations should be understood as groups united by biological interactions as opposed to mere common ancestry, as seems to be the case here. In this paper, I defend population geneticists' linguistic practice of calling K = 5 human continental groups 'populations' by developing a novel theory of biological population that captures how population geneticists talk about populations in this context. The theory is that, in this context, populations are K populations, which are, roughly, perduring objects whereby every temporal part is a fuzzy set of conspecific organisms that form a genomic ancestry group. ...