https://www.jstor.org/stable/20098724Many dismiss scientific racism as blatant lies, and while I can under that point since more often than not such faulty science is used to reify and justify inequality, I do think there’s a place for racialism (i.e., the acknowledgment that humanity is sub-divided into different biological taxa known as races) in communist thought as opposed to racism (the notion that biological racial differences justifies oppression).
Indeed, in Soviet history “scientific racism” as a discipline was widely adopted in the USSR, with Craniometry being widely used as a way to measure differences between races, and the Linnean system of racial classification was en vogue across Soviet history even long after Sweden abandoned it.
And this legacy remains in the form of Russian and Chinese anthropologists being more likely to believe in the concept of races as being rooted in biology compared to their western counterparts:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15666627?dopt=AbstractNow: Yes, race is a social construct, but only insofar that “subspecies” is as shown by how taxonomists in the field of zoology can’t agree on which subspecies should be counted as a separate species or not (e.g., the Dingo), considering how both race and subspecies are ultimately based on genetics, which is a material reality.
One of the first and most important who tried to deny the existence of human races on a genetic level is certainly Richard Lewontin.
In 1972, following his studies, Lewontin stated that "about 85% of human genetic variability is due to individual differences within populations and only 15% is due to differences between different populations or ethnic groups". With this he comes to the following conclusions:
Racial classification has no genetic or taxonomic significance
Two individuals taken at random from any group are as different from each other as two individuals taken at random from the whole world
Two individuals are different in that they are individuals and not because they belong to different races and you can't tell someone's race from their genes
In drawing these conclusions, however, Lewontin makes a statistical error, which is objected to him by A.F.W. Edwards in 2003, that is to analyze the data as if the variables were not related to each other and to draw conclusions only on the basis of this analysis.
However, the explanation for the diversity between human groups lies precisely in the correlations between the variables and these relationships can be extracted using sorting techniques and group analysis (cluster analysis), which are commonly used in modern human genetics. Edwards argued that "even if the probability of not being able to racially classify an individual based on the frequency of alleles
In a single locus is 30%, the probability of incorrect classification is close to zero if enough loci are analyzed".
That doesn’t mean biological determinism. After all, society grants men and women more or less the same rights despite acknowledging biological differences between males and females (hence why there are no maternity wards for men, for example).
But of course, for a communist, as long as class analysis and economics remains the dominant framework, then it is possible to acknowledge racial biological differences much the same way biological sexual differences are. The key is not to let race displace class as the main contradiction, nor let biological determinism take over. After all, the USSR acknowledged racial differences without recognising racial hierarchies.