hedwards: EDIT: You're confusing race with ethnicity. Hispanic is a bullshit term that they use for people that grew up speaking Spanish. If you're really curious about where your family came from, I recommend Ancestry.com's test. I took that earlier in the year out of curiosity. Results were mostly as I suspected, but I was a bit disappointed that there weren't any particularly shocking secrets.
P1na: The way I understand it, ethnicity has to do with the geographical area one was born at (or ancestry), while race is simply about physical traits alone. While skin color is typically the main differentiator of race, there are more points of course; plus there will be overlap on these trait among different traits and there will be no easy dividing line after all the mixing that has been going on. However, that doesn't invalidate the core concept of race.
I'll grant you that the trait definition of what makes a race is social, though, if that's what you where going at. Going by the deffinition of common physical traits, you could make the point there could be a joint eyebrow race or a prone to heart attack one; skin color and such are typically used as it's the more immediately obvious one and ethnicity also played a role on it.
As for the hispanic word... I don't know, I'll take your word on it. There's a bunch of words I hear Americans use and I don't really understand what it means for them, sometimes I get curious.
Nobody understands what Hispanic means. It's essentially that somebody is from one of the Spanish speaking nations or their family was. It's not what I would personally consider to be a useful word as Italians have as much in common with Spaniards as folks from various South American countries have with each other. But, Italians aren't Hispanics.
It's a bullshit designation that they get when other groups have as much right or more to their own designation, but don't get it for political reasons.
Race was always a social construct. The commonly used terminology is based upon anthropological classifications and basically by the shape of the skull. The 23 & me project pretty thoroughly debunked the notion that races exist.
Ethnicity is a little bit more challenging as those are smaller groups that have more in common genetically. But, it's also more of an issue of culture than anything else.
Bunglatron: This might upset some people but if we get people on board we could take the best of every race and create some sort of program but unfortunetly nazi white supremascists gave eugenics a bad name.
Emob78: Eugenics never had a good name, only an agenda. Just read some of Margaret Sanger's works. Pretty disgusting stuff.
Eugenics was a sick extension of the normal rules of procreation. People who are viewed to be of less value have a harder time having children.
Eugenics, was a stop further where there's an outright culling rather than just allowing certain variants to die out. It still happens in parts of the world like the US, but it's not something that's done on a wide scale and is mostly a side-effect of allowing people to decide whether to have children and if they do get pregnant whether or not to abort the fetus.