***There is NO SUCH THING AS RACE***

Trying to jump back into the discussion again.

I wouldn't claim that race originally is a socio-cultural concept, the right word for that is ethnicity. Many different species on the planet can be divided into races, even if I think it's kind of questionable to quote scientific products during the area of racial biology, where many scientist in the western world had a bias for this divide. But yes I would say that races do definitely exist biologically.

However, not within humans, that Fishman61 quote a dictionary does not mean anything else than that there are people that use the word in that way, not that it is scientifically correct. I see that you try to justify by saying that it's a question of semantics, that words change and that one word can have multiple of meanings. This is of course very true, but it's also very dangerous, since some words and some meanings can be used to create larger differences among people than actually exists, by mixing science with prejudicest and socially and juridical categorization. I think that is the case in US and I think that is why people should be taught not to use that word. Let me quote this time from the encyclopedia.com:


The concept of race as a categorization system for human beings did not exist formally until the late eighteenth century. Most analysts (e.g., Feagin and Feagin 1999; Allen 1994; Roediger 1991; Omi and Winant 1994) have linked the inception of the biologically based idea of distinct races of human beings to European colonization of the New World. Although prior to this time human beings certainly distinguished between themselves in many ways, these distinctions tended to be based upon tribal, clan, ethnic, or national differences that stemmed from place of residence/territory or shared belief systems rather than on innate, genetic characteristics. However, as capitalist-based exploitation of certain (often darkerskinned) groups began in the form of chattel slavery and other abuses of humanity, those in power began turning to science as a way to rationalize the oppressive conditions to which these groups were consigned. The rush to develop these pseudoscientific claims might have been spawned in part by the need of the colonizers to assuage their guilt and to resolve the cognitive dissonance and contradictions evident in rising new societies that prided themselves on freedom and democracy even as they relegated certain groups in their societies to a nonfree, even subhuman status (Horsman 1997). While the “science” that developed the idea of race is certainly discredited by today’s standards, the social ramifications of humans having separated themselves into races still remain firmly intact. As the Thomas theorem once stated, “when men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences” (Thomas and Thomas 1928, p. 572). Thus, although the idea of race as a classification system of human beings is what social scientists call socially constructed rather than biologically based, it still is an enduring category of social analysis. It is so not because of its genetic or biological basis, but because of the power it has wielded as an idea to create dividing lines between different classes of human beings across the globe (Graves 2004).

Several scholars have identified the conception of human races as a key part of the development of a racist ideology (e.g., Feagin 2000; Yetman 2004). An ideology is a belief system intended to rationalize and justify existing social arrangements. In this way the concept of race is a decisively social concept because it is not observed as existing independent of the “racialized social systems” (Bonilla-Silva 1997) that hold it in place. Feagin identifies three dynamics that crystallized by the late 1700s to result in a clearly racist (as opposed to nationalist or cultural) ideology: “(1) an accent on physically and biologically distinctive categories called ‘races’; (2) an emphasis on ‘race’ as the primary determinant of a group’s essential personality and cultural traits; and (3) a hierarchy of superior and inferior racial groups” (Feagin 2000, p. 79). Thus, at this point in history, no longer are human differences attributed first and foremost to national, regional, and cultural variations. Instead, they become perceived in a biologically determined (static, unchanging) way, and the differences begin to be encoded into hierarchical categorization schemas that connote superior and inferior species of human beings.
http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/race.aspx

So clearly there is no biological race among humans and to define them as such is apparently dangerous

Then let's look up the word racism:
racism According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term describes ‘the theory that distinctive human characteristics and abilities are determined by race’. The word itself is rather recent, probably going back only to the 1930s. There are two attitudes towards the concept of racism: one says that ‘racism’ is usefully applied only where it is derived from a perception of race and the ensuing fixation on ‘typical’ racial traits. In this sense ‘racism’ describes the racialist attitudes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, deriving from the merger of physical anthropology and ethnography on the background of the idea of evolution. Another school has argued that racism consists in intentional practices and unintended processes or consequences of attitudes towards the ethnic ‘other’. According to this line of thought, it is not necessary to possess a concept of ‘race’ to entertain prejudices towards other peoples.
http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Racism.aspx#4

It's not stated of course that only states who have the kind of racial structure taken into practice that will have racism in the society, but can we try to agree that it definitely does not help to use biological terminology to increase differences among people who already, through complicated past history, had problems with each other and makes it considarbly harder to become as one.