Some social scientists are fed up with the terminology because of its imprecision. Anthropologists were among the first in the community to want to do away with the term for that very reason, but it never gained the kind of traction across disciplines. Certain sects of politicians certainly want to do away with it too and they try to score political capital while they're at it. Heated debates about affirmative action, particularly in college admissions, have also politicized the issue. And lest we forget, Judge Sotomayor's nomination heckled a number of conservatives who believed that she would use her race in order to trump neutral objectivity standards in reading legal precedent or issuing opinions. For a really good reason on this, I recommend Kairys'
The Politics of Law.
FWIW, law is certainly rule established by people. And when the OP asks if we should move on from the term "race," it begs a further question. What
really are we moving past?
I agree that race has been used inconsistently. At times it refers (indelicately) to skin color; at other times, it has referred more precisely to cultural classifications and even geographic ones. Today, we collect demographic information covering five races -- Black, White, Hispanic, American Indian, Native Alaskan/Aleut -- which cover all the grounds. Never mind the "Other" category, multiraciality, and all its mix-ups.
Race, at least in America, has had a burdensome legacy. Scientists in the early 20th century and even much longer before that thought race referred not simply to (rather arbitrary) phenotypic (physical appearance) characteristics, but the assumption was that these surface differences corresponded to real
innate biological differences in athleticism, intelligence, personality traits, temperaments, and more.
The Bell Curve was written (and debunked later) in an effort to show how Blacks are intellectually inferior to their White peers, net of everything else. Until the issuing of amendments for the protected racial classes, earlier drafts of the Constitution only gave the franchise to individuals who owned land -- white males -- not to women or any person of color. Blacks were given a 60% proportion of citizenship, and supposedly "one drop" evident in your family's pedigree made you Black no matter your skin tone.
I also read in
Omi's article "The Changing Meaning of Race" that race became heightened in scholarship following a number of integral movements: the breakdown of colonialism in the 20th century, the Civil Rights Movement, critical race scholarship, among others. As scholars were questioning these biologistic assumptions, others were connecting the dots between race and inequality. On this, the community is divided. Some, again, want to fully reflesh out race to correct some of its arbitrariness while others treat race as an independent variable for some study of interest.
A panethnic affiliation means that you define your race in terms of some localized culture. The muck of figuring out if a Somalian is black, red, what have you comes from a cultural identification of peoples in similar geographic space. I think this is a bit more evident in Southeast Asia that, while falling into the "Asian" race, that these people identify with that region and its concomitant cultural membership than, say, a Chinese or a Japanese person.
To move past race is to treat racism as if it is some troublesome artifact, I think. While Jim Crow laws have fallen by the wayside, racism has had to turn to more insidious covert measures. It is illegal to discriminate on the basis of race nowadays, but whether we're talking about everyday interactions or systemic effects, "colorblindness" is just some idealized vision. Moving past race means that we're not talking about or thinking about how it impacts daily life. If that weren't the case, then I would clearly be out of a line of work. But not just my pocketbook -- rather, it would be equivalent to sticking one's head in sand, forgetting that we've come a long, long way in this country in our racial relations and yet have so much more room to go.
I'm willing to put away race when it has been shown time and time again, consistently, across scholarly communities and the general public, that race has no effect on life. But I don't think that day will ever come. We're steeped in consciousness and inequality.