What's stopping me from identifying variation in the frequency of different traits between ethnic groups in the current day? It's not a virtue to pretend not to notice such things (or, indeed, to be truly incapable of the most basic pattern recognition).
I think the argument could then be made that if you identify traits common to closely related tribes (eg. indigenous East African) that are noticeably different from the frequency or magnitude of these traits in a different cluster of closely related tribes (eg. indigenous Scandinavian) then there should be no reason to pretend to ignore them.
People frequently seem to think that identifying these traits is a permanent thing or a fact of nature, rather than as you say, a statement about the current day (and I would add, an often inaccurate statement based on corner cases like those I've mentioned). To make it more than that is a mistaken notion. You can justify a lot of ugly racism that way. Many people do and have.
As an example, slavery in the US created an artificial category or label of black people out of many unrelated peoples, calling them inferior by nature and using that to justify unethical systems.
Ronald, your comment is flagged and I cannot reply. I think it is possible that you are the one working backwards, i.e. you want to consider your opinions on race to be a fact of nature and you get defensive when I point out that this is shaky ground to stand on, so you think I am trying to justify an ideology you are opposed to and attribute some kind of ill will to me. It is not controversial ideology to say for example that slavery was ethically questionable and not based on a good scientific understanding of the origins or nature of man. If you find yourself eager to defend slavery on racial grounds you may want to do some introspection, rather than point fingers at people who tell you this.
It's a fair point that some indigenous African bushmen, even today, spend time watching lions and pressuring them off of fresh kills in order to take home the leftovers, as they have done for centuries.
It's equally fair to observe that the offspring of those very same bushmen when transfered to a Scandinavian country may spend more time word processing or catching trains.
What's stopping me from identifying variation in the frequency of different traits between ethnic groups in the current day? It's not a virtue to pretend not to notice such things (or, indeed, to be truly incapable of the most basic pattern recognition).
I think the argument could then be made that if you identify traits common to closely related tribes (eg. indigenous East African) that are noticeably different from the frequency or magnitude of these traits in a different cluster of closely related tribes (eg. indigenous Scandinavian) then there should be no reason to pretend to ignore them.