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11/28/2007: "Race is physical, genetic"

A trained artist can look at a skull and immediately tell the race and gender of a corpse.

"If you turn the skull of a white male sideways, it's almost like a truck hit it. It's just straight up and down flat," said Marla Lawson, a renowned forensic artist who works for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. "The forehead protrudes very little and the chin sinks in. But for African-Americans, they slightly slope at the forehead and they protrude slightly at the mandible and they have these great cheekbones. Their skulls weigh more than white people's skulls, and their teeth will be whiter and brighter usually."

An Asian person's skull will have a wider facial area, Lawson said, but people of Hispanic descent are more challenging because the structures are nearly identical to Caucasians.

But determining male and female is easy, said Lawson who created the first, and dead-on, likeness of Olympic Park bomber Eric Rudolph while he was a fugitive. Run your fingers vertically over your eyebrows. Males feel a defined ridge under the brow line. A woman's face is smoother.

[ Let's see: shows up in all members of a group regardless of conditioning, is a physical trait... that means it's genetic. But morons will argue it's not genetic until they can see which gene, which is an illusion since race is a collection of genes. Instead of being racist... why not be bigoted against morons? ]

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/11/27/riley.sketch/index.html