Race is more like "variety."
It's like saying all tomatoes are the same species, so there's no such thing as a Roma or Beefsteak. Doesn't mean "race" is a vald construct, just that the way it's presented is basically setting up a straw man in support of the argument he's making. It's a foolish thing to do--why set up your own argument as a straw man?
Otherwise you're stuck with a few different problems. The first is the lack of clear borders. Then again, varieties and races in animals and plants seldom have clear borders. Species seldom have clear borders. Environmentalists went a bit gaga whwen a "species" of wolf turned out to be a hybrid. Not a species at all. If it's hard to define "species", of course it's hard to define "race" and variety. In some cases of echinofossulocactus in N Mexico, you get different species and descriptions of the prototypical example depending which side of the damned growing area you start on. Looking at genetics helps, but you still get arguments over which genetic traits, exactly, are important. But no one wants to say they're all the same species, because if you take samples from the extremes of the growing area they don't produce fertile offspring.
Another is a recent reclassification of varieties of humans in Africa. Based on skin color and politics--on the basis of a political definition of race--lumpers put two rather distinct varieties of humans in the same pool, creating a hellish amount of genetic diversity in that one pool. Suddenly the amount of variation within a single race was greater than variation between races. If they'd used the definition of varieties from before the '70s, it's unclear that would have happened. Oddly, the post-70's definition of race was that of Western white racists and the black liberation philosophies that kind of racism spawned, pretty much only skin color. Politics caused biology to adopt the most extremely racist definition of race, then used it to undermine racism. Left out was the non-racist strains of physical anthropology that liked looking at a range of physical traits and differences and correlations between them. We sometimes worship before the altar of the great god GIGO, when we're all set for GO.
It gets back to how we define "race." Linguists have the same problem with language. So recently an article posted on DU looked at a "language" now nearly extinct in Sierra Leone but used in songs and some speech in Cuba. "Banta." The problem is that Banta pretty much by everybody is considered a mutually intelligible dialect of a much larger set of dialects that form a language. The native speakers of Banta and the other dialects all say that they have no trouble understanding what's said in any of what splitters would want to call "different languages." The speakers don't consider them different languages. (And those are the two primary characteristics of "language" that are used in various ways--mutual intelligibility and whether speakers consider them separate.)
Note that some folk decided "race" wasn't an entirely bad way of looking at things. When it becomes politically advantageous, exceptions are made. Some medications work different on different subpopulations, and the single simplest identifying factor is race. Not 100% accurate, but fairly accurate, at least for historically settled populations.
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