The most important fact about race: It doesn't really exist. At least not the way many Americans think it does. There is simply no undisputed scientific definition of race. What are considered genetic characteristics are often the result of cultural habit and environmental adaptation. As far back as 1785, a German philosopher noted that "complexions run into each other." Julian Huxley suggested in 1941 that "it would be highly desirable if we could banish the question-begging term 'race' from all discussions of human affairs and substitute the noncommittal phrase 'ethnic group.' That would be a first step toward rational consideration of the problem at hand." Anthropologist Ashley Montagu in 1942 called race our "most dangerous myth."
Yet in our conversations and arguments, in our media, and even in our laws, the illusion of race is given great credibility. As a result, that which is transmitted culturally is considered genetically fixed, that which is an environmental adaptation is regarded as innate and that which is fluid is declared immutable.
Many still hang on to a notion similar to that of Carolus Linnaeus, who declared in 1758 that there were four races: white, red, dark and black. Others make up their own races, applying the term to religions (Jewish), language groups (Aryan) or nationalities (Irish). Modern science has little impact on our views. Our concept of race comes largely from religion, literature, politics, and the oral tradition. It comes creaking with all the prejudices of the ages. It reeks of territoriality, of jingoism, of subjugation, and of the abuse of power.
DNA research has revealed just how great is our misconception of race. In The History and Geography of Human Genes, Luca Cavalli-Sforza of Stanford and his colleagues describe how many of the variations between humans are really adaptations to different environmental conditions (such as the relative density of sweat glands or lean bodies to dissipate heat and fat ones to retain it). But that's not the sort of thing you can easily build a system of apartheid around. As Thomas S. Martin has written:
The widest genetic divergence in human groups separates the Africans from the Australian aborigines, though ironically these two 'races' have the same skin color. ~ There is no clearly distinguishable 'white race.' What Cavalli-Sforza calls the Caucasoids are a hybrid, about two-thirds Mongoloid and one-third African. Finns and Hungarians are slightly more Mongoloid, while Italians and Spaniards are more African, but the deviation is vanishingly slight.
Well, it sure feels like race
Regardless of what science says, however, myth can kill and cause pain just as easily as scientific truth. And regardless of what science says, there are no Japanese players in the NBA or, as anthropologist Alice Brues told Newsweek, "If I parachute into Nairobi, I know I'm not in Oslo."In fact, give or take a few thousand years, it's unlikely that those of a Nordic skin complexion would stay that way living under the African sun. Similarly, the effects of a US diet are strong enough that the first generations of both European and Asian Americans have found themselves looking up at their grandchildren.
In such ways adaptation mimics what many think of as race. But who needs science when we have our own eyes? If it looks like race, that's good enough for us.
Further, we are obsessed with the subject even as we say we wish to ignore it. A few years back, a study of urban elections coverage found five times as many stories about race as about taxes.
We can't even agree on what race is. In the 1990 census, Americans said they belonged to some 300 different races or ethnic groups. American Indians divided themselves into 600 tribes and Latinos into 70 categories.
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| Front teeth |
New Guinean-Germans Japanese-Estonians Celtic-Indians |
| Ability to digest milk | Swedish-Indians |
| Nose length |
Norwegian-Arab-Nigerians The English-Algerians |
4 comments:
I've written a number of academic essays over the past few years on the same topic. I get most faculty to agree with me, but I'm also warned to be careful. If I were to ever get any traction with a movement demanding the U.S. government stop the insidious segregation of Americans by the socially incorrect race construct, it could prove to be physically dangerous to me. Imagine if politicians could not distinguish their American constituency by race. What if they couldn't tell who belonged to what group? They would be helpless to know who to tell what lie to? Candidates will get a certain number of votes from the ‘party followers’, those who don’t know or care what the issues are or the candidates position as long as their ‘team’ wins. So a candidate only has to find a minority group they can make promises to, i.e. pay for votes...and that is enough to tip the scales in their favor. What if they couldn’t tell how many minorities, and what minorities, there are in their district? What if they had to campaign for all voters? What a novel idea!
But the most shameful result of federal racial segregation is in education. Look at the definitions of race on the Department of Education’s (DoE) web site...if you can find it. A young person wouldn’t even know how to select a ‘race’. And look at the educational performance statistics by race the DoE publishes. Year after year it’s the same ranking. It is a self fulling prophecy. If you tell a child that they belong to a particular race, and that race is consistently ranked low in educational accomplishment, they will assume they are destined to fail and so will everyone else.
There is a plethora of genuine scientific studies done by university psychologists, anthropologists and others illustrating the fallacious construct of race. Germany does not allow the question to be asked on school or government forms....they tried it in the 20th century and it didn’t work out too well for Jews.
One critical point; this does not do away with a person’s culture. Citizens can and should be aware of their culture and celebrate all the aspects of it. But they should also demand they be considered American’s (assuming they live in America) and treated with the respect, dignity, and equal protection under law guaranteed by the Constitution.
The only value in race is for race baiters who make a ton of money selling books on the subject, usually advocating the supremacy or entitlement of a race, and others who are constantly on the news networks or CSpan panels proclaiming supremacy or entitlements.
Do away with the ridiculous construct of race and the arguments tearing at America will begin to disappear. Leave it in place and something akin to Germany in WWII will inevitably be the consequence.
If racial categories remain federally recognized there should be an annual $2000 tax deduction for interracial marriages. Within a few generations we could find out what Americans look like as an ethnic group.
to anonymous:
If there was a tax deduction for interracial, wouldn't that violate some rule? They've already segregated by race, so if two people violated those categories, would they get into trouble with the government? Also, back to my original point, it isn't about who marries who since race is a social construct. It goes on all over the world and has since time immemorial. It's culture that is important; the culture of a people that gather together by some attribute that isn't necessarily defined by skin color. It could be religion, geographical origin, or whatever a group of people says it is. But when a country tries to define the categories people, they mess it up. Only people can define what group they belong to. If the feds were serious, they would issue a color chart we could use. Yet they persist in the silly interracial category that implies there is some biological attribute that distinguishes by groups, much like the old 'one drop rule.' Government needs to declare race nonexistent, and get out of the segregation business. But they're not going to do that for the same reason the race baiters don't. They're making too much money with the turmoil.
It would be good if more Europeans understood that their differences from Africans consists almost entirely in genetic material that they don't have. All of us Eurasians have almost entirely "African blood", and very little other except a bit of Neanderthal.
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