My ethnic problems

Sam Smith – One my ethnic problems is that, having been an anthropology major in college, I don’t believe in race, which is why I call it an ethnic, and not a racial, problem. Here’s how I described it in The Great American Political Repair Manual,  a book I wrote back in 1997:

[The evolutionary biologist] 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.”

Racists and their vigorous opponents both act as though race is a genetic determinant of fixed character and thus the actual science of the matter hardly gets mentioned in the media or in our discussions and disputes. This is sad, because if we would recognize ethnicity as mainly culturally and environmentally created, we might find it easier to change some of our relations for the better.  Yet, for the most part, even those who share this view mostly just keep quiet about it all.

 That’s not the only reason this white guy is out of step with the current debates. I also lived almost two thirds of my life in a majority black city known as Washington DC. I enjoyed it, learned from it, and was engaged and accepted in it. One of the things I found, however, was that hardly anyone outside of DC expressed much interest in the local city. Yet if we going to have a successfully diverse country, some examples would prove useful. And DC should be near the top of the list.

 For example, DC has a lower violent crime rate than 21 cities. And while it has had crises like the 1968 riots, even ethnic conflict has often been easier to resolve in DC. Lately I’ve been considering what was different about the city. Among the things that come to mind is that Washington has long been ahead of much the South. For example, as early as the 1830s thirty percent of Washington’s blacks were free. There are other factors such as forty recent years of black mayors, a long history of federal employment of local blacks,  Howard University (which dates back to 1867 and from its beginning open to blacks and whites), and an economic and social complexity within the black community  that undermines ethnic cliches.

Historian Marya Annette McQuirter has noted, “During the Civil War and Reconstruction, more than 25,000 African Americans moved to Washington. The fact that it was mostly pro-Union and the nation's capital made it a popular destination. Through the passage of Congress's Reconstruction Act of 1867, the city's African American men gained the right to vote three years before the passage of the 15th amendment gave all men the right to vote… The first black municipal office holder was elected in 1868. When Washington briefly became a federal territory in 1871, African American men continued to make important decisions for the city. Lewis H. Douglass introduced the 1872 law making segregation in public accommodations illegal.”

Another factor that helped black-white relations in DC was that its civil rights leaders of the 1960s organized more by issues rather than just by identity. Matters such as a proposed massive freeway system, home rule and DC statehood affected whites as well as blacks. Black activists thus became strong leaders of a whole community.

In short, DC has been ahead in ethnic trends for a long time, something that has also improved black-white relations. The rest of American could learn things from the city’s story.

I’ve discovered one other reason why I don’t fit comfortably into the ethnic debate these days. And that is because liberals– in no small part due to their improved education in recent decades – now approach problems in a way I think of as a  gradocracy: applying academic and intellectual standards to political and practical problems.

For example, if you compare the effective action of the civil rights movement in the 1960s with what is going on today, there is no doubt that we’re living in a time when analysis has a higher priority than effective action.  If’s as if we just talk about racism long enough it will go away.

Unfortunately that’s not the case. And there’s a more practical approach. For example, blacks could be leading a cross-ethnic  working class movement for higher wages and regrowth of labor unions, but rather than talking about “white privilege” despite the fact that there are more poor whites than there are blacks in total.

I have also realized for some time that being an inductive thinker – examining life from the bottom up as do reporters, detectives, and many scientists - made my college experience and later life more difficult. I was educated and lived in a world of controlled by theories yet I was always looking at the evidence and asking what it meant and what you could do about it rather than just lumping it into a theoretical status.

 For example, when I meet someone for the first time, I certainly notice their color, their height, and their weight. But I make no assumption that such obvious indicators will tell me all that much. And so I go after facts that are far more significant such as their work, their views, their personality and their history.

The current ethnic debate – on both sides – tends to conglomerate the variety of human existence into very simplistic labels.. In other words we fight one cliché with another instead of coming up with pragmatic ways of really changing things.

For example, many of those who engage in racism are poorly educated. So why not change our school system so kids learn the truth about mutli-culturalism at an early and useful age? Do we really think that convicting a murderous racist cop is more important than teaching over 50 million children what ethnicity is really all about?

In the end, it’s cures we should be seeking, not condemnation as we discover solutions and not just causes.