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June 08, 2003

Race is only a cultural construct

Thanks to Prometheus 6 for a nice set of links to lots of info from the PBS series, "Race - The power of illusion." One of the items PBS provides is a list of ten things everyone should know about race:

Our eyes tell us that people look different. No one has trouble distinguishing a Czech from a Chinese. But what do those differences mean? Are they biological? Has race always been with us? How does race affect people today?

There's less - and more - to race than meets the eye:

1. Race is a modern idea. Ancient societies, like the Greeks, did not divide people according to physical distinctions, but according to religion, status, class, even language. The English language didn't even have the word 'race' until it turns up in 1508 in a poem by William Dunbar referring to a line of kings.

2. Race has no genetic basis. Not one characteristic, trait or even gene distinguishes all the members of one so-called race from all the members of another so-called race.

3. Human subspecies don't exist. Unlike many animals, modern humans simply haven't been around long enough or isolated enough to evolve into separate subspecies or races. Despite surface appearances, we are one of the most similar of all species.

4. Skin color really is only skin deep. Most traits are inherited independently from one another. The genes influencing skin color have nothing to do with the genes influencing hair form, eye shape, blood type, musical talent, athletic ability or forms of intelligence. Knowing someone's skin color doesn't necessarily tell you anything else about him or her.

5. Most variation is within, not between, "races." Of the small amount of total human variation, 85% exists within any local population, be they Italians, Kurds, Koreans or Cherokees. About 94% can be found within any continent. That means two random Koreans may be as genetically different as a Korean and an Italian.

6. Slavery predates race. Throughout much of human history, societies have enslaved others, often as a result of conquest or war, even debt, but not because of physical characteristics or a belief in natural inferiority. Due to a unique set of historical circumstances, ours was the first slave system where all the slaves shared similar physical characteristics.

7. Race and freedom evolved together. The U.S. was founded on the radical new principle that "All men are created equal." But our early economy was based largely on slavery. How could this anomaly be rationalized? The new idea of race helped explain why some people could be denied the rights and freedoms that others took for granted.

8. Race justified social inequalities as natural. As the race idea evolved, white superiority became "common sense" in America. It justified not only slavery but also the extermination of Indians, exclusion of Asian immigrants, and the taking of Mexican lands by a nation that professed a belief in democracy. Racial practices were institutionalized within American government, laws, and society.

9. Race isn't biological, but racism is still real. Race is a powerful social idea that gives people different access to opportunities and resources. Our government and social institutions have created advantages that disproportionately channel wealth, power, and resources to white people. This affects everyone, whether we are aware of it or not.

10. Colorblindness will not end racism. Pretending race doesn't exist is not the same as creating equality. Race is more than stereotypes and individual prejudice. To combat racism, we need to identify and remedy social policies and institutional practices that advantage some groups at the expense of others.

RACE - The Power of an Illusion was produced by California Newsreel in association with the Independent Television Service (ITVS). Major funding provided by the Ford Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Diversity Fund.

This too, from an interview by PBS with renowned scientist Stephen Jay Gould. (In my view his culminating work, "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory" is the most important text on evolution since Darwin first defined it over 100 years ago).

Is it correct to say, 'We're all Africans?'

The human species started in Africa. In that sense, yes, we're all Africans. But it's important to keep in mind that current African peoples are as descended from that original entity as people of European extraction are. We're all equally African is the only way to think of it, because that's where the species started.

And that's pretty clear. I don't think there's much debate about that.

The big debate has been when do the non-African people get out of Africa. And that's been complicated because clearly, close relatives of modern humans were in Europe, where they eventually evolved to the Neanderthal people, and were in Eastern Asia - Java Man, Peking Man, and the old types of Homo Erectus, probably a million and a half to two million years ago. So there were folks moving out of Africa a long time ago, and it was widely thought until recently that it was that first migration that gave rise to human racial variation. In which case human races would be fairly old, even in evolutionary terms.

It turns out that's not true. I think there's almost genetic proof now - I wouldn't say the issue is totally resolved - that those lineages just died out, that Neanderthals in Europe died, that Homo Erectus in Asia died, that there was a second migration of our modern species, Homo sapiens, which emerged from an Erectus stock, but an Erectus stock in Africa, and that all modern humans are the products of this second migration, which is probably less than a hundred thousand years old by the best current evidence.

It looks as though all non-African diversity is a product of the second migration of Homo sapiens out of Africa - a migration so recent that there just hasn't been time for the development of much genetic variation except that which regulates some very superficial features like skin color and hair form. For once the old cliché is true: under the skin, we really are effectively the same. And we get fooled because some of the visual differences are quite noticeable.

What caused different skin colors to evolve?

We don't really know what causes different skin colors, and I don't think anyone should claim we do. There are competing ideas.

The strict Darwinian selectionist theory would claim that different colors are advantageous in different environments. The old argument - and it's not a stupid one, it may be right - is that having fair skin in a tropical climate doesn't do you a whole lot of good with respect to Vitamin D deficiencies and that darker skin color is an adaptive advantage there. And that white skin is advantageous in high latitudes where there isn't intense sun and you need to get vitamin D with the help of sunlight. That may be so.

Interestingly, that wasn't Darwin's own suspicion. Darwin's own suspicion was that most of the visual 'racial' differences are due to what he called sexual selection and have no adaptive significance in terms of physiology or anatomical adaptation. He said, Look, humans are just enormously various in their preferences. For capricious reasons different standards of beauty arise among different groups of isolated people, and then in the process of mate selection certain cultures favored one skin color, one body form, and others favored others. And so those differences arise for a reason. But the reason is the capricious aesthetic preferences of different groups throughout the world.

And another possibility, of course, is that some of these founding populations were very small and so you can get just random differences arising from them.

We don't really know what causes differences in skin colors is the honest answer. And they're not, in an evolutionists' sense, at all significant. Obviously it's been significant historically and culturally. But I think an evolutionary biologist tends not to be enormously troubled about it because skin color differences are so minor with respect to the immensity of evolutionary change.

How odd is our system of racial classification?

My favorite trivia question in baseball is, "Which Italian American player for the Brooklyn Dodgers once hit 40 home runs in a season?" Nobody every gets it right, because the answer is Roy Campanella, who was as Italian as he was black. He had an Italian father and a black mother, but he's always classified as black. You see, American racial classification is totally cultural, and it's based on the unfortunate and sad legacy of racial distinction based on this ridiculous metaphor, the purity of blood.

You're identifiable as having black ancestry because we can see it. I mean, who's Tiger Wood, who's Colin Powell? Colin Powell is as Irish as he is African, but we don't classify him as that.

No, we have a really screwed up classification. To think it's biological is just plain wrong. It's based, flat-out, on the legacy of racism and the metaphor of the purity of the blood. It's a very troubling issue.

Posted by Mike at June 8, 2003 04:44 AM

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Posted by: Eden at February 15, 2004 08:46 AM

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