If someone asked you to
describe your identity to them, where would you begin? Your
nationality? Your language? Your skin color? How about your race?
Just what is “race”
and how did the term begin?
Nina Jablonski, an
anthropologist and palaeobiologist at The Pennsylvania State
University, who is known for her research into the evolution of human
skin color, says this about race …
“'Race' and
'ethnicity' have been and continue to be used as ways to
describe human diversity. Race is understood by most people as a
mixture of physical, behavioral and cultural attributes. Ethnicity
recognizes differences between people mostly on the basis of language
and shared culture."
So, race is usually
perceived as something inherent in our biology. It is commonly
understood to be inherited across generations. Emma Bryce, Live
Science contributor, explains the history of the term …
“The idea of 'race'
originated from anthropologists and philosophers in the 18th century,
who used geographical location and phenotypic traits like skin color
to place people into different racial groupings. That not only formed
the notion that there are separate racial "types" but also
fueled the idea that these differences had a biological basis.”
(Emma Gryce. “What's
the difference between race and ethnicity?”
Live Science. February
08, 2020.)
By
the 18th century, race was widely used for sorting and ranking the
peoples in the English colonies – Europeans who saw themselves as
free people, American Indians who had been conquered, and Africans
who were being brought in as slave labor
Then, in the first half of
the 19th century, one of America’s most prominent scientists was a
doctor named Samuel Morton, a man who accepted skulls scavenged from
battlefields and snatched from catacombs, proported that people could
be divided into five races and that these represented separate acts
of creation. The races had distinct characters, which corresponded to
their place in a divinely determined hierarchy.
Morton’s “craniometry”
showed, he claimed, that whites, or “Caucasians,” were the most
intelligent of the races. East Asians—Morton used the term
“Mongolian”—though “ingenious” and “susceptible of
cultivation,” were one step down. Next came Southeast Asians,
followed by Native Americans. Blacks, or “Ethiopians,” were at
the bottom. In the decades before the Civil War, Morton’s ideas
were quickly taken up by the defenders of slavery. Paul
Wolff Mitchell, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania
explains …
“He had a lot of
influence, particularly in the South. When Morton died, in 1851, the
Charleston Medical Journal in South Carolina praised him for
'giving to the negro his true position as an inferior race.'”
(Elizabeth Kolbert.
“There’s No Scientific Basis for Race—It's a Made-Up Label.”
National Geographic.
March 12, 2018.)
Today Morton is known as
the father of scientific racism. So many of the horrors of the past
few centuries can be traced to this idea that one race is inferior to
another. To an uncomfortable degree we still live with Morton’s
legacy: Racial distinctions continue to shape our politics, our
neighborhoods, and our sense of self.
The effects of this
history prevail today because in current definitions of race, there
is still an underlying assumption that traits like skin color or hair
texture have biological, genetic underpinnings that are completely
unique to different racial groups. Yet, the scientific basis for that
premise simply isn't there.
Nina Jablonski explains …
"If you take a
group of 1,000 people from the recognized 'races' of modern people,
you will find a lot of variation within each group. But, the
amount of genetic variation within any
of these
groups is greater than the average
difference between any two (racial)
groups. What's more, there are no genes that are unique to any
particular 'race.'"
Ultimately, there is so
much ambiguity between the races, and so much variation within them,
that two people of European descent may be more genetically similar
to an Asian person than they are to each other.
In other words, no genetic
variants occur in all members of one racial group but not in another.
This conclusion has been reached in many different studies. Europeans
and Asians, for instance, share almost the same set of genetic
variations. As Jablonski described earlier, the racial groupings we
have invented are actually genetically more similar to each other
than they are different – meaning there's NO WAY to definitively
separate people into races according to their biology. Jablonski
concludes …
"Our research has
revealed that the same or similar skin colors – both light and dark
– have evolved multiple times under similar solar conditions in our
history. A classification of people based on skin color would yield
an interesting grouping of people based on the exposure of the
ancestors to similar levels of solar radiation. In other words, it
would be nonsense."
(Emma Gryce. “What's
the difference between race and ethnicity?”
Live
Science. February 08, 2020.)
Let's repeat this
important sentence: there is no firm genetic basis behind racial
classification. Instead, race is a highly flexible way in which
societies lump people into groups based on appearance that is assumed
to be indicative of deeper biological or cultural connections. As a
cultural category, the definitions and descriptions of races vary.
Also important to
understand that geographic ancestry is not the same thing as race.
African ancestry, for instance, does not tidily map onto being
“black” (or vice versa). In fact, a 2016 study found wide
variation in osteoporosis risk among women living in different
regions within Africa. Their genetic risks have nothing to do with
their socially defined race.
(Alan
Goodman. “Race Is Real, But It’s Not Genetic. Sapiens.org.
March 13, 2020.)
Professor Alan Goodman,
biological anthropologist, says …
“In 1972, Harvard
evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin had the idea to test how much
human genetic variation could be attributed to 'racial' groupings. He
famously assembled genetic data from around the globe and calculated
how much variation was statistically apportioned within versus among
races. Lewontin found that only about 6 percent of genetic variation
in humans could be statistically attributed to race categorizations.
Lewontin showed that the social category of race explains very little
of the genetic diversity among us.
“Furthermore, recent
studies reveal that the variation between any two individuals is very
small, on the order of one single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), or
single letter change in our DNA, per 1,000. That means that racial
categorization could, at most, relate to 6 percent of the variation
found in 1 in 1,000 SNPs. Put simply, race fails to explain much.”
(Alan
Goodman. “Race Is Real, But It’s Not Genetic. Sapiens.org.
March 13, 2020.)
Exactly how different are
members of what the the world commonly classifies as “races”? A
2002 Stanford study found that only 7.4% of over 4000 alleles were
specific to one geographical region. Furthermore, even when
region-specific alleles did appear, they only occurred in about 1% of
the people from that region – hardly enough to be any kind of
trademark. Thus, there is no evidence that the groups we commonly
call “races” have distinct, unifying genetic identities. In fact,
there is ample variation within races.
So, when you hear “Black”
or “White” or “African-American” or “Caucasian,” think of
the “human race” – one beautiful, general classification. The
truth is that we, discriminating people, “made up” categories of
race. And now, we, the ancestors of those same old scientists and
true believers, still perpetuate the concept of racial differences.
And, that is extremely disturbing – in fact, unbearable – because
in 2020 what we know as “race” can still determine people’s
perceptions, their opportunities, and their experiences.
“We
often have this idea that if I know your skin color, I know X, Y, and
Z about you. So I think it can be very powerful to explain to people
that all these changes we see, it’s just because I have an A in my
genome and she has a G.”
Heather
Norton, molecular anthropologist at the University of Cincinnati
who
studies pigmentation
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