Okay, everybody, guess what!! My favorite newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, has come out with an article disputing the entire idea of race. Gee, then why do we still have racism?
PAGE ONE -- No Biological Basis For
Race, Scientists Say
Distinctions prove to be skin deep
Charles Petit, Chronicle Science Writer
Monday, February 23, 1998
The President's Initiative on Race, designed to
attack prejudice by bringing people of different
races together to talk, may have overlooked
something.
Namely, that the very concept of race is bogus and
has no basis in biology, according to most
scientists.
''This dialogue on race is driving me up the wall,''
said Jefferson Fish, a psychologist at St. John's
University in New York who has written
extensively about race in America. ''Nobody is
asking the question, 'What is race?' It is a
biologically meaningless category. It is a cultural
term that Americans use to describe what a
person's ancestry is.
''But biologically the human species does not have
categories. It just has variations as one travels
around the world.''
True, a walk along Market Street or almost any
main street in a major U.S. city will reveal a host of
people of various colors and cultures.
Surely, one may suppose, the American melting pot
is brimming with different races and racial mixtures.
Wrong, say a broad coalition of experts.
''The concept of race is a social and cultural
construction. . . . Race simply cannot be tested or
proven scientifically,'' according to a policy
statement by the American Anthropological
Association. ''It is clear that human populations are
not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically
distinct groups. The concept of 'race' has no
validity . . . in the human species.''
Although few people would mistake a group of
Arapahos for Finns, or Malays for Tutsis,
anthropologists can find no clear racial boundaries
to show where one ''racial'' group stops and
another begins.
Jonathan Marks, a University of California at
Berkeley anthropologist, said the only pattern that
shows up consistently is that as one surveys
traditional homelands, ''people are similar to those
from (areas) geographically nearby and different
from those (who are) far away.'' The bigger the
distance, the more different people tend to look.
Conversely, while people don't fit into neat racial
cubbyholes, the more closely related they are, the
greater the chances of finding good tissue matches
for such things as bone marrow transplants.
Despite this, many Americans still believe in three
great racial groups, a system developed in Europe
and North America in the 18th century.
Under that notion, indigenous residents of France,
Iran and Poland, for example, are all Caucasoids,
members of the so-called white race. People from
Somalia, Nigeria and Zimbabwe in Africa are all
Negroid, belonging to the black race. Ethnic
Chinese, Koreans, Malays and American Indians
are all Mongoloids, variants of the yellow race.
And people born to, say, ethnic Swedish and
Chinese parents are of mixed race.
No way, say scientists, who call such thinking a
folk myth.
''We don't even come close to having enough
genetic diversity for races, or subspecies -- not
close,'' said Robert Sussman, an anthropologist at
Washington University in St. Louis and editor of a
newsletter of the anthropological association that
has taken on race and racism as its yearlong theme.
''It's hard to get across,'' said Sussman. ''The best
audience to try to get to is probably high school
and young college students. But even they are
steeped in American folklore, and the folklore is
that races really exist.''
One reason race is a myth, the great majority of
anthropologists agree, is that there has not been
enough time for much difference to build up
between human beings.
By most measures, modern humans arose in Africa
less than 200,000 years ago, a short time by
evolutionary time scales. And the migration out of
Africa by the ancestors of today's Europeans,
Asians, and North and South Americans took
place less than 100,000 years ago.
Environmental pressure produced different physical
appearances, including slightly different physiques,
and Africa has the most human genetic diversity of
any continent.
''But the environment, literally, works only on the
surface, changing skin and hair a little bit,'' said
Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, a Stanford University
geneticist. ''Underneath, there has been little
change.''
So, although admirable, Clinton's initiative -- by its
very name -- reinforces a false sense that biological
races are real, say anthropologists who asked to be
on the president's panel but were turned down.
''If Americans in general understood the history of
the concept of race, the erroneous biological
connotations of race, and the cultural and social
dimensions of race, they could better address the
initiative's goal of 'One America in the 21st
Century,' '' said Mary Margaret Overbey, a
lobbyist for the association.
If anything, the president's initiative should have
been on racism, say the scientists. For, even
without race, racism can exist as a belief that
ancestry is a significant factor in cultural and
behavioral differences among peoples.
Rather than race, scientists like to discuss ''clinal
variations,'' or physical types that may be found in
one general area but that fade more or less evenly
into other types as one move about the globe.
Yet even anthropologists admit they use the term
''race'' -- even if they don't really approve of it --
because so far there is no better term to describe
the subtleties of the human species.
''I use it because for some uses, it works,'' said
Dennis Stanford, chairman of anthropology at the
Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
But at best, it is a clumsy term for people like Fish,
the St. John's University psychologist, who is
married to a Brazilian.
By standard American usage, he is white because
his ancestry is all European, and she is black
because some of her ancestors were African. But
she is not really the color black, rather more of a
light brown, with ancestry from many parts of the
globe.
In Brazil, people are labeled not by race, but by
''tipo,'' Portuguese for type, and some families
have many tipos. And she is a morena, which
means, roughly, brunette. ''Americans think you
can't change race, that it's like changing genes,''
Fish said. ''But my wife can change her race by
taking an airplane home.''
Last year, the association urged the government to
drop the term race from its census categories in
favor of blurrier, but more useful, terms such as
ethnicity that also reflect culture and the
psychological tendency of people to label
themselves.
Now, while strict racial categories are not being
abandoned altogether, censuses will permit people
to list themselves in several races if they so choose.
Since 1900, 26 different racial categories have
been used in various censuses, including Hindu and
Mexican. At the turn of the century in the United
States, Italians, the Irish, and Jews were all thought
to be racial groups.
Nearly all college textbooks have long since
dropped the idea that humanity can be neatly, or
even sloppily, divided into races.
And a recent survey found that some experts in the
19th century graded humanity into as many as 300
races. Even current encyclopedias routinely list as
many as nine races (African, American Indian,
Asian, Australian, European, Indian, Melanesian,
Micronesian, and Polynesian).
In years past, children of mixed marriages ''were
assigned the racial (and legal) status of the more
subordinate parent,'' said Faye Harrison, an
anthropologist at the University of South Carolina.
''That rule, called . . . the 'one drop rule' (for one
drop of blood), has worked to classify me as
African American, period,'' said Harrison.
''Despite the fact that I, like most other African
Americans I know, have a mixed heritage and
mixed 'race' genealogy. But that multicultural or
multiracial reality is part of my extended family's
private transcript, not our public identity as blacks,
as African Americans.''
Studies show that the ancestry of American blacks
is about 70 percent African, with the rest European
and American Indian.
Stanford geneticist Cavalli- Sforza and his
colleagues are collecting genes from traditional
peoples all over the world. From them, they can get
a good idea how past populations migrated and
intermingled.
The gradients, or rate of change from place to
place, ''are all gradual. The idea of race is not
tenable,'' Cavalli-Sforza added. The geographic
patterns of some sets of genes do not match other
sets of genes, showing clearly that human
populations have been merging, migrating, and
intermarrying from the start.
While some racist groups may believe there once
were pure African or Nordic or other races, genes
tell a different story, according to Alan R.
Templeton, a biologist at Washington University in
St. Louis.
Still, anthropologists know they have a hard sell.
''Teaching that racial categories lack biological
validity can be as much of a challenge as teaching in
the 17th century that the Earth goes around the
sun,'' said Marks.
c1998 San Francisco Chronicle Page A1
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