The Race Thing: Part Three

Engaging in Dialogue
As I’ve mentioned in Part Two, I’m very glad that I’ve broached this subject because good is definitely coming from it. I have engaged in a bit of dialogue via email with other readers about The Race Thing, and I may cite snippets in a future post.

Does the Concept of Race Have a Biological Basis?
After pondering over things connected with The Race Thing, I was suddenly reminded of a class I took as an elective, Anthropology 100. It was a pretty cool class; we had guest lecturers that specialized in a certain area of anthropology each week. One day, I sat in wonder as our lecturer totally debunked the very concept of race. He concluded by stating that race is a socio-political construct rather than a scientific one, and that the concept of race has no biological basis.

I had to chew on that one awhile before I even attempted to swallow it, but after mulling it over a bit, a little light bulb came on, and the realization flooded over me that Dr. Guest Lecturer was right.

Now, I’m not an anthropologist, so perhaps I’m not the best person to explain this in a light bulb-brightening way, but once I grasped it, it just made a world of sense to me. I’ll cite from the transcript of an interview with Alan Goodman, a professor of biological anthropology at Hampshire College from a PBS series entitled “Race: The Power of an Illusion” to explain:

What’s Wrong With Classifying by Race as Biology?
Scientists have actually been saying for quite a while that race, as biology, doesn't exist - that there's no biological basis for race. And that is in the facts of biology, the facts of non-concordance, the facts of continuous variation, the recentness of our evolution, the way that we all commingle and come together, how genes flow, and perhaps especially in the fact that most variation occurs within race versus between races or among races, suggesting that there's no generalizability to race. There is no center there; there is no there there in the center. It's fluid.

But many individuals will say, "Well, that's okay, at least it's an approximation. It at least gives us a way to classify. Hey, you know, our head size may be continuous and shoe size may be continuous, but we developed a way to classify people by hat size and shoe size. And it kind of works. Your shoe may be a little bit crunchy but you basically know to go in and start somewhere, So what's wrong with doing it for race?"

And I'll tell you, there's a couple things that are wrong with it, where that analogy really breaks down. We've developed a universal system for thinking about hat size that's measurable, for example. So you can go into Sao Paulo Brazil and the hat merchants there have the same scale that the hat merchants do in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And we can have universality because it's objective, it's measurable, we're just measuring the circumference around the head. It doesn't change culturally from one place to another. But think about race and its universality or lack thereof. Where is your measurement device? There is no way to measure race first. We sometimes do it by skin color. Other people may do it by hair texture. Other people may have the dividing lines different in terms of skin color. What's black in the United States is not what's black in Brazil or what's black in South Africa. What was black in 1940 is different from what is black in 2000. Certainly, with the evolution of whiteness, what was white in 1920 - as a Jew I was not white then, but I'm white now, so white has changed tremendously.

There's no stability and constancy. That's life. That's fine as social ideas go, that we all have our individual classification systems and may use them, but for science, it's death. It does not work. Science is based on generalizability, it's based on consistency, it's based on reproducibility. If you have none of that, you have junk science [ . . .]

Racism rests in part on the idea that race is biology; it is based on biology. So, the biology becomes an excuse for social differences. The social differences become naturalized in biology. It's not that our institutions cause differences in mortality; it's that there really are biological differences between the races. [In the last sentence, Goodman is giving an example of how some would try to justify differences in mortality rates by using the faulty biological explanation of race.]

So, until we address that there is no race in biology, that race is an idea that we ascribe to biology, that there's no race there, there's a possibility that well-meaning and not-so well-meaning individuals will drag that up and will inevitably put that in our faces as the reasons why there are differences in life circumstances between different groups.

Wait . . . What About Medical Incidences?
Yes, it is true that certain groups of people are genetically predisposed for certain hereditary diseases. For example, statistics show African-Americans have a higher incidence of sickle cell anemia than other racial groups in the US. But upon further examination, sickle cell has nothing to with African ancestry per se, but rather everything to do with a condition that developed in response to malaria.

With the technology that is available to modern science to do DNA analysis and with the advent of The Human Genome Project, etc. it is coming to light that our modern concept of “race” is an unhelpful one.

Okay, Maybe, But What’s Wrong with Race as a Socio-Political Construction?
Absolutely nothing. Using a classification system for whatever reason is not inherently wrong and/or discriminatory. Forming an identity with a certain group that has not only physical similarities, but cultural similarities as well is not harmful in the least bit. But using the notion of supposed biological difference in “race” to validate/excuse social differences is when we get into trouble.

Other Links
I don’t mean to be overwhelming, but here are links to other articles that I found on the Net to help clarify this stance:

"Does Race Exist?"

"Why We Should Give Up on Race"

American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA) Statement on Biological Aspects of Race

Spanish word/phrase of the day: la raza (lah RAH-sah) = race

Questions, comments, concerns? Please feel free to E-mail me!