New science undermines oldest notions about race
by James Roylance
…Advances in genetics are undermining some of our oldest notions about the nature and biology of race. And the scientists whose intellectual forebears helped establish those notions say it’s time to set the record straight.
“Race as an explanation for human biological variation is dead,” says Alan H. Goodman, president-elect of the American Anthropological Association.
The truth emerging from modern genetics, scientists say, is that we’re 99.9 percent identical. Thanks to our common origins, and our natural eagerness to exchange DNA, our genes are thoroughly scrambled. And what patterns do emerge bear little resemblance to our traditional, geographically rooted notions of “race.”
Researchers say this new, deeper understanding should silence those who argue that some innate inferiority — or superiority — lies behind persistent racial disparities in such things as school achievement, poverty or incarceration rates, or infant mortality.
“That just doesn’t wash,” says Goodman, a professor of biological anthropology at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. “It takes … a gun out of the hand of racists.”
‘Race has real effects’
But it doesn’t end the discussion. Race still exists as what scientists call a “social construct,” an invention of society which we begin to learn by the age of 3 or 4.
“Race has real effects. It has material effects,” Goodman says. “If you talk of differences in voting patterns in the U.S., differences in health care, education, housing, differences in school behavior — that structure between racial groups is real. But it’s not biological.”
These realizations sparked anthropologists, who gathered recently in Alexandria, Va., to begin what they see as a badly needed public conversation about the biological and social realities of race in America.
They also want to put to rest some ghosts in their own history. It was one of their own — German scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, often called the father of physical anthropology — who proposed in 1795 that mankind was divided into five races based on geography, physical attributes and traits. He called them Caucasian, Negro (or Ethiopian), American, Mongolian and Malayan.
The notion stuck, and it influenced the thinking of many 19th- and 20th-century scientists whose theories often confused science with cultural biases and value judgments.
“This led to errors and misapplications and, much more seriously, to the abuse of biology as a means of achieving power over others,” says University of Pennsylvania anthropologist Frank Johnston. Nazi atrocities, apartheid in South Africa and “one drop of blood” rules, once used to assign race and expand slavery and oppression during America’s antebellum and Jim Crow years, were all rationalized by misplaced theories of racial biology.
…For social anthropologists, race is entrenched in American society. “And the racism that comes from that is something that we deal with every day,” says Moses.
She worries that the death of biological race might become an excuse to ignore the impact of racism. “The concern is that by saying race doesn’t exist biologically, it will fall off the radar screens of policy-makers and leaders who really need to understand the impact that social race continues to have,” she says.
“Unless we acknowledge that, and understand how we’ve institutionalized racism and attributed behavior to people based on their skin color, for example, then we can’t get to a colorblind society, where color doesn’t matter.
“Because color does matter in this society.”