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.
At best, race 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.
Taking the great white race away from today's racists is like taking candy from a baby. There are sure to be shrieks and howls of outrage. But it will be very hard to take away this piece of candy, because to drop the metaphor, nothing is harder to expunge than an idea. The white race is not a real, hard fact of nature; it is an idea.
In 1959 a young anthropologist named Philip Newman walked into the very remote village of Miruma in the upper Asaro Valley of New Guinea to make a field study of the Gururumba. It was late that first afternoon when it began to dawn upon his native hosts that he head made no move to leave. Finally, a man of some rank plucked up his courage and said, "How long will you stay, red man?"
Most people are probably amused, but a few will be puzzled and chagrined to know that what passes in our own culture as a member of the great white race is considered red by some New Guineans. But when did anyone ever really see a white white man? Most so-called white folk are turned by wind, rain, and certain kinds of lotion to various shades of brown, although they would probably prefer to be thought bronze. Even the stay-in who shuns the sun and despises cosmetics would rarely be able to be considered white in terms of the minimal standards set on television by our leading laundry detergents. Their colour would likely be a shade of pink that is a basic tint for all Caucasoids. (That, like "Caucasian," is another foolish word in the service of this concept of race. The Caucaus region, as far as we know, played no significant role in human evolution and certainly was not the cradle of any significant human variety.)
Actually, even the generalization about pink as a basic skin tint has to be explained and qualified. In some people the tint of the skin is in substantial measure the result of chemical colouring matter in the epidermis; in others there is no such colouring matter, or very little, and tinting then depends on many factors, including the colour of the blood in the tiny capillaries of the dermis. Statistically, there is a continuous grading of human skin clour from light to dark. There are no sharp breaks, no breaks at all. Since nobody is really white and since colour is a trait that varies without significant interruption, I think the most sensible statement that can be made on the subject is that there is no white race. To make this just as true and outrageous as I can, let me immediately add that there never was a white race.
While at it, I might as well go on to deny the existence of a red race, although noting that if there was such a thing as the white race it would be at least esthetically more correct to call it the red race. Also, there is not now and never has been either a black or a yellow race.
To deny that there are differences between individuals and between populations is ridiculous. The New Guineans spotted Dr. Newman as an off-beat intruder as soon as they clapped eyes on him. I was spotted as an alien the first time I showed up in the small city of Ch'uhsien, in Anhwei province, China, back in 1947. One time, a charming young lady of three scrambled into my lap when I offered to tell her a story; she looked into my eyes just as I began and leaped off with a scream. It was some time before I learned that in this area the worst, blood-thirsty, child-eating demons can be identified by their blue eyes.
Individual differences are obvious, even to a child. Unfortunately, race is not to be confused with such differences, though most everybody see them and some people act toward others on the basis of them. I say "unfortunately," because the confusion seems so deeply embedded as to make anyone despair of rooting it out.
Most laypeople of my acquaintance, whether tolerant or bigoted, are frankly puzzled when they are told that race is an idea. It seems to them that it is something very real that they experience every day; one might as well deny the existence of different makes and models of automobiles. The answer to that analogy is easy: cars don't breed. To get a car you maufacture parts and put them together. To get our kind of biological organism you start with two fully-formed specimens, one of each sex, and if they are attracted to each other, they may replicate. Their replication can never be more than approximate as far as either of them, the parents, is concerned, because, as we so well know, each contributes only and exactly one-half of the genetic material to the offspring. We also know that some of the genetic material each transmits may not be apparent in his or her own makeup, so that it is fully possible for a child to be completely legitimate without resembling either side of the family.
The phenomenon of genetic inheritance is completely neutral with regard to race and racial formation. Given a high degree of isolation, different populations might develop to the point of being clearly distinguishable while they remained capable of producing fertile hybrids. There would, however, be few if any hybrids because of geographical isolation, and the result would be a neat and consistent system. Much too neat and consistent for humans. Never in the history of this globe has there been any species with so little seitzfleisch. Even during the middle of the Pleistocene, 300,000 or more years ago, our ancestors were continent-hoppers. That is the only reasonable interpretation of the fact that very similar remains of the middle Pleistocene fossil Homo erectus are found in Africa, Europe and Asia. Since that time movement has accelerated and now there is no major region of this planet without its human population. The mobility is so characteristic of our genus, Homo, has unavoidable implications, for where we move, we mate. This is not a recent phenomenon, but has been going on for one or two million years, or longer than the period since humankind became recognizable. We know of this mobility not only from evidence of the spread of our genus and specieis throughout the world, but also because the fossils of man collected from one locality and representing a single relatively synchronic population sometimes show extraordinary variation among themselves. Some years ago a population was found in Tabun Cave, near Mt. Carmel, in Israel. They physical anthropologists Ashley Montagu and C. Loring Brace descibe it as "showing every possible combination of the features of Neanderthal with those of modern men." At Chouk'outien, a limestone quarry not too far from Peking in a cave that was naturally open toward the close of the Pleistocene geological period, about 20,000 years ago, there lived a population of diverse physical types. While some physical anthropologists minimize them, those who have actually pored over the remains described differenences as great as those separating modern Chinese from Eskimos on one hands and Melanesians on the other. All of this, of course, without any direct evidence of the skin colour of the fossils concerned.
The evidence that our Pleistocene ancestors got around goes beyond their own physical remains and includes exotic shells, stones and other materials in strange places which these objects could have reached only by being carried great distances. If our ancestors moved about that much, they also spread their genes, to put it euphemistically. Even phrasing the matter this way, and allowing for a goodly amount of gene flow between existing racial populations through hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, the resulting image of race is incredibly wrong, a fantasy with hardly any connection to reality. What is wrong is our way of creating and relying upon archetypes. Just as we persist in thinking that there is a typical American middle-class person or a typical American male, so we think of races in terms of typical, archetypical, individuals who probably do not exist. When it is pointed out that there are millions of living people who fall between the classified races, the frequently heard rejoinder is that this is so now, but it is a sign of our decadent times. Those fond of arguing this way usually go on to assert that it was not so in the past, that the races were formerely discrete.
In a startingly large number of views, including those shared by informed and tolerant people, there was a time when there was a pure white race, a pure black race, etc., etc., depending upon how many races they recognize. There is not a shred of scientifically respectable evidence to support such a view. Whatever evidence we have contradicts it. In addition to the evidence of Chouk'outien and Tabun mentioned above, there are many other fossils whose morphological characteristics, primitivity to one side, are not in keeping with those of the present inhabitants of the same region. The evidence is that the differences between contemporary forms of so-called Neandrathals and other fossils Homo sapiens of 25,000 to 100,000 years ago to have been very little or no greater than those between two variant populations of our own century. Furthermore, the same evidence indicates that the Neandrathals did not vanish suddenly but probably were slowly submerged in the population that surrounded them, so that their genetic materials form part of our own inheritance today.
In the vocabulary of the layperson the word "race" is a nonsense term, one without a fixed, reliable meaning. One of the most respected and highly regarded voumes to have yet been published in the field of physical anthropology is Human Biology by four British scientists; Harrison, Weiner, Tanner and Barnicot (Oxford University Press, 1964). These distinguished authors jointly eschewed the word "race" on the grounds that it was poorly defined even in zoology, i.e. when applied to animals other than man, and because of its history of misunderstanding, confusion, and worse, when applied to humans.
Simlar views have been held for some time and are familiar in the professional literature. Ashley Montagu, for example, has been in the vanguard of the movement to drop the concept of human race on scientific grounds for twenty-five years. His most recent work on the subject is a collection of critical essays from many specialists, The Concept Of Race (Free Press, 1964). Frank B. Livingstone, a physical anthropologist at the University of Michigan, has spoken out "On The Non-Existence Of Human Races" (Current Anthropology, 3:3, 1962).
Quite specifically, there are many things wrong with the concept of race. As generally employed, it is sometimes based on biological characteristics but sometimes on cultural features, and when it is based on biological traits the traits in question usually have the most obscure genetic backgrounds. The use of cultural criteria is best exemplified in such untenable racial constructs as the "Anglo-Saxon race" or the "German race" or the "Jewish race." Under no scientifically uttered definition known to me can these aggregates be called races. The first is a linguistic designation pertaining to the Germanic dialects or languages spoken by the people who about 1,500 years ago invaded the British isles from what is now Schleswig-Holstein and the adjacent portion of Denmark. The invaders were in no significant way physically distinct from their neighbours who spoke other languages, and in any case they mated and blended with the indigenous population they encountered. It is meaningless in racial terms - just as meaningless as extending the term to cover a nation of heterogeneous origin and flexible boundaries, such as Germany or France or Italy or any other country. As for the moribund concept of a "Jewish race," this is simply funny, considering the extraordinary diversity of the physical types that have embraced this religion, and the large number that have relinquished it and entered other faiths.
The use of cultural criteria to identify individuals with racial categories does not stop with nationality, language or religion. Such traits as posture, facial expression, musical tastes and even modes of dress have been used to sort people into spurious racial groups. But even when biological criteria have been used, they rarely are employed in a scientifically defensible way. One of the first questions to arise, for example, is what kind of criteria shall be used to sort people into racial categories? Following immediately upon this is another query: how many criteria should be used? With regard to the first, strictly genetic characters, such as blood factors (which can be linked with relatively few gene loci) results in classifications that cross-cut and obliterate conventional racial lines so that such constructs as the white race disappear as useful taxonomic units. The more criteria that are added, the more abstract the racial construct becomes as fewer individuals can be discovered with all the necessary characteristics and more individuals are found to be in between.
That racial classification is really nonsense can be demonstrated with ease merely by comparing some of the most usual conceptions of white and black. What degree of black African ancestry establishes a person as black? Is it 51% or 50.1% or some other slight statistical preponderance necessary? The question is ridiculous; we have no means of discriminating quantities of inherited materials in percentage terms. In that case can we turn to ancestry and legislate that anyone with a black parent is black? Simple, but totally ineffective and inapplicable: how was the racial identity of each parent established? It is precisely at this point that anthropologists raise the question of assigning specific individuals to racial categories. At best, a racial category is a statistical abstraction based upon certain frequencies of genetic characters observed in small samples of much larger populations. A frequency of genetic characters is something that can be displayed by a population, but it cannot be displayed by an individual, any more than one voter can represent the proportion of votes cast by her party.
The great fallacy of racial classification is revealed by reflecting on popular applications in real situations. Some of our outstanding "black" citizens have almost no phenotypic resemblance to the stereotyped "black." It requires their acts of self-identification to place them. Simultaneously, tens of thousands of persons of slightly darker skin colour, broader nasal wings, more everted lips, less straight hair, etc., are considered as "white" without question. Conversely, some of our best known and noisiest bigots undoubtedly have some "black" in them.
Why is it so hard to give up this miserable four-letter word that of all four-letter words has done the most damage? After all, the word refers to nothing more than a transitory statistical abstraction. But an anthropologist might answer that the word "race" expresses a certain kind of unresolved social conflict that thrives on divisions and invidious distinctions. It can thrive in the total absence of genetic differences in a single homogeneous population of common ancestry (for example, between the Japanese and that portion of themselves they know as the Eta).
In a truly great society it may be that the kinds of fear and rivalry that generate racsim will be overcome. This can be done without the kind of millenarian refrom that would be necessary to banish all conflict, for only certain kinds of hostilities can be channeled into an already raging racial bigotry. Great areas of the earth's surface have been totally devoid of racism for long periods of time and such a situation may return again, although under altered circumstances. If and when it does, the word "race" may drop from our vocabulary and scholars will desperately scrutinize our remains and the remains of our civilization, trying to discover what we were so disturbed about.
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