The myth of human races

Introduction

INTRODUCTION It is not the presence of objective differences between groups that create races, but the social recognition of such differences as socially significant or relevant. Pierre L. Van den Berghe 1 Historically, race thinking2 assumes at least five things: 1. That humanity can be classified into groups using identifiable physical characteristics; 2. That these characteristics are transmitted "through the blood"; 3. That they are inherited together; 4. That physical features are linked to behavior; 5. That these groups are by nature unequal and therefore can be ranked in order of intellectual, moral, and cultural superiority. My objective in this book is to refute the notion that human "races" (in the plural) exist. I hope to contribute to efforts that will permit all of us to respond to human diversity in productive and useful ways. Let us b~gin by taking a brief look at the first of the five assumptions mentioned above, which is the assumption that if human races did exist, we should be able to classify mankind into mutually exclusive groups. As we shall see in the following pages, no one has ever been able to succeed at this task because no one has ever found a specific set of characteristics that can be used to distinguish one group from another without introducing layers and layers of ambiguity. The second assumption listed above, that blood is the vehicle of heredity, has been proven false. More than a century ago, research began to demonstrate that genes, not blood, transmit the hereditary information and that many genes express themselves differently in different environments. Yet, today people still talk in terms of "blood inheritance." For example, we often hear that a person acted in a particular way because of a hot blooded nature. 2 A lain Core os According to the blood theory of inheritance, each person is supposed to obtain half of his or her blood from each parent, onequarter from each grandparent, and in decreasing fractions from remote ancestors. This view of inheritance led some who wished to promote racism to adopt the "one-drop" rule: Anyone who has a single drop of "black blood" is black; anyone who has a single drop of "Jewish blood" is a Jew. According to the gene theory, on the other hand, each person is supposed to obtain half of his or her genes from each parent. However, it is impossible to predict what specific fraction of the hereditary contribution of each grandparent will be transmitted to each of their grandchildren. It could be as much as one-half, it could be nothing. At this time, it is impossible to define a parent's or grandparent's hereditary contribution, even after the birth of the child. The third assumption is that groupings of physical characteristics such as blond hair, narrow noses, and blue eyes are inherited together . At first this appears to make sense. After all, we seem to have little difficulty in distinguishing Native Americans from dark-skinned sub-Saharan Africans, northern Europeans, or aboriginal people of Australia. What we are responding to is the fact that people from ea:ch of these areas tend to have some traits in common. But not all individuals in any given group have combinations of general traits in the proportions they should if this part of race theory were true. The physical traits being discussed are distributed throughout the entire human species; each trait is largely independent of others. They are not linked and therefore not inherited together. The fourth assumption, that physical features are linked to behavior , is also without foundation. Two people differing in physical appearance will not necessarily differ in behavior. No valid, scientific proof has been offered to demonstrate that physical and mental characteristics are linked. Furthermore (and contrary to what has been shown to be true for ants, bees, or ducks) no one has been able to demonstrate that human behavioral characteristics are inherited. The belief that they are, and consequently that we cannot change them, has led to much pseudoscientific nonsense and to extreme horrors such as human slavery and the Holocaust. The fifth assumption, that some human groups are by nature intellectually , morally, and culturally superior or inferior, has never Introduction 3 been supported by scientific evidence, in spite of frequent and repeated efforts of many who tried to find it. It is sad that the idea of race is embedded in our historical consciousness...