The myth of human races

2. Race Classification: An Impossible Task

Chapter 2 RACE CLASSIFICA TION: AN IMPOSSIBLE TASK If an Arab and a Jew, standing completely naked in front of a large mirror, were to look at their bodies they would find that they were as alike as two peas in a pod. Fernand Corcos (circa 1948) What Fernand Corcos, my uncle, meant was that the two hypothetical men were more alike than they were different. As a matter of fact it would have been impossible for anyone, except the two of them, to know which one was a Jew and which one was an Arab; their "differences" would be purely cultural, not physical. My uncle could have made the same comment about the Serbs and the Croats: If they were fighting in the streets without their clothes on and without saying a word, they would be unable to recognize one another as "enemies." Physical differences among other groups of human beings may be more varied than the differences between Jews and Arabs, or Serbs and Croats. For instance, we might be able to tell the difference between an Eskimo and a Watusi or a Bengali and a Swede; to deny these striking differences would be foolish. But within an "obvious" difference there may lurk a subtle commonality . Good scientists know they should not always believe what they see; often, it is critical to go beyond direct observations, to look for interpretations which, though they may seem to deny the observations, not only explain them, but other things as well, things which at first appeared to have nothing in common. Humanity is diverse; to understand this fact, all you need to do is spend a few minutes sitting in the terminal of an international airport . There we can observe people of different skin colors, 15 16 Alain Corcos statures, hair forms and facial characteristics. Some people have dark brown skin, others have light skin; some have straight or wavy hair, others curly hair; some have prominent and thin noses, and others broad and flat noses; some have thin lips, others have large or everted lips. Some are tall and others short. Some have long heads, others round heads, and still others, intermediate heads. However, as we look longer and more carefully we begin to see that some individuals have more similarities with one another than they do with many others. In other words we can begin to see groups of individuals within the larger group. A sense of some kind of order begins to emerge from what we first saw as random and chaotic. Since some of us are "more alike" than others, it seems only natural to attempt to place those who are similar into groups generally described as races. That is what scientists tried to do in the past. At first, they used indicators such as skin color, shape of eyes and noses, and so on. In the process, race became the framework for categorizing other ideas about human differences. There is nothing inherently wrong with the idea of classifying. Grouping objects, events, ideas, or organisms is often helpful. It permits us to talk or to write about them in terms of their common traits, as well as their uniqueness. But for classification to be meaningful in the world of science, any member of one group has to be unequivocally distinguishable from a member of another group. We have no problem distinguishing a bird from a fish. Birds have feathers, most of them fly. No fish has feathers and none can fly. Hence, such classification is helpful. In the same vein, no mallard duck ever looks like a Canadian goose. Scientists are therefore justified in calling some birds mallard ducks and others Canadian geese. A successful classification then provides us with an efficient tool to memorize the characteristics that an individual of a described group or class has. All we need to do is to remember the characteristics of the groups.! At first glance, sorting humanity into more or less clear cut groups seems easy. If we think of a baker in France, a fisherman in Vietnam, and a peasant on the west coast of Africa, we have no problem imagining three men of different physical types whose ways of life are different, whose languages are not the same, and who follow different religions. Chapter Two 17 Similar distinctions were made in the past. Ancient Egyptians, for example, represented four types of people on the tombs...