Race and Science
The race controversy engendered by the recent Executive
Order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” represents only one
front in this administration’s general antagonism against science, and against
specialized knowledge more broadly. Science is being catastrophically defunded,
its facilities and offices in the government are being shuttered, and the field
of higher education is in a general uproar. Truth and sanity are always welcome,
but they generally represent what science is providing, not what science needs
to have imposed upon it by decree.
Biological anthropology, the study of our species and its
origin, has had two watershed discoveries. In the 19th century, we
learned that our species is descended from earlier, extinct species similar to
living apes. In the 20th century, we learned that race and human
variation are quite different things.
By “race”, we generally mean the idea that the human species
is composed of a fairly small number of fairly distinct kinds of people, each
with their own inherent properties. It certainly
seemed that way in the 1700s and 1800s. Over the course of the 20th century,
however, anthropology began to ask the
question, what would the human species look like if we removed the lenses of
race from our own eyes? Would we still see it? And if not, what would we see?
The answer has emerged gradually over the last few decades.
Groups of people are differentiated from one another primarily culturally, in
terms of their language, belief systems, personal adornment, traditions, knowledge,
tastes, family relations, and all of the other things that cultural
anthropologists began to study intensively in the early part of the 20th
century.
Now if you decided, for whatever reason, to focus only on
biological distinctions, ignoring the primary dimension of human variation,
what would you see? Actually, you would see that you can't make that
distinction so readily, because so much of human biology is in fact strongly
influenced by culture, from the shape of your head to your likelihood of dying
from tuberculosis. Human bodies indeed absorb a great deal of the cultural
world.
But suppose, however perversely, that you decide to ignore both
cultural differentiation and bodily differentiation, and decide to focus
exclusively on the human gene pool. Would you see race there? And if not, then
what would you see? And the big discovery of human population genetics towards
the end of the 20th century was that you don't see race; rather, you see nearly
all detectable genetic variations nearly everywhere. Human genetic variation is
primarily polymorphic and cosmopolitan. However it is measured, upwards of 85%
of the detectable human genetic variation is variation within groups rather
than between groups. That doesn't mean that there are no geographical patterns,
of course.
So if we ignore the cultural variation, the bodily variation,
and the primary, polymorphic, pattern of genetic variation, and we decide to
focus only on genetic variation from group to group, what patterns do we find? Is
race finally there? No, we find gradual change across geographical gradients, a
pattern that genetic anthropologists describe as clinal. We find that people
are similar to those nearby, and different from those far away – although even
then, only in an ideal, non-urbanized, precolonial world. The genetics of New York City is something
else entirely.
If we ignore the cultural, the physical, the polymorphic and
clinal genetic variation, then what is left? Do we finally uncover the
primordial human divisions? No, we find that there are all kinds of interesting
local genetic patterns in the human gene pool,
with different cultural identities being associated with different genetic
histories and with different probabilistic genetic risks at present. But those
different genetic risks don’t map on to race: Pennsylvania Amish have their
risks (polydactyly); Ashkenazi Jews have their risks (Tay-Sachs Disease);
Afrikaners have their risks (variegated porphyria); Northern Europeans have
their risks (cystic fibrosis). Racializing these differences only confuses
things. Sickle-cell anemia is found in Saudi Arabia and Greece, as well as in
West Africa. Why? Because it is associated with malaria, not with being
African. And these remain risk factors
for particular populations, still afflicting only a small minority within each
population – just simply a larger minority than in other populations.
When you look at the human species scientifically, this is
what you find. It isn’t race. Race comes from somewhere else.
What then, do we mean when we say race is a “social construction”?
We mean that it is a product of history, not of biology. What we have come to
understand as race is the outcome of centuries of political relations between
powerful Europeans and the less powerful – the English versus the Irish, the
Christians versus the Jews and Muslims, European colonists versus Native
Americans, traders versus African slaves. What they have in common is the
formation of symbolic boundaries that function to establish and maintain
inequalities. Those cultural boundaries sometimes correlate with biological
features, which affords them some camouflage as apparent products of nature
rather than of human invention. That is why even scientists were confused about
it for two hundred years.
The fact is, however, that the average difference in lifespan between Blacks and Whites in America is due to racism, not to sickle cell anemia. The lie of race is that it misrepresents the actual biology of our species. The fact that race is also there to perpetuate injustice makes race less of a fact of nature, and more of a fact of biopolitics.