Date: Friday, January 18, 2002 9:40 PM
From: George Winkel
Subject: Letter to the Editor biological non-existence of “race”
Radley Balko has written a splendid piece for Fox News Straight Talk, “Biologically Speaking, Race Doesn’t Exist” (byline 1/17/02). Balko argues It’s time government stops recognizing race.”If science ceases to recognize race, government ought to follow suit. It’s time to take race off of the U.S. Census. And, while we’re at it, off of college applications, loan applications, and off the minds of New Jersey’s state troopers.”Here! Here!
As Balko explains, Dr. J. Craig Venter and Dr. Joseph L. Graves, Jr., both found “race” lacking support in the human genome DNA evidence. I applaud them both for urging physicians and scientists to stop categorizing in terms of “race.” After government and law, science and medicine must certainly be the institutions most guilty for creating and propagating the hypnotic “race” delusion.
That said, I have a caveat for the approach of “race”-minimizing which Mr. Balko reports in his article. To minimize “race,” as being “only” six genes out of the 30,000 to 40,000 genes that make us human; or to say the sickle-cell trait is found other places beside sub-Saharan Africa, and so on, is not enough. If only one gene implicitly defines a “race” then “race” stands immutable. It implies “difference” between people, which never can be truly bridged or “blended” away.
“Race,” in the U.S. of America, is a vast, horrid obsession, with a long, ugly history. I think the national hypnotic suggestion-obsession with “race” needs more curative attention than this casual, inferential denial that “enough” genes support our historical racial classifications.
On the one hand, white supremacists can (and do) argue that the greatest portion of genetic material is not specific to anything. Since we share most of the genome with everything from trees to warthogs, it follows that a few genes may mean a lot among the few exclusively-human genes. On the other hand, black nationalists have been building up an allegedly separate “black culture,” and redefining “race” as “social reality,” immune to any scientific epiphany for quite some time.
But first things first. “Race” certainly is the Frankenstein monsterous creation of bad science, and it must be slain by science or it will never go away.
First, I suggest hammering the point that peoples’ “race” is scientifically undefined, and it is undefinable scientifically. “Race” purports to be some kind of scientific, medical truth which flat does not exist. Science cannot comprehend things which cannot be defined. All discussion of “race” is as metaphysical as witchcraft.
Second, “race” is said to be subdivision of species. Species are scientifically factual, because each species ideally is defined by its inability to breed out with any other species. This can be scientifically proven. If any two zoological “types” cannot reproduce viable offspring, then they are necessarily different species – for being “mutually exclusive.” Thus, each species is defined as a closed breeding population by species.
Species, not race is the fundamental unit of scientific taxonomy. Race merely notices the variation often visible within a species. Apparently, close adaptation to each climatic environment, brought about by the constant pressure of natural selection, impress some recognizable regional racial variation onto many species of wild animals, and on people, too. People are a species distributed world-wide, and it is not surprising we show some adaptation to the diverse climatic homelands peoples occupy. And the sheer size of the Earth partly explains human racial variation: Since almost every marriage is between persons fairly local to their region of the world, the genetic distance between all peoples worldwide almost exactly matches the number of miles between them. Racial somatic variation is simply a continuous effect of distance between peoples.
The only sharp lines of demarcation found separating races (as opposed to species) are those separating the man-made animal races, which are the domesticated animal breeds. (E.g., the artificially selected breeds of dogs, cows, horses, chickens, etc. – separated by fence-lines.)
To summarize: The word “race” in America can only mean “species” or else “breed.” But all human beings the world over are absolutely the same species – Homo sapiens. Therefore, “race” cannot exist as difference by species. To attribute any so-called “pure race” in people to some sort of human “domestication” or miraculous “breeding” is absurd. Although people clearly show regional racial variation, it can reflect only natural variation, acquired generally in boundless worldwide environmental patterns (i.e., same as for wild animals). Human racial variation, as said, mainly reflects miles distance. Anyway, variation is not logically divisible by anyone, since no one is “more human,” or more disinterested in their perspective from which to tell other people which “race” they belong in. And there is no rational basis for counting any number of “races” as alleged “subspecies” of the human race. “Races” CANNOT BE DEFINED, PROVED OR COUNTED. “Race” does not exist in ANY scientific sense. “Race” is a mythical construct, albeit somewhat complexion-chauvinist based, as a system of social caste. “Race” has noting to do with ANY genes in the human biome.
All of this scientific logic was confronted before, long ago, in fact, by people bent on denying the lesson of history. More than a century ago there were “white” doctors and “scientists” determined to prevent what they called “mongrelization” of their “race” by racial “amalgamation” with Negro “black” genes. The former Jim Crow laws that were in place through the middle of the last century were supplemental to “anti-miscegenation” laws. The whole idea was to deny the evidence of history that populations in contact eventually blend. The highest powers of government then wanted to keep America white for the “white man” (legally defined then as “pure white”). They wanted to hold all Negroes in apartheid until their removal to Africa or somewhere far away – permanently – along with everyone “tainted” with “black blood,” even if only “one drop.” Through the distorting lens of “race” “white” Americans once saw justice, evidently – after their enslaving “black” ones for almost two-and-a half centuries – in not even letting African descendants remain when no longer needed for slaves. If the “white” legislators enacting Jim Crow had troubled consciences about it, they apparently decided that only their own “white” racial “purity” merited concern.
Long before that, in order to justify enslaving “black” people on the “race” theory doctors in the 19th, as in the early 20th century, too, tried to show the “races” were in fact separate species. Failing that, they tried to show the “races” were separate domesticated animal “breeds”. They were able to pass off shoddy reasoning only because then, as now, the country was so committed to classifying everyone by “race” that shoddy claims could be palmed off as “science.”
“White” Americans today are far different. I believe the greatest revolution of the 1960’s civil rights movement was the “white” people then forsaking their racial “purity” – their historical self-definition by “race,” and accepting inevitable racial “amalgamation” (the true meaning of “integration”) – the final racial justice in America. The other shoe has yet to drop. “Minorities” flirting with the notion of their racial “empowerment” are the ones asking for the return of Jim Crow.
Racial variation does obviously exist, and it is inheritable. Racial variation is a proper concern of science and medicine. But racial variation does not allege any mutually exclusive “race-lines” are embedded in us – not even one gene. Also, racial variation does not purport to count named “races,” or force anyone to “be” one. Natural human regional somatic variation simply does not mean the same thing as “race.” “Race” is about endogamy, about “lines” that someone in society doesn’t want to see crossed – for so-called “race” is all about social caste. But, finally, not escaping our notice is the so-called national civil rights organizations’ conspicuous failure to challenge the patently bogus “race” pseudo-science. They are exploiting the “race” delusion now.
George Winkel