Race--Only in the Eye of the Beholder : Top scientists find little scientific ground for the concept
Seldom has science found itself venturing into the realm of evil more than when it has tried to define, describe and categorize the human species according to race. Early in this century, for example, deeply flawed research into racial differences led to the conclusion that certain people were genetically superior to others. This contributed to the misguided eugenics movement, sterilization of perceived defectives and, ultimately, to the supreme evil of Nazi racial theory and extermination.
So we welcome news that modern techniques of biology have brought a growing consensus among anthropologists and other scientists that the concept of race has little basis in science. Of course people with ancient origins in different parts of the world usually have different characteristics, most obviously skin color and facial features. But in Atlanta on Monday a panel of scientists told the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science that there is little scientific ground for connecting these superficial features to the perceived behavioral differences that underlie racism.
A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT: “Race has no biological justification,” C. Loring Brace of the University of Michigan said. “Race is a social construct. There is no useful entity that corresponds to what we call race. Both the term and the concept of race should be abandoned, so we can focus on biology.” Neither Brace nor any of the other panelists were naive enough to think this would happen soon, given the powerful and divisive role that perceptions of racial behavioral differences play today. Nor are the scientists’ ideas altogether new. But they are worth considering now, in the aftermath of the ugly debate over the flawed book “The Bell Curve,” which presses the argument that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites and whites to Asians. And especially in anticipation of the debate in California and elsewhere over the future of affirmative action.
Brace argues that differences in human traits range along a continuum, or clines, that defy rigid racial categories. Studying tooth size, skin color and hemoglobin S--the factor responsible for sickle-cell anemia, most commonly found in blacks--he concludes that each developed separately in response to adaptive needs. He adds that these characteristics vary enormously within regions and therefore cannot be useful in defining races. He notes that many superficial distinctions, like eye shape, have no practical meaning today. And he makes the historical point that race scarcely had any meaning before the Renaissance in Europe, when seafarers crossed oceans and human geographical distances became more apparent and a racial apartheid developed with slavery in the New World.
FEDERAL FOLLY: Fast forward to 1995. Centuries of brutality, injustice and hate have created an artificial racial construct. At the Atlanta meeting, Prof. Michael Omi of UC Berkeley poked fun at the well-meaning but really meaningless federal definitions devised by the Office of Management and Budget for the Census Bureau and all other federal agencies. Confusing physical characteristics with cultural ones, the OMB lumps all Latino peoples together, and combines Americans of Japanese ancestry with those from China, Laos and Somoa. And it leaves no room for people of multiracial origins.
Omi pointed out that race and ethnicity are more matters of perception than reality. Romantic media images of American Indians in recent years produced an impossible 25% increase in the Indian population between the 1980 and 1990 censuses, and a mere wording change in the 1990 census form gave a 6,000% increase in those calling themselves Cajuns.
Science has done a service in urging us to step back from daily worries and petty ethnic rivalries and ask what it all means, and whether the poison sometimes in our hearts has any validity.
