Transcript Race: Humanity`s Most Dangerous Myth

Race
A social concept, but biologically
unsupportable!
Is race in our genes or just in our heads?
Most of us can see differences in humans:
skin color, eye color, hair are obvious.
We, and most others in the world, tend to
use these traits to categorize people.
Morally, many of us understand the
ramifications of our use of these categories
and the harm they have brought and can
bring.
We need to understand the difference
between what is essentially a sociological
view of race rather than a biological view of
race.
Try some sorting by “race.”
A sociological view of race:
Race is used as a means of determining
how a person should be related to or
treated, either on a personal level or
under some aspect of the law.
Race is a modern idea; ancient societies
did not divide people of physical features,
but by language, wealth, status, religion,
or class.
A biological view
of race:
The anatomy of a given
racial group is used in
comparison with that of
other racial groups to
investigate how people
adapt to environments.
It is essentially "value
free."
Early Racial Classifications
Homer
Homer (fl. 1200 - 850 B.C.)
•Iliad and Odyssey acknowledge variability
•Aethiopians: People at the eastern and western edges of the
known world
•Cubit-men: African (?) pygmies
Herodotus
Herodotus (484?-425? B.C.)
•Historiae argues for an environmental cause of variability
between human groups
•Egyptians have strong skulls due to exposure
•Persian skulls are brittle due to the use of felt hats
Hippocrates (460 - 377 B.C.)
•Environmental influences on human variability are noted in
Volume I of Corpus Hippocraticum
•Body build and temperament of different peoples are said to
be related to their climate and life style
Hippocrates
Early Racial Classifications
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
Claims environmental causes of physical variation in
humans
Wooly hair of Aethiopians due to arid climate
Aristotle
Straight hair of Scythians due to moist air
St. Augustine (354-430)
In De Civitate Dei Contra Paganos he says all men
born everywhere, no matter how strange they appear
to us, are descended from Adam, i.e., are descended
from a single ancestral stock
St. Augustine
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
Questioned the environmental hypothesis in
accounting for human variation, suggesting
an early hereditarian argument based on the
power of the mother's seed.
Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564)
Noted a relationship between race and the
shape of the skull
Differential Worth: The
Beginnings
Races are ranked on various criteria
judged to assess intelligence or
moral standards
The rankings are used either to
bolster the scala naturae or protoevolutionary relationships
Such rankings are highly subjective
and loaded with potential for
ethnocentric abuse, with the highest
rank always being reserved for the
race of the person doing the ranking
18th Century Racial Ideology
Monogenism versus Polygenism
Monogenism: All humans had a
single origin from Adam and Eve.
The races are seen as being due to
environmentally determined
degeneration from Europeans
Polygenism: Different races are
descendants of different Adams,
separate creations
Carolus Linnaeus, 1707 – 1778
Viewed the task of classification as one of attempting to
understand the natural laws of the Scala Naturae (the
ladder of nature)
Races of Linnaeus
Americanus: Red, choleric, erect
Europaeus: White, fickle, sanguine, blue-eyed, gentle,
governed by laws
Asiaticus: Sallow, grave, dignified, avaricious, ruled by
opinion
Afer: Black, choleric, obstinate, contented, regulated by
customs
Ferus: Wild man, walks on all fours, hairy
Troglodytes: You wouldn't believe it
Monstrous: Giants, mutants
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, 1752 - 1840
German Anatomy Professor
Father of Physical Anthropology
Father of Craniology
Founder of Anthropology in Germany
On the Natural Variety of Mankind (1775)
•We owe much of our view of the races to him, but he was
probably one of the least racist people of his time.
Advocated Monogenism
•Refuted the existence of "wild men" and "troglodytes" of earlier
classifications
•Proposed a system for classifying humans into five different
races based on the shape of the skull
•Using a skull from the Caucasus mountains as the perfect
European form, he claimed his four other races degenerated from
this group
•Caucasoid (Europeans), Mongoloid (Asians), American (Native
Americans), Ethiopian (Africans), and Malayan (Southeast Asians)
Samuel George Morton, 1799 - 1851
Physician from Philadelphia
•Polygenist, convinced of inferiority of
African populations
•Measured cranial capacity (volume of
braincase) to assess differential worth
•Very careful technician, published
extensive list of measurements of cranial
capacities
Morton's Racial Rankings
Racial
Category
Morton's
Averages
(cubic inches)
Gould's
Averages
(cubic inches)
Caucasian
87
87
Mongolian
83
87
Malay
81
85
American
82
86
Ethopian
78
83
Modified from Gould, S.J. (1981)
Pierre Paul Broca, 1824 - 1880
Founder of French Anthropology
First Society of Anthropology (1859)
First School of Anthropology (1876)
•Instigated the study of Craniometry
•Attempted to quantify differential worth
•Ratio of radius to humerus: a high ratio is ape-like,
hence lower worth.
•Found Caucasians scored higher than Hottentots,
Eskimos, and Australians
•He discarded the ratio in favor of measures with
whites furthest from the apes
•Brain size: bigger is better
•Men > Women
•Eminent Men > Mediocre Men
•Superior races (Caucasian) > Inferior (Other
races)
Definitions of Race
E.A. Hooton (1926): A race is a great division of mankind, the
members of which, though individually varying, are characterized as a
group by a certain combination of morphological and metrical features
[which ones?], principally non-adaptive, which have been derived from
their common descent.
Brues (1990): A race is a division of a species which differs from other
divisions by the frequency with which certain hereditary traits [which
ones?] appear among its members.
Mayr (1963): Biological races are noninterbreeding sympatric [in the
same area] populations that differ in biological charteristics but not, or
scarcely, in morphology.
He points out that human races do not experience such limitation of
interbreeding
Mayr (1963): considers the major divisions of humankind to be
subspecies, which are aggregations of local populationsof a species
inhabiting geographic subdivisions of the range of the species and
differing taxonomically from other populations of the species.
How Many Races?
Author
Number of Races
Linnaeus (1758)
4 (+3 imaginary)
Blumenbach (1781)
5
Hooton (1926)
3 (many levels)
Garn (1965)
9 (+ 2 lower levels)
Failure of the Race Concept
The classification [of humans] into races has proved
to be a futile exercise for reasons that were already
clear to Darwin (Cavalli-Sforza et al., 1994)
While it is clear that there is only one human species,
there are no objective reasons for splitting or lumping
at any lower taxonomic level (I.e., subspecies, races,
varieties).
Kennewick Man: A Troubling Case of
Race in Contemporary Anthropology
For all we now know about the first inhabitants of North
America, we still have lots of questions, and recent
discoveries still have us asking…
Major controversy began in 1996 with the discovery of the
‘Ancient One,’ Kennewick Man.
Kennewick Man, or the Ancient One, as the
Umatilla nation of Washington calls him
Unfortunately James Chatters’s descriptions of him
as “Caucasoid” got confused with “Caucasian.”
Is repatriating such remains a ‘crime against science’? Is
not repatriating them an echo of the 1890s Moundbuilder
myth?
The controversy has lead to a wide range of books…
Even
novels...
Ethnicity:
The emphasis of culture over biology
Ethnic groups are formed by virtue of community of
language, religion, social institutions, etc., which have
the power of uniting human beings of one or several
species, races, or varieties and are by no means
zoological species (Deniker 1900)
When one uses the term 'ethnic group,' the question is
immediately raised, 'What does it mean? What does the
user have in mind?' And this at once affords an
opportunity to discuss the facts and explore the
meaning and falsities enshrined in the word 'race' and
to explain the problems involved and the facts of the
genetic situation as we know them. (Montagu 1962)
Ethnicity is a multifactorial concept including, but not
limited to, cultural constructs, genetic background,
ecological specialization, and self-identification. (After
Crews and Bindon 1991)
Race and IQ
The Bell Curve:
A resurgence of Biological Determinism
Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray , 1994
• The IQ of migrants to the U.S.
• Non-literate vs. literate comparisons
• Genes versus environmental influences
• Immigration Restriction Act of 1924
Sir Cyril Burt
Social Class and Intelligence
Intelligence tracks within British social classes
Monozygotic (identical) twins reared apart
Experiments allegedly show very high
heritability for IQ scores (up to 80% of
variability due to genes)
Scientific fraud
Can't tell what parts of his research are true,
but he greatly increased his sample size
without changing any of his correlations--a
statistical impossibility.
The Fallacy of Heritability
Heritability is a measure of the
degree of genetic determination of a
characteristic within a given
population
Heritability gives no indication of
the genetic basis of differences
between populations
e.g., Black versus White
differences on IQ scores could
be due entirely to environment,
in spite of studies (like Burt's)
indicating a high heritability of IQ
scores within populations
Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: the Fallacy of Race
Montague and Livingstone suggested that we can make our race problem
go away by not calling a race a race, but by calling it an ethnic group, a
complex distinction.
A race refers to a group of people who share some biological or anatomical
characteristics, whereas an ethnic group is a group of people who share a
particular culture.
The implication was to substitute discrimination on the basis of cultural
differences for discrimination on the basis of racial differences. This
approach hasn't solved any problems.
Montague and Livingstone said that biological differences are not restricted
to particular geographic regions, but are distributed as clines.
Clines are gradual transitions in frequency of a trait over space as in
ABO Blood Types and skin color.
Skin Color Production
Skin color is due primarily to the presence of a pigment called melanin .
Both light and dark complexioned people have this pigment.
However, two forms are produced—pheomelanin, which is red to yellow in
color, and eumelanin, which is dark brown to black.
People with light complexioned skin mostly produce pheomelanin, while
those with dark colored skin mostly produce eumelanin.
To a lesser extent, the color is affected by the presence of fat under the
skin and carotene, a reddish-orange pigment in the skin.
Modern concepts of race
Races are categories that might be useful in some ways if they
simply refer to populations of people who have evolved in
adaptation to their environment while remaining slightly or
moderately isolated from other populations.
A. Viewed in this way, the usefulness of race is in examining how
people have adapted to their environments.
Most anthropologists think a biological concept of race is not
harmful, but neutral.
B. A good example of race being used in an adaptational sense is
the analysis of skin color. Probably no other single factor is as
important in any treatment of race as skin color.
C. First, dark skin has been shown to be advantageous near the
equator.
The reason for this is simply that the dark skin pigment,
melanin, protects the deep layers of the skin from the
harmful effects of ultraviolet light. For this simple reason,
we expect peoples from tropical areas to have darker skin and they do.
Skin Color continued…
D. There are several advantages to having white skin in regions away from the
equator, especially in Europe. All are probably contributing factors to the
evolution of white skin.
1. Cold injury
In Northern Europe it gets cold and during glacial times it was terribly cold.
White skin is less prone to damage by cold injury, such as frostbite. This was
discovered during the Korean war, when it was observed that Black soldiers
suffered about 3 times the amount of frostbite as White soldiers. This occurred
even though they spent equal amounts of time exposed to the cold, and were all
dressed in the same uniforms.
2. Vitamin D
Vitamin D is produced from cholesterol in the skin when the skin is exposed to
ultraviolet light. Not getting enough vitamin d results in an illness called rickets.
If you remember, rickets was one of the characteristic diseases of European
Classic Neanderthals. The farther away from the equator, the less ultraviolet
light is received at the surface of the earth. White skin can produce vitamin D
much easier than dark skin, so having white skin helps prevent vitamin D
deficiency and rickets.
3. Camouflage or protective coloration
Northern Europe is snowy today and was very snowy during glacial times.
Having pale skin might have been advantageous for a hunter, since it would not
show up as well against a snowy background
How many races are there?
How do you define even a race
biologically?
A formal genetic definition says that if you can correctly assign
individuals to their correct population with an accuracy of 75% or
more, then you have a race. If you can't assign them with 75%
accuracy, then you don't have a race.
Using the formal definition of race, humanity has been divided into
varying numbers of races ranging from 3 to several hundred.
Cuvier (the same person who advocated the theory of catastrophism)
split humanity into 3 major races: Negroid, Caucasoid, and
Mongoloid. In America we give this racial division almost sacred
importance. We think it's "natural" or scientifically valid.
The point is that there is no racial classification that has any more
scientific merit than any other. This is a difference from the
sociological concept of race, where racial labels are thought of as
having some validity, both to the persons doing the classification and
to the people being classified.
Using the biological concept of race, the goal of classifying
humanity is now considered a waste of time.
There are some useful reasons to study racial variation, but
classification for the sake of classification is not one of them.
Biological scientists use racial labels only for convenience, and
define races in terms of a particular goal of a particular study.
Raced-based genetic studies in medicine
This is what is meant by race labels being used for convenience.
You use whatever name exists that refers to the group you want to
study.
But this is vastly different from using race labels as a justification
for behavior toward a group.
The American Anthropological Association (see Anthropology
Newsletter, September 1997, page 27) issued a draft statement about
race.
Whatever the utility of race for examination of adaptive differences
in populations, the AAA now considers the harmful nature of a
sociological definition of race to have dangers that outweigh the
usefulness of any biological definition.
Their statement notes that all human variations are capable of
interbreeding and do so; they note that any human being is capable
of learning cultural traits of another group.
They conclude by saying:
"...that present-day inequalities between human groups are not
consequences of their biological inheritance; rather, these
inequalities are products of historical and contemporary social,
economic, educational and political circumstances."
Let's do our best to rid ourselves of
the idea that race has biological
foundations.
Only then can we deal with the fact
that there are only sociological
definitions of race.
I know what it’s like to have a racial identity because I used to be an Indian. I
grew up with this idea and people accepted me as an Indian and I believed in
the whole concept of race. As a child, being Indian and having race felt
shallow and mysterious at first, but it felt real enough. It felt important, too –
it wasn’t at all a slight matter to have race.
So when I gave up being Indian during the late 1990s, it wasn’t easy to do.
But I chose to give it up after I discovered the truth about race.
It’s a lie. The whole concept defaces the nature of humanity. Race has more
to do with satisfying the human impulse to sort things into convenient
classes than with any meaningful biological definition of humankind. And
its main purpose is not to comment on humankind, but rather to serve as a
means for gathering and wielding social power – mostly the power to
dehumanize ourselves and each other.
Roger Echo-Hawk, The Magic Children
How do we do dump the concept of race?
Just refuse to participate!