The Reality of Race I
There are consistent differences between
different human populations.
If you placed 100 San Bushman (from
Southern Africa) in a room with 100 native
Japanese, and with 100 native Swedes and
with 100 native Australians, all of you could
sort out the members of each of these
populations with 100% accuracy.
However, if you placed 100 Egyptians in
another room with 100 Sudanese, with 100
Turkish people, with 100 Jordanians , it would
be extremely difficult to sort out these people.
Human variation I
Human Variation II
The Reality of Race II
People are distinct across broad geographic
ranges (for example, between the populations
from the Kalahari and from Sweden).
However, humans are continuously distributed,
with no distinct borders or boundaries
separating populations. Biological features
gradually change from one geographic area to
another.
Thus, there is both a reality of human
difference between peoples from distant
locales, and at the same time, no reality to the
concept of racial groups bounded by distinct
borders.
Thus: can races be defined?
If there are no distinctive features that provide
boundaries between human populations, then why
have the traditional views of race as distinctive
groups developed? And do most people believe that
there is a reality to human races as separate entities?
Much of this is the result of the history of the study
of human biology and variation. Up until the latter
part of the 20th century, races were viewed as groups
with fixed and identifiable borders. Various authors
defined the number of races and their distributions in
numerous ways.
Five Races
History of the Concept of Race
Humans have used the concept of race for
centuries as a way of elevating the image of
their own group.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, there was
great debate about the nature of human
difference.
In the U.S., much of this debate focused on
the practice of slavery and whether the
Declaration of Independence ‘s reference to
the ideal that “all men are created equal...”
also referred to African American slaves.
Jefferson and the Declaration
About two miles from where we are today, Thomas
Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, a
document that, perhaps more than any other,
established the central concept of the U.S.
Jefferson wrote, as we have seen, that it was a “self
evident” truth “that all men are created equal”. For
Jefferson, this meant precisely that all humans, with
their different physical features, were part of the
same creation? And thus to be considered in the
same fashion, legally, socially and politically?
This was the background for the debates surrounding
both the meaning and utility of a concept of race as
well as the justifications for slavery.
The U.S. and Race
What made this debate even more meaningful in the
U.S. was that here, unlike late 18th century Europe,
where peoples were relatively similar in appearance,
and it was unusual to meet an individual with exotic
features. In the U.S., this was a normal pattern with
Native Americans, and individuals of African and
European background routinely passing each other
on the street.
Further, the unequal distribution of property and civil
rights between the various groups and the bias in the
law toward Europeans (and northwest Europeans in
particular) also played a role in focusing attention on
the differences that distinguished humans.
Race as an Issue in the U.S.
Thus after the revolution, the United States
became heavily involved with the concept of
race especially as it impacted on the larger
issue of slavery.
Great Britain outlawed slavery in the Empire
in 1807, and from this time on, there were
periodic conflicts with the U.S. when Royal
Navy ships, patrolling the west coast of
Africa, would intercept American slave ships.
Race in early 19th Century Britain
This did not, of course, end the idea in Britain of
differences between races. In 1799, surgeon Charles
White recounted his belief that despite the ability of all
humans to successfully interbreed, we did not constitute a
single species, nor was the environment a factor in the
emergence of physical differences. His views, like many
others before and after, were inextricably tied to the high
value they placed on the nobility of his own kind.
For White, the white European, the Caucasian, the Aryan,
the Teuton, possessed truly wonderous gifts:
“none would doubt the white European’s intellectual
magnificence, surely superior to that of every other man”.
Where else shall we find, he asked:
Race and Beauty
“That nobly arched head, containing such a quantity of
brain….? Where that variety of features, and fullness
of expression, those long, flowing, graceful ring-lets;
that majestic beard, those rosy cheeks and coral lips?
Where that….noble gait?
In what other quarter of the globe shall we find the
blush that overspreads the soft features of the
beautiful women of Europe, that emblem of modesty,
of delicate feelings…? Where, except on the bosom
of the European woman, two such plump and snowy
hemispheres, tipt with vermilion?”
Charles White, English physician (1799)
Philadelphia in the early 19th C.
Philadelphia, as a Quaker city, was a center for
abolitionist activity in the years before the Civil War
(remember, this was a time before the publication
of The Origin of Species)
One leader, Samuel Stanhope Smith, Professor of
Natural Theology at the College of New Jersey
(later to become Princeton) actually argued that
differences in the appearance of Europeans and
Africans was due entirely to environmental
influence, including their status in society, and that
if a African’s lot improved, they would begin to look
more like Europeans.
Phrenology
Samuel Morton (1799-1851)
Considered by some as the founder of
American physical anthropology, Morton was
a physician whose views on human variation
would have a deep and long lived influence
on the study of human variation and its
meaning.
Morton used the collection of human skulls
that he had amassed (more than 1200 at his
death) from virtually every human population
on the planet to examine the nature of
human variation in cranial structures.
Morton’s racial ideas
Amongst Morton’s skull collection were a number
recovered from ancient Egyptian cemeteries and
when he compared these with modern Egyptians,
Morton concluded that there was virtually no
differences in the skulls.
There were, he argued, significant differences in the
skulls of living Europeans when compared with those
of Africans.
In Morton’s time the ancient Egyptians were
considered to be from remotest antiquity, near to the
beginnings of human existence.
If there was no difference between the two Egyptian
groups, but much differences between Europeans
and Africans, then the differences between racial
groups were as old as the groups themselves.
Americana book
The Influence of Morton’s
Racial Views
Thus, Morton concluded that what were considered the
races of humans were actually different species whose
differences went back to human origins.
Because Morton used what were, for the time, extremely
scientific methods, his work was accepted in many scientific
circles here and in Europe.
After Morton’s death, two others, amateur Egyptologist
George Glidden and an Alabama physician, Josiah Nott
widely communicated Morton’s views to scientific audiences
in the U.S. and abroad.
In the years prior to the Civil War, Morton’s work was
employed by many, included those in Congress, as a
justification for the maintenance of slavery.
Morton Egypt
Morton skull
Morton race
Early 19th Century Studies
Thus, prior to the publication of The Origin of
Species (1859), most studies of race focused
on the identification of distinct racial groups,
and the specific biological traits of each
group.
At this time, there was little appreciation of
the nature and importance of variation, and
there was a general view that races were
originally composed of people who all looked
exactly alike.
This was the origin of the concept of the
‘Pure Race”.
“For nearly two centuries anthropologists have
been directing their attention principally toward the task
of establishing criteria by whose means races of
mankind might be defined. All have taken completely
for granted the one thing which required to be proved,
namely that the concept of race corresponded with a
reality which could actually be measured and verified
and descriptively set out so that it could be seen to be a
fact. In short, that the anthropological conception of
race is true which states that there exists in nature
groups of human beings comprised of individuals each of
whom possesses a certain aggregate of characters which
individually and collectively serve to distinguish them
from individuals in other groups.”
Ashley Montagu (1964:5)
Color Chart
Hair form
Cephalic
noses
Race and Colonialism
During the whole of the 19th Century, there were
conflicts in most European countries between those
who wished to totally exploit colonial peoples for
economic gain, and those who fought for a more
enlightened approach.
One unintended consequence of Darwin’s work was
the employment of the concept of Natural Selection
(“the survival of the fittest”) as a mechanism that
also applied to the competition between societies.
So-called “Social Darwinism” argued that since the
European states were virtually always able to subdue
non-Western peoples, t they were the most fit, and
by implication their people were also the most fit.
Later 19th Century Studies
Although Darwin had emphasized the crucial
importance of variation in the process of evolution,
most studies of human races in the latter half of the
19th Century continued to stress stereotypes and
fixed patterns in the work.
In the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, and the
unification of Germany, there arose in the 1870s a
strong current of German nationalism. This was
manifested in numerous ways including the retelling
of German (or Teuton) origin myths, especially in the
work of Richard Wagner and the Ring Cycle, but also
in the work of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and
his views of the untermensch and ubermensch.
Nationalism and Race
In addition to this work, other writers were also setting out
origin stories and myths as representative of the early history
of European peoples, especially those of northwest Europe.
One of the earliest was the the Comte Joseph-Arthur de
Gobineau, who in 1853 wrote a celebrated essay entitled: “On
the inequality of the human races”
Later, at the beginning of the 20th Century, a British writer
Houston Chamberlin, wrote Foundations of the 19th Century.
In both these works, the arguments, based on linguistics,
archaeology and social philosophy, was that overwhelming
evidence documents that the northwest Europeans, the socalled Nordics, Teutons or Aryans, were the race that was
responsible for most of the great achievements of western
humankind, and that they should deserve to be masters of
other, less well endowed groups.
“Pure Races”
Through much of the 19th Century, pure races
were thought to have characterized the early
development of our species. Later on, as these
pure racial groups met and mixed with other
such races, they interbred and became mixed.
Original races were composed of individuals
who all looked and behaved in the same way.
This concept of race led to the ascribing of
stereotypical notions about each race,
especially having to do with behavior and
intelligence.
Madison Grant: The Passing of the
Great Race (1916)
Madison Grant, New York lawyer, writer, member of the board
of the Bronx Zoo and the American Museum of Natural History,
wrote a book that would have enormous implications for the
population history in the U.S.
In the this book, Grant argued that discoveries in
archaeology, linguistics and genetics all showed that the
Nordic race, having begun its existence in the mountains of
southern Russia, migrated from there to their present locale in
northwest Europe. These people possessed superior physical,
psychological and neurological abilities and were able to
subdue inferior peoples in their way.
The Influence of the Aryan Peoples
According to Grant, it was this group, with their
superior intellect and general prowess, having passed
through Palestine, Greece and Rome, were
responsible for Christ, and Greek and Roman
civilizations.
After settling in northwest Europe, they were the
driving force of the developments in Europe and were
the major early settlers into America. It was there
work and genius that resulted in the great American
Republic.
Grant argued that with the enormous influx of
immigrants into the U.S., the quality of the genetic
materials of the Nordics is being diluted and the U.S.
faces an inevitable decline in greatness.
The Immigration Act of 1921
The arguments made by Grant were used in
Congress to pass the Johnson Immigration
Act of 1921, which effectively ended the
great age of European immigration into the
U.S.
This restrictive act set very low levels of
immigration from all areas of the world into
the U.S., with the exception of those people
from northwest Europe whose immigration
numbers were without limits.
Pure Races and Biology
The idea of pure races originated in the 19th
century, before our understanding of basic
biological mechanisms had developed.
The concept of pure races implies that every
individual in a population possesses the same
alleles for every gene.
Not only does this deny the continual
introduction of mutations, but even if, by
severe artificial breeding, a pure group were to
be created, every individual would be effected
by the same germs. A pathogen lethal to one
would be lethal to all.
Pure Races and Nazism
The Nazis picked up many of the ideas that had begin to
develop in the late 19th Century, and made them
government policy. This resulted in one of the most
unspeakable governmentally sanctioned mass murders in
all history.
The concept of the ‘pure race’ was at the core of the Nazi
vision of a pure Nordic race, originally composed of
individuals who were all tall, blond haired and blue eyed.
The Nordics later came into contact with ‘inferior’ races,
with intermixture diluting Nordic superiority
The Nazis murdered millions of people who they believed
were members of inferior races. This vision was applied
not only to Jews but also to Eastern Europeans, Gypsies,
Africans and South Asians and most East Asians except the
Japanese.
Responses to Nazi Racial Views
Even before World War II, European scientists had responded
strongly to the unscientific doctrines of Nazi racial ideas.
For example, in 1936, two eminent British biologists, Julian
Huxley and A.C. Haddon, had written a book, We
Europeans, which showed in a clear, concise fashion the
major errors in these views.
In one famous observation in this book, the authors note that;
“Our German neighbours have ascribed to themselves a
Teutonic type that is fair, long-headed, tall and virile. Let us
make a composite picture of a typical Teuton from the most
prominent of the exponents of this view.
Let him be as blond as Hitler, as dolicocephic as Rosenberg, as
tall as Goebbels, as slender as Goering and as manly as
Streicher. How much would he resemble the German
ideal?”.
The Aftermath: The UNESCO
Statement on Race
Since the end of WWII, UNESCO has issued a number of
such Statements on Race:
The first states, in part: “Racial doctrine is the outcome
of a fundamentally anti-rational system of thought and
is in glaring conflict with the whole humanist tradition
of our civilization. Race hatred and conflict thrive on
scientifically false ideas and are nourished by
ignorance.
Scientists have reached general agreement in
recognizing that mankind is one: that all men belong
to the same species.
UNESCO Statement II
From the biological standpoint, the species Homo
sapiens is made up of a number of populations, each
one of which differs from the others in the frequency
of one or more genes.
National, religious, geographic, linguistic and cultural
groups do not necessarily coincide with racial
groups.
With respect to reace-mixture, the evidence points
unequivocally to the fact that this has been goingon
from the earliest times.
The biological fact of race and the myth of ‘race’
should be distinguished.
The 1960s: Evolution & Variation
“From Whatever viewpoint one approaches the
question of the applicability of the concept of
race to mankind, the modalities of human
variability appear so far from those required for
a coherent classification that the concept must
be considered as of very limited use. In my
opinion, to dismember mankind into races as a
convenient approximation requires such a
distortion of the facts that any usefulness
disappears”.
Jean Hiernaux (1964:41)
The 1954 Supreme Court Desegregation
Decision and “Scientific Racism”
The U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawing school
segregation resulted in the organization of a
movement which termed itself Scientific Racists.
The individuals involved in this point of view included
geneticists, psychologists, anatomists and
anthropologists. They argued that the evidence for
differences in intellectual abilities between racial
groups had not as yet been completed worked out
and that it was premature to bring together members
of different races in the same schools and thus to
encourage intermarriage.
The Modern Concept of Race I
Human biology reflects two kinds of evolutionary
mechanisms:
1) Natural Selection working on populations to
better adapt them to the conditions in their
local environments.
2) Random mechanisms, like drift and
migration, which modify the biology of a
population, but are not adaptive. These socalled “Stochastic” changes certainly played a
role in the earlier phases of human evolution,
when population sizes were small.
Human Races as Clines
Clines are changes in the frequency
(percentages) of an allele or feature across
space.
Clinal distributions characterize the world
wide pattern of biological variation in
humans.
Thus, there is a reality to human races in that
human populations differ.
But, there is no reality to race as a set of
distinct human groups with boundaries
separating them from other such groups.
Modern Concepts of Race II
It is clear that both of these evolutionary
processes were at work in the formation of
modern human biological variation.
However, when examining a specific biological
trait, like hair color, for example, it is difficult to
determine whether the variation in the
expression of the feature is the result of
selection or random processes.
This confounds many studies of the relationships between a specific biological trait and the
possible environmental pressures that underlie
its presence in the population.
Modern Concepts of Race III
As we have seen, initial studies of race were
based on the examination of obvious
biological features, such as stature, hair color
and other features.
Modern investigations focus on genetic
comparisons, both nuclear and mtDNA.
These genetic studies document:
1) greater genetic variation exists within
major geographic populations than between
them.
2) human populations are remarkably
homogeneous in their genetic materials.
3) African populations are more variable.
Social Concepts of Race I
Even though the notion of a pure race is a
biological impossibility, it and other incorrect
views of the biology of race have become
part of our social concepts of race.
The use of the term “race” is common in all
facets of society. What is meant by race in
these contexts, however, is very different
from the biological notions of race as
continuously distributed human populations
whose allelic variation varies clinally.
Social Concepts of Race II
In present day society, the social concept of
race is intertwined with the idea of an “ethnic
group”.
When the U.S. government uses the term
race, it often is describing groups of people
who share language, culture and a vague
historical background.
For example, the use of the term “Hispanic”
does not have any biological meaning, but
rather refers to peoples from parts of Central
and South America and the Caribbean.
Social Concepts of Race III
Other socially constructed races, including
African Americans (‘blacks’), Europeans
(‘whites’), and Asians, have little biological
reality and are often based on behavioral and
cultural stereotypes, or simply on skin color.
Many social agencies utilize the identification
of the racial identity of people in order to
determine the effectiveness of programs and
thus for requests for Federal funding.
Race and Racism
The study of race continues to be one
in which science, myth and bias often
are intermixed into theories and claims
that are difficult to sort out.
For example, the work of people such
as J. Philippe Rushton and others
continue to be cited and used, much as
earlier studies were, to support the
ideas of inequalities between human
groups.
Popmap
Race and Intelligence I
Often, over the course of American
history, one or another racial group has
been designated as being inferior or
superior in intelligence to other racial
groups.
Throughout the 19th century, various
stereotypes were developed to support
these claims. Many were simply the way
Europeans justified the often times
horrible treatment of colonial peoples
under their control.
Race and Intelligence II
During World War I, the use of IQ tests
in the U.S. for the first time suggested
differences between various racial
groups, but the data was ambiguous.
Lately, the notion of IQ differences has
become an important issue for
discussion with the publication of books
such as The Bell Curve. What are the
realities to these discussions?
Race and Intelligence III
Remember, most of the so-called ‘racial
groups’ in the U.S. are actually socially
constructed groupings and have little
biological reality.
But, humans are different in their
biologically based abilities. We are not
created equal.
All humans possess varying kinds of
neurologically based abilities
Race and Intelligence IV
Some have math skills, others language
skills, still other hand-eye-brain
coordination skills.
Most importantly, these abilities are not
human population group specific, but are
found across the human species.
And, there remain strong cultural and
social influences to IQ scores; there are
no “culture free” ways to measure
intelligence.
A Summary Point: Intelligence
It must be emphasized that, as we have
seen, the notion of ‘intelligence’ in
humans is a very complex one,
involving many different skills and
abilities. No one test, especially one
founded in the concepts and ideas of a
particular culture, can measure all the
various talents every modern human
possesses.
Medicine and Social Races I
Social notions about race do not have a basis
in biological reality, but the use of these
concepts obscures other kinds of variables.
Many medical studies divide their samples into
“Whites” and “Blacks” (African Americans).
For example, studies of cardiovascular disease
patterns often utilize these categories.
However, African Americans have a very
diverse biological history, with genetic
contributions from Africans, Europeans and
Native Americans.
Medicine and Social Races II
Because of the complexity of African
American biological history, different
individuals have different assortments of
genetic variations, and may very well differ in
their susceptibility to various diseases.
Studies like this may overlook other risk
factors, like socio-economic status, and overly
stress biology.
Some Question for Discussion
Having examined the notion of race and its
historical development, what are your views
on the continued use of the term in our
culture and in our language.
Is this a concept that continues to be
harmful?
Do you have any suggestions for concepts or
words to replace the concept and term ‘race’?
Should we ignore the biological differences
that mark world-wide human variation?
Questions for Discussion
How important is the concept of race in modern
society?:
A) not important, and because of the horrible history
of race in recent human history, it ought to be put
aside.
B) it is important for everyone to know what their
racial background is.
C) the U.S. government uses race as a way to
measure the effectiveness of social programs. it is
useful in this context.
D) there must be a better way to divide the human
species into identifiable groupings.
Human Races: A Summary
Much of human biological variation is the
result of adaptation to specific environments.
Because of stochastic mechanisms, human
population variation is complex; all variation
cannot simply be ascribed to adaptation.
The present mobility of the world’s people,
allowing them to move around the planet with
great ease means that population variation
will slowly disappear as humans intermarry.
Thus, over time, human races will increasingly
become part of our history.