When Racial
Categories Make No Sense
By Dan Gardner, social policy researcher and freelance writer (special to
The Globe and Mail newspaper, Canada, Oct. 27, l995) reprinted with permission
of Dan Gardner
Next May,
a national census will ask a question no Canadian government has ever
before had the temerity to ask: "What race are you"?" As politically explosive
as that question is, few Canadians would have much trouble answering.
But revolutionary developments in the study of biology over the past 25
years undermine the very idea of race and could give people reason to
reconsider how they fill out the Statistics Canada qesionnaire. Some social
scienists are even arguing that government should abandon the race question
and other race-based social policies.
For most
Canadians, categorizing others by race is almost automatic. We use certain
physical differences as cues--hair texture, eye colour, some facial shapes,
and especially skin colour.
Each of
these features is a product of genetics, but only skin colour is plastered
all over the body like a genetic billboard. So differences in skin colour
are the ones that cause most Canadians to assume Oscar Peterson is "black"
and Jean Chretien "white". This unanimous opinion gives race the semblance
of an objective fact.
But biologists'
growing understanding of genetics in the last 50 years has put race--and
skin colour--in a whole new perspective. Beginning in the 1940s, scientists
began to realize that the racial map of human beings did not match what
they were learning of human genes. Early on, it was seen that there was
no gene that was unique to a race, and so there was no "black" or "white"
gene.
A 1972
survey by Richard Lewontin, Harvard University's world-renowned geneticist
and evolutionary biologist, finally swept the old race categories out
of biology. "The races are primarily defined according to skin colour,
which is a genetic trait," he says. "The question I asked was, if you
looked at two people of different races, would there be other genetic
differences between them?"
The results
confounded the old assumption that there are profound biological differences
between the races. Of all the genes in human being, about 75 per cent
are identical in every person; only 25 per cent vary from person to person.
And of that variable amount, Professor Lewontin demonstrated, 85 per cent
of the difference would be present even if the two people were fairly
closely related; that is, an ethnic subgroup, like Norwegians. Another
9 per cent of the genetic variation will result from individuals being
members of separate nations or tribes within a "race"--a Spaniard and
an Italian, for example. And only about 6 per cent is the result of the
two people being from what we call separate races. Hence, Professor Lewontin
discovered that any person's race accounts for only about 0.24 per cent
(or 6 per cent of 25 per cent) of his genetic make-up. Canada's Prime
Minister may easily be more genetically akin to Canada's greatest jazz
pianist than to another "white" person.
Jan Sapp,
chairman of the department of science studies at York University in Downsview,
Ont., and author of several books on evolution and genetics, says that
"since [most] of the diversity between human beings exists within so-called
races, the categories 'white' and 'black' are nonsense, genetically speaking."
Not only
do our racial lines not measure something substantial, they are also hopelessly
arbitrary. "A biologist may talk about two 'races' of fruit flies because
they have some genetic difference he or she is interested in," says Prof.
Sapp. "But the choice of that particular genetic difference as the line
between races i just for his own purposes and is trivial to anyone [else]."
Our society
has given the genetic trait of skin colour the special privilege of being
the dividing line between human races. But fingerprint types, blood types,
or any one of th other 25 per cent of genes that vary among humans could
just as logically be used. Any other choice of genetic trait would produce
a racial map completely different from our "black" and "white" world.
A racial world based on fingerprint types, for example, would place most
Europeans and Africans in the "Loops" race; Mongolians and Australian
aborigines would be proud members of the "Whorls".
"Race has
really lost its significance as a concept," says Prof. Lewontin.
Indeed,
Prof. Sapp expresses the widely held view that "'race' shouldn't be used
in [the study of] human biology because it is so tied up in political
and cultural meanings."
But the
problem remains: Even if race has become meaningless to scientists, it
is very real to practically everyone else. "Society's belief in the existence
of races creates what social scientists call a social reality," says California
State University sociology professor Yehudi Webster. The reactions of
the public to the O.J.Simpson verdict--harshly split between black and
white--are a reminder of that social reality, if any is needed. Biological
race is dead; social race is alive and thriving.
Most social
scientists and government policy-makers are well aware that our racial
categories make no biological sense. But they continue to pour out social
policy that uses the race categories of the "social reality." Canadian
employment equity legislation, for example, is designed to help those
who are "non-white in colour or non-Caucasian in race." The race question
was placed on the 1996 census for the purpose of creating the visible
minority data for employment equity to function.
That is
the sort of government policy that infuriates Prof. Webster, author of
"The Racialization of America". The addition of a race question to the
Canadian census is, he feels, "an act of promiscuous stupidity." He represents
a growing academic faction that wants the old racial thinking thrown out
of government policy. "Politicians are simply putting into law the racial
concepts developed by 18th- and 19th-century racial theorists" who first
proposed the idea that profound physical differencs exist between races,
Prof. Webster says. The Canadian government "clearly does not realize
that when they put race in policy, they are helping to create the race
consciousness that is the bane of American society. They are putting the
stamp of officialdom on race consciousness. Canada will pay a heavy price
down the road."
Heribert
Adam, sociology professor at Simon Fraser Univeristy, agrees. "If we entrench
racial categories in government policy, we can expect never to have a
race-blind society. If we had effective legislation outlawing racial discrimination,
and we were sensitive to multiculturalism in hiring procedures, we could
achieve the same goal as racial social policies without racializing the
society any more."
The man
who did more than any other to destroy the biological idea of race is
unimpressed by these arguments. Says Richard Lewontin: "Race is a real
social phenomenon. If the state has a duty to intervene to protect powerless
peoples, then it has to intervene at the level of racial classification.
I don't oppose a race question on the census because the state can't fulfill
its obligation to help if it doesn't have data."
Says Parin
Dossa, anthropology professor at Simon Fraser University, "Being included
in the census provides minorities with an opportunity ot engage in the
struggle for equality. I don't think we can move away from categorization
given the fact that race is a deeply entrenched phenomenon."
Could biology's
new view of humanity eventually remove the racism from society? Heribert
Adam sighs, "Unfortunately, science and perception are two different things.
A lot of people believe Elvis Presley is alive."
Dan Gardner
gardner@helix.net
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