Why do we still believe in race? There are two common answers, depending on
side of the fence you stand on the meaning of race. Those who believe the
race is a real biological entity argue that we still believe in it - well,
because it's a real biological entity. For such so-called race realists, race
describes the way the world is organised. Those who view race, not as a biological
entity but as a social construction, argue that race is a figment of racist
imaginations. Science, they claim, has disproved the reality of race, and
only prejudice gives it validity.
I want to suggest that both arguments are wrong. First, the question of whether
race is a biological reality or a social construction is not one that science
can answer. Science can provide us with data about differences between human
populations, but how we interpret that data - and whether we believe
that the data points to the reality or otherwise of race - is beyond the domain
of science. Second, underlying the idea of race today is not so much a belief
in the inequality of human groups as a vaguer sense of the importance of human
differences. And this sense of the importance of human differences, as opposed
to human commonalities, is something common to both sides of the race debate.
What maintains a belief in race today, I want to argue, is not a residual
attachment to ideas of racial science, but the contemporary desire to celebrate
difference - together with the belief that we should look to science (rather
than to, say, politics) for answers to questions of who we are.
Ironically, the more we find out about human biology, the more uncertain scientists
appear to be about the meaning of race. The Human Genome Project was supposed
to settle the question of race once and for all, by allowing us to compare
the genomes from individuals belonging to different 'races'. But when scientists
did just that, they came up with very different answers about the biological
meaning of race. According to Craig Venter who led the private sector assault
on the human genome, 'The Human Genome Project shows there is no such thing
as race'. Venter's company Celera used DNA from three females and two males
who identified themselves as Hispanic, Asian, Caucasian or African American.
'In the five genomes, there is no way to tell one ethnicity from another',
Venter told a press conference in the White House.
Not all scientists agreed. In a major paper in the journal Genome Biology,
the geneticist Neil Risch and his colleagues dissented from the party line,
arguing that 'from a scientific perspective', racial categories have 'great
validity'. 'A decade or more of population genetics research', they insisted,
'have documented biological differences between the races.'
Why such confusion about the meaning of race? Why can't geneticists agree
among themselves whether the Genome Project shows racial differences to be
a biological reality or a social myth? Science provides us with objective
data about human differences. The genetics of population differences is a
biological reality, not a social construction. But the interpretation
of such differences is deeply shaped by social and political trends. Another
way of putting this is that science can neither confirm nor disconfirm race
as a biological reality, because race is a not scientific category.
To see this more clearly, I want to look at both the traditional liberal arguments
against the idea of race as a biological category and the arguments of those
who insist that racial differences are rooted in scientific evidence. Both
sets of arguments, I want to suggest, are found wanting - because the debate
about race cannot be settled as a scientific issue.
Is race a social construction?
The scientific consensus today is that race is meaningless as a biological
category. Three main arguments are used to justify this belief. First, that
more than 90% of human genetic variation exists within populations; less than
five per cent distinguish what are commonly called 'races'. Second, that all
human populations merge into each, ensuring that there are no sharp distinctions
between human groups. And third, that Homo sapiens is too young a species
for racial differentiation to have deep evolutionary roots. Let us look at
these arguments in turn.
Imagine that some nuclear nightmare wiped out the entire human race apart
from one small population - say, the Masai tribe in East Africa. Virtually
all the genetic variation that exists in the world today would still be present
in that one small group. That's a dramatic way of expressing the results of
a landmark analysis conducted by the geneticist Richard Lewontin in 1972.
From a study of variation in human blood types, Lewontin showed that virtually
all of the difference - 85 per cent - occurred between individuals within
single populations. A further 7 per cent differentiated populations within
a race. Only 8 per cent of total variation distinguished the major races.
Lewontin's paper caused a sensation, and remains to this day one of the most
frequently cited academic papers. In a stroke, Lewontin seemed to have demolished
any scientific rational for the idea of race.
The results from a recent study by Noah Rosenberg and his colleagues published
in Science are even more striking. They show that differences among
individuals account for a staggering 93-95 percent of all genetic variation.
About 2 per cent is taken up by differences between populations within a race.
And race accounts for just 3-5 per cent of all human difference. The Rosenberg
study is the largest of its kind and these figures are now widely accepted
as the most accurate.
All this seems to back up the argument very strongly that race has no biological
meaning. We know, however, that tiny genetic differences can have huge physical
or behavioural impacts. From a genetic point of view poodles and greyhounds
are almost identical, as are dachsunds and St Bernards. Humans and chimpanzees
share 99.4 per cent of functional genes, but we're different species. Tiny
genetic differences, in other words, can lead to major phenotypical changes.
The fact that race accounts for only 4 per cent of genetic variation among
humans does not necessarily mean that race has no biological validity.
The people of China look very different from those of Kenya. But there is
no point between Nairobi and Beijing at which the race to which Kenyans belong
ends and those to which Chinese belong begins. Every population shades imperceptibly
into another. Since there are no clearcut divisions between populations, many
geneticists suggest, so race cannot exist in any meaningful sense.
Even race realists acknowledge the difficulty of defining races. 'The precise
number and grouping of races will always be somewhat arbitrary', Jon Entine
writes. Dividing humans into races 'is akin to wrestling an octopus into a
shoe box: no matter how hard you fight with it, you still have something dangling
out somewhere. Modern typologists cannot even agree whether it is more meaningful
to lump races into large fuzzy groups or split them into smaller units of
dozens or even hundreds of populations.'
When even a strong proponent of the race concept admits that it is next to
impossible to divide humans into a clean set of races, perhaps it is time
to give up on the idea. The fuzziness of boundaries between races, however,
does not necessarily mean that races don't exist. Many real categories have
fuzzy boundaries. Among non-human animals, for instance, subspecies are often
separated by a continuous gradation rather than by a sharp boundary.
Recent genetic studies suggest that it is indeed possible to divide up humanity
into a number of major groups which closely correlate with classical concepts
of race. Consider, for instance, the study by Noah Rosenberg and his colleagues
that I mentioned earlier and which showed that the difference between races
accounts for as little as about 4 per cent of total human variation. The same
study also showed that despite the fact that most variation occurs among individuals,
it is nevertheless possible - in fact quite easy - to distinguish genetically
between races.
The scientists studied 377 microsatellite sequences from 1056 individuals
from 52 populations worldwide. They fed the data to a computer programme called
structure which takes any set of data and attempts to find a rational
way of dividing it into as many groups as it is asked to. The number of groups
into which the data set is broken down is denoted by the letter K.
In this study, structure was asked to divide up the populations of
the world (represented by the 52 DNA samples) into two, three, four and five
groups according to how similar or dissimilar were their DNA sequences. When
the scientists set asked the programme to divide the population of the world
into two groups, one group comprised of Africa, Europe and western Asia and
the second group of eastern Asia, Australia and the Americas. When K=3, the
group consisting of populations from Eastern Asia and the Americas remained
unchanged. But the populations of sub-Saharan Africa were separated from those
of Europe and Western Asia. In other words, the three groups were the populations
of sub-Saharan Africa, those of Europe and Western Asia, and those of Eastern
Asia, Australia and the Americas. When asked to create four groups, structure
created a new group by separating the populations of eastern Asia and the
Americas. And when asked to break the data into five groups, structure kept
all the other groups as they were but separated off the populations of Austral
ia from the rest of Asia.
There are two things remarkable about these findings. First, the computer
programme divides the population of the world according to the continent on
which they live, and as we move from K=2 to K=5 the boundaries of the continents
become ever more distinct. Second, when the world's populations are divided
into five groups, those five groups correlate closely with what we call 'races':
Africans, Caucasians, Orientals, Australasians and Native Americans. And all
this from DNA sequences in which only 4 per cent of total human variation
is apportioned out among the races. Rosenberg's study seems to suggest that,
however small the differences between races, they are nevertheless sufficient
to pick them out.
As a species, Homo sapiens emerged from the East African savannah
some 150,000 years ago. The first bands of modern humans did not leave their
African home until around 60,000 years ago. Any differences between races,
therefore, must be at most 60,000 years old. For many, there simply has not
been sufficient time for deep divisions to develop between races. As the late
Stephen Jay Gould put it, 'Homo sapiens is a young species, its division
into races even more recent. This historical context has not supplied enough
time for the evolution of substantial differences... Human equality is a contingent
fact of history.'
We know, however, of many mutations that have spread rapidly in a short space
of time. The gene for lactose tolerance, for example, which allows human adults
to digest milk became dominant in those communities that started practicing
agriculture around 10,000 years ago. Today, lactose tolerance is widespread
among people who come from areas that have a long history of agriculture -
including Europe, the Middle East and South Asia - or who rely extensively
on milk in the diets, such as the Fulani in West Africa. But people from other
areas - such as East Asia - remain lactose intolerant, and find it difficult
to digest milk.
Similarly, genes that confer protection against malaria are also thought to
spread through particular populations - that is, those populations under threat
from malaria - in the space of a few thousand years. The quickness with which
such mutations can spread, and allow one population to be distinguished from
another, have led some race realists to query the received wisdom that
Homo sapiens is too young a species for races to have properly developed.
In any case, genetic differences between races are unlikely to be the product
solely, or even primarily, of natural selection. They are rather likely to
be the consequence of two other evolutionary forces, whose impact is less
time-limited - genetic drift and the founder effect.
Genetic drift refers to the random changes to gene frequencies that can occur
over time, especially in a small population. The most extreme case of genetic
drift is called the 'founder effect'. Suppose a small number of people leave
their community to form a new one. The people who make up the new community
are unlikely to have exactly the same genetic profile as the original population.
The smaller the new community, the more likely it will have a distinct genetic
profile.
All the people in the world today are descended from small bands of Africans
- perhaps no more than a few hundred in each band - who moved out of that
continent some 60,000 years ago. Each group would have had a genetic profile
slightly different from that of the African population whence they originated.
Some genes would have been more common, others less common than in the mother
population. Along the way, as they journeyed out of Africa, these small bands
of original explorers would have picked up new genetic mutations. And thanks
to genetic drift, the genetic profiles of the new and the old populations
would have continued to move apart.
The combination of genetic drift and the founder effect, race realists argue,
together with genetic mutations that these early migrants would have picked
up on their journeys, would be sufficient to explain major differences between
the races. Humans may be a young species, they say, but that does not deny
the biological reality of race.
Is race a biological reality?
So, does science really tell us that race is a biological fact? Despite what
I've just argued, it does not. For while science does not absolutely close
the door on the idea of race, it certainly does not open it either.
The debate about race is not a debate about whether differences exist between
human populations. Jon Entine, a staunch defender of the idea of race, defines
race as 'human biodiversity'. That's meaningless. No one, on either side of
the debate, would deny that there are a myriad of differences between different
human populations. The real debate about race is not whether there are any
differences between populations, but about the significance of such
differences.
The fact that a BMW is a different colour from a Boeing 747 is of little significance
to most people. The fact that one has an internal combustion engine and the
other a jet engine is of immense significance if you want to travel from London
to New York.
But if you are a Yanomami Indian living in the Amazon forest, even this difference
may not be of that great a significance, since it's unlikely that you will
be able - or need - to use either form of transport.
If we want to understand the significance of any set of differences, in other
words, we have to ask ourselves two questions: Significant for what? And in
what context? One of the problems of the contemporary debate about race is
that these two questions get too rarely asked.
In the nineteenth century races were seen as fixed groups, almost akin to
distinct species, each with special behavioural and physical characteristics
that distinguished one from the other. The races could be ranked on an evolutionary
hierarchy, with whites at the top and Negroids at the bottom.
Today, with a few exceptions, race realists reject the idea that there are
essential differences between human populations, or that differences signify
inferiority or superiority. But that's made race a very flaky concept. No
one knows quite how to define it. The problem for race realists today is the
very opposite of that for nineteenth century racial scientists. Racial scientists
'knew' the significance of race but could find no way of truly defining differences.
Today, as the study by Rosenberg and his colleagues clearly reveals, we can
define differences between Continental populations. But the significance of
such differences no longer seems clear.
To understand this better, I want to look at one area in which the biological
concept of race does seem relevant - medicine. We know that many diseases
are colour-coded. In Britain there is particular concern about diabetes among
Asian men. In America, African-Americans suffer disproportionately from hypertension.
Tay-Sachs disease is found particularly among Jews.
Many doctors and geneticists have suggested that medicine shows up the reality
of race. As a doctor, Sally Satel, put it in a widely-reported essay in the
New York Times,
In practicing medicine, I am not colorblind. I always take note of my patient's race. So do many of my colleagues. We do it because certain diseases and treatment responses cluster by ethnicity... When it comes to practicing medicine, stereotyping often works.
At the Washington drug clinic where she works, Satel prescribes different
amounts of Prozac to black and white patients because African Americans seem
to metabolise antidepressants more slowly than Caucasians.
Yet, though different populations exhibit distinct risk profiles for diseases
and disorders, we should be wary before suggesting that this establishes the
reality of race. Sally Satel tells us that 40 per cent of African Americans
metabolise anti-depressants more slowly than do Caucasians. That means that
the majority of black Americans respond in the same manner as do Caucasians.
There might be medical advantages in treating blacks and whites differently
with respect to anti-depressant uptake, in other words, but such differential
treatment tells us nothing about racial differences except in a most superficial
sense.
The real medical advantage would come from being able to genotype each individual,
and hence be able to create a risk profile for each one. Such a project is
currently unfeasible for both practical and financial reasons. Therefore doctors
often resort to using surrogate indicators of an individual's risk profile
- such as race. Knowing the continent from which an individual's ancestors
originally came can provide clues as to what genes that individual might be
carrying. It's what Sally Satel calls a 'poor man's clue'.
But a poor man's clue in medicine is often a very poor clue to race. We all
know, for instance, that sickle cell anaemia is a black disease. Except that
it isn't. In the USA, the presence of the sickle cell trait can help distinguish
between those with, and without, African ancestry. But not in South Africa.
In South Africa, neither blacks nor whites are likely to possess the trait.
That's because sickle cell is not a black disease, but a disease of populations
originating in areas with high incidence of malaria. Some of these populations
are black, some are not. The sickle cell gene is found in equatorial Africa;
in parts of southern Europe; in southern Turkey, parts of the Middle East;
and in much of central India. Four distinct types of sickle cell genes have
been discovered, relating to different populations.
So, given the diversity of populations suffering from the sickle cell trait,
why do we think of sickle cell anaemia as a black disease? Because most people
know that African Americas suffer disproportionately from the trait. And,
given popular ideas about race, most people automatically assume that what
applies to black Americans also applies to all blacks. It is the social construction,
not the biological reality, of race that turns sickle cell into a black disease.
There's a similar picture with diabetes. In the USA, Hispanics are nearly
twice as likely to have diabetes than whites. Hispanic, however, is not a
biological category. The Hispanic population is made up three Continental
groups - Caucasian, African and Native American. It has become a population
group only because of the peculiarities of immigration into the USA.
If we break down the Hispanic population into its three main sub groups by
country of origin - Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and Cubans - we see that the incidence
of diabetes is much lower in Cuban Americans than in the other two groups.
Some have suggested that this is because Cuban Americans have a much lower
African and Native American ancestry than do Mexicans or Puerto Ricans - and
that both Africans and Native Americans have greater predisposition to diabetes.
But if we look at the genetic origins of the three main Hispanic groups we
find that Cuban Americans have a percentage of Native American genes no different
to Puerto Ricans, while when it comes to their African heritage they stand
in between Mexicans and Puerto Ricans:
Genetic origins of the Hispanic subgroups in the USA (in per centage terms)
| Caucasian | African | Native American | |
| Mexican Americans |
61 |
8 |
31 |
| Puerto Ricans |
45 |
37 |
18 |
| Cuban Americans |
62 |
20 |
18 |
It is difficult, in other words, to explain the lower incidence of diabetes
among Cuban Americans in terms of their distinct racial ancestry. The biology
of race, can tell us little about the differences between the incidence of
diabetes either within the Hispanic community, or between Hispanics and whites.
Population differences are clearly important in medicine. But we should not
confuse these with racial differences. The boundaries of a population, and
the differences that matter, vary depending on the question we are asking.
Do we want to know about sickle-cell anaemia, diabetes or Tay-Sachs disease?
Are we concerned with population differences in Britain or the USA? And so
on.
Sally Satel called race a 'Poor man's clue' in medicine. It's a telling phrase.
Race provides a clue because there are clearly genetic and social differences
between population groups that have medical consequences. But it's a poor
clue because the way we divide up society into different groups is not necessarily
the most useful way to understand a disease or disorder.
So, we return to the question: is race a biological category? What the 4 per
cent of variation that marks the difference between races tells us is the
continent whence your ancestors originated. The 4 per cent comprises largely
of genes responsible for relatively superficial features, such as skin colour,
bodyform or certain physiological functions like drug uptake. It has been
estimated, for instance, that skin colour, accounts for more than half the
measured genetic difference between Continental groups. Virtually no expressed
genes have been identified that are shared by all members of one race and
are not also present at substantial levels in other races. There is no evidence
that races exist in the old-fashioned sense of clearly delineated groups of
people each with a special, essential quality. Not even race realists believe
that these days. Which makes it hard to know what they do believe.
What race expresses today is a much vaguer belief about the importance of
human differences, a sense that what matters are our particular identities,
that these are in some sense fixed and inviolable, and that preserving and
celebrating such differences and identities is essential to the healthy functioning
of human societies.
Looked at in this fashion, the division between the two sides in the race
debate is actually far less than might otherwise appear. For the celebration
of difference has become the hallmark, not of racists, but of modern, liberal
democracies. 'It's good to be different' might well be the motto of our times.
The celebration of difference, the promotion of a pluralist society, tolerance
for a variety of cultural identities - these are seen as the hallmarks of
a decent, liberal, democratic, non-racist society.
From this perspective, modern race realism is not a throwback to nineteenth
century racism, but an expression of the contemporary embrace of pluralism.
To be sure race realists stress the importance of biological diversity, anti-racists
of cultural diversity. But the real division, I want to argue, is no longer
between those who see the world through racialeyes and those who see see it
through cultural eyes. It is rather between what the anthropologist Leonard
Lieberman has called 'lumpers' and 'splitters' - between those who stress
the importance of human commonalities and those who stress the importance
of human differences.
The political debate about race has always involved two distinct arguments:
one about equality, the other about universality. The first is an argument
about whether human beings possess a fundamental sameness by virtue of being
human. The second is an argument about whether or not what humans have in
common is more important than our differences. The relationship between these
two arguments has changed over time.
In the nineteenth century, most people accepted that different races were
real entities and that different races were unequal. The main debate was about
whether or not they were different species - in other words, were non-whites
human? By the beginning of the twentieth century, the main debate revolved
around whether races were unequal or just different. In the postwar world,
most (though not all) anthropologists came to accept that humanity had a common
origin and that races did not express unequal endowment. The debate now was
whether the concept of race had any validity at all.
In this process, the relationship both between lumpers and splitters, and
between the debate about equality and that about universality, also changed.
In the nineteenth century splitters believed in the inequality of races and
often claimed, too, that different races had distinct evolutionary origins;
lumpers, on the other hand, believed not just in a common origin for humanity,
but denied that different groups could be ranked on a scale of intelligence
and civilisation. Lumpers, in other words, believed in both universality and
equality. Splitters were hostile to both. Today, however, this clean distinction
between lumpers and splitters is no longer easy to make - because, by and
large, both lumpers and splitters now profess a belief in the equality of
human groups. Nor is there any longer a straightforward association between
equality and universaility. Many of those who today subscribe to the idea
of human equality also deny the idea of human universals. Indeed, 'anti-racism'
has today come to mean hostility to the idea of universality and the advocacy
of cultural, and sometimes moral, relativism.
All of which brings us to another transformation in the postwar understanding
of human differences. Increasingly, people have come to view differences not
so much a function of biology as of culture. The denial of the importance
of racial divisions has gone hand in hand with the acceptance of the idea
that cultural divisions are deep, ingrained and necessary. By the beginning
of the twenty-first century, we have come to view cultural differences in
much the same way as people had viewed racial differences at the end of the
nineteenth.
To understand all this better, I want to take a historical detour, to look
at how the idea of race developed over the past three centuries, and at the
relationship between ideas of racial and cultural differences.
A brief history of race
People have always recognised differences between populations. But they have
not always viewed those differences as racial. The modern idea of race
is relatively recent - no more than three centuries old. Before the modern
concept of race could develop, the modern concepts of equality and humanity
had to develop too. Racial difference and inequality can only have meaning
in a world which has accepted the possibility of social equality and a common
humanity.
It was through the Enlightenment, the intellectual transformation of Europe
in the eighteenth century, that such ideas became firmly established in the
modern imagination. Whatever their other differences most Enlightenment thinkers
held that humans were by nature rational and sociable, and that there existed
a common human nature. Implicit in these beliefs was the idea that all humans
were potentially equal. Through Enlightenment philosophy humanity had for
the first time a concept of universality that could transcend perceived differences.
What is striking about Enlightenment discourse is the lack of any discussion
of race. Compared to writings both before and after, eighteenth century writings
show a remarkable disdain for racial arguments. When in 1800, the French anthropologist
Joseph-Marie Degerando wrote a methodological text for the Société
des Observateurs de l'Homme, the principal anthropological society of its
time, he did not think it necessary to deal with the question of race. Of
course Enlightenment thinkers clearly held racist views, some very openly
and overtly. It would have been astonishing if it had been otherwise. But
what was absent at this time was any sustained discourse of race.
Enlightenment thinkers believed that all humans were potentially equal, and
that social progress would overcome divisions. But by the early decades of
the nineteenth century such optimism seemed misplaced. Far from healing social
divisions, industrialisation and progress appeared to exacerbate them. Within
European nations, there developed a yawning gulf between the advancing middle
classes and the working class and rural poor, who, to middle class eyes at
least, seemed shackled to ignorance and poverty. An equally deep chasm had
opened up between European nations and those of Africa or Asia, which Europeans
increasingly thought of as incapable of civilisation.
Many prominent thinkers became convinced that certain types people were by
nature incapable of progressing beyond barbarism. They were naturally
inferior. The idea of race developed as a way of explaining the persistence
of social divisions in a society that had proclaimed a belief in equality.
From the racial viewpoint, inequality persisted because society was by nature
unequal. The destiny of different social groups was shaped by their intrinsic
properties.
Racial thinkers divided humanity into discrete groups, each with particular
properties, and the divisions between which seemingly being immutable and
unchanging. Racial ideology was the inevitable product of the persistence
of differences of rank, class and peoples in a society that had accepted the
concept of equality. People came to understand the world in racial terms because
there seemed to be no other way through which to make sense of the world around
them.
Key to this process was the emergence of the Romantic movement. The Romantics
rejected what they saw as the abstract nature of Enlightenment universalism,
and championed instead particularist accounts of human difference. They considered
every people to be unique, and that such uniqueness was expressed through
its volksgeist, the unchanging spirit of a people refined through history.
The idea of volksgeist became transformed into the concept of racial
make-up, an unchanging substance, the foundation of all physical appearance
and mental potential and the basis for division and difference within humankind.
At the roots of modern racism, therefore, lie Romantic visions of human differences.
Ironically, though, Romantic notions of human differences also lie at the
heart of contemporary visions of cultural pluralism. Following the experience
of Nazism, the Holocaust and the Final Solution, biological theories of human
differences became discredited. But while the biological arguments for racial
superiority were thrown into disrepute many of the assumptions of racial thinking
were maintained intact - in particular the belief that humanity can be divided
into discrete groups, that each groups should be considered in its own terms,
and that differences, not commonalities, shaped human interaction. These assumption,
however, were cast not in biological terms but in the language of cultural
pluralism.
Pluralism took the Romantic idea of human differences and refashioned in a
non-racist way. It effectively turned on its side the evolutionary ladder
of Victorian racial theory, conceiving of humanity as horizontally, rather
than vertically, segmented. Humanity was not arranged at different points
along an ever-rising vertical axis, as the racial scientists had believed,
but at different points along a stationary horizontal axis. Humanity was composed
of a multitude of peoples each inhabiting their own symbolic and cultural
worlds. Pluralism provided a vocabulary with which to articulate particularist
identities without having to refer to the discredited discourse of race. And
in the 60 years since the Second World War, it has become a key way of thinking
about human societies - especially for anti-racists.
What pluralism does is to disconnect the relationship between universalism
and equality. All people are equal - but only because every group is different.
As the sociologist and feminist Sonia Kruks put it in a recent book:
The demand is not for inclusion within the fold of 'universal humankind' on the basis of shared human attributes; nor is it for respect 'in spite of one's differences'. Rather, it what is demanded is respect for oneself as different.
Such 'identity politics' is clearly rooted in Romantic views of human difference.
And through such identity politics, the celebration of difference, which once
was at the heart of racial science, has become a key plank of the anti-racist
outlook. The result has been an increasing convergence in recent years between
anti-racist and race realist views.
On the one hand, race realists now portray themselves as pluralists. Charles
Murray and Richard Herrnstein, for instance, authors of the notorious The
Bell Curve, claim that they are simply making a case for 'conservative
multiculturalism':
It is possible to look ahead to a world in which the glorious hodgepodge of inequalities of ethnic groups - genetic and environmental, permanent and temporary - can be not only accepted but celebrated...
Each clan will add up its accomplishments using its own weighting system will encounter the world with confidence in its own worth and, most importantly, will be unconcerned about comparing its accomplishments, line by line with those of any other clan. This is wise ethnocentrism.
Or, as Sonia Kruks would put it, 'What is demanded is respect for oneself
as different.'
And on the other hand, anti-racists have increasingly begun to view cultural
identity in natural terms. You might have seen Motherland, the BBC
documentary last year in which three black Britons traced their genetic ancestry.
Bristol youth worker Beula McCalla was told that was told that her gentic
lineage traced back to the tiny island of Bioko, off the coast of Cameroon.
The next thing, she was off on a plane to be reunited with her long-lost relatives,
the Bubis. 'I've found who I am', she sobbed. 'I've found my home.'
Ten years ago, black identity might have been seen as cultural or political
expression. Now it's increasingly seen as genetic heritage, inextricably linking
race, culture and identity. According to Joseph Harker, former editor of the
Voice, Britain's leading black newspaper, genetics provides black people
with 'a route to a new identity', a reconnection with 'their own brothers
sisters and cousins' and the possibility of 'a whole new history and culture'.
Genetics cannot, of course, do any such thing. But it's not just black Britons
who nowseek their history and culture in their biological past. Jews, Icelanders,
Macedonians - everyone, it seems, is looking to genetics as the soil in which
to root their culture and sustain their identity.
Superficially, all this might seem like a throwback to nineteenth century
racial science. But it is very much a 21st century phenomenon. As societies
become more fragmented, as social bonds seem ever more fragile, and as social
emancipation more and more seems a mirage, so there is a desperate search
for meaning in ever-narrower and seemingly more foxed identities. And as the
sphere of politics visibly shrinks by the day, so people increasingly look
to science to answer the kinds of questions that science simply cannot answer.
And that is why I think we still continue to believe in race. It's an attempt
to find in the past and in science the certainties we can no longer find in
the present and in society.