What Are We Talking about When We Talk About “Race”?
Marshall H Segall
INTRODUCTION
“Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” This is the title, translated into English, of Gauguin’s masterpiece painted in Tahiti in 1897. Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
Religious answers to these questions, whether pagan, Judeo-Christian, Islamic, Hindu, or other, have influenced our thinking for millennia. Challenging alternatives, offered by independent thinkers over many centuries who dared to doubt religious authorities, have consistently been met with great resistance. Questioning dogma has never been an easy thing to do.
Thus, the Church and Galileo went head-to-head on the location of the earth in relation to the sun, with the Church hanging on to its position for centuries before acknowledging that the great scientist was right.
Today, early in the 21st century, science has given us a very dramatic pair of answers to the first two of Gauguin’s questions, “Where do we come from?” and “What are we?”
The answers constitute irrefutable, replicable, empirical facts. They result from the astonishing achievement in 2001 whereby biologists delineated the human genome.
Combining the findings on the DNA make-up of our species’ genome with anthropological data detailing the gradual emergence of artifacts that denote geographically dispersed cultural differences, and linguistic evidence on relationships among languages, the history of human migration has become crystal clear. While new data are likely to force minor refinements in the story of our ancestors’ migrations, the biological and social sciences alike now recognize that the first fully human ancestors of all of us originated in Africa about 160,000 years ago. Doesn’t that do it for Gauguin’s first question, “Where do we come from?” Haven’t we, all of us, … tracing our ancestry back to its roots … come from Africa?
As for his second question, “What are we?”.... The obvious answer has to be that we constitute a single species that, scientifically speaking, cannot be (and has, in fact, never been) divided into separate “races”. It is incontrovertible that there are no separate “races”.
For that reason, I have for some years been urging that the word “race”, whenever used to refer to human population groups, be encased in quotation marks, as I have so far in this book and do so do throughout it, including in its title.
That this is a significant departure from standard practice, not only in the popular culture but even in the social sciences, is demonstrated most tellingly, and embarrassingly so, in my own 1979 textbook “Cross-Cultural Psychology: Human Behavior in Global Perspective”. In it, I used the word “race” several times to designate different cultural groups while discussing
differences between groups in susceptibility to visual illusions and did not employ quotation marks. Moreover, in other sections of the book, in discussions of ethnic and racial discrimination, I failed to note that there were no such things as separate “races” in the biological sense of that term.
Why not? You might well ask! The simple fact is that it hadn’t occur to many of us who were discussing intergroup relations in the 1970s, or the 1980s, or even well into the 21st century, that we were using a cultural construct masquerading as a biological reality.
But to get back to the only correct answer to Gauguin’s second question, we are one species, indivisible. That’s it in a nutshell!
You would think we could just leave it at that. So can we? I’m afraid not. Why is it so difficult for us to get it ..the truth,
that is … that biologically speaking, there are no human Araces@ As surprising as it may be, no one can any longer validly assert that human beings fall into a small number of discrete groupings called Araces@. On April 16, 2001, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in its journal Science (almost simultaneously with the British journal Nature) published, as its cover story, the initial findings of the Human Genome Research Project. These much heralded scientific findings made it abundantly clear that all human beings alive today, wherever we live, and whatever we look like, are so closely related that we can=t possibly be divided from each other into Araces@. It is now impossible for any well informed person to continue to believe that human beings belong to three, five, seven, or, for that matter, any number of separate biological races. Rather, we must all be thought of as members of the same single biological grouping, a unified species known as Homo sapiens sapiens, or, simply put, the human race. As we shall see in detail in Chapter I, the Human Genome Project completed in 2001 confirmed that we are a single species, one that evolved from our hominid ancestors. Our earliest truly human ancestors originated in Africa and subsequently some of their descendants began a series of migrations into all inhabitable parts of the Earth that continues to this day. These scientific findings regarding our origins, our migrations, and the processes whereby we developed diverse physical and psychological characteristics in different parts of the world, should have made the concept of separate “races” as outmoded as the notion that the world is flat, or that the sun revolves around the earth.
But just as those erroneous popular beliefs took a very long time to be replaced by the astronomical facts (a spherical earth, revolving around the sun) in everyday understanding, the fact that our diversity has nothing to do with “races” has yet to penetrate most people’s awareness. Why? Because most of us find these scientific facts incompatible with the social world as we know it to be. It seems somehow un-natural not to see “races” …. (“White”, “Black”, and otherwise) … when our own eyes seem to show them to us. Furthermore, their putative existence is regularly confirmed by what we hear, read, and learn from trusted sources, like our parents, our teachers, our media, and even our government, as when it asks us to state our “race” on the census. The census is such an important influence on our beliefs about “race” that we will devote a later chapter to this phenomenon.
Most of what most of us “know” could not have been learned from direct experience. Anything that happened before we
were born, or occurred in places where we have never even visited, can come to us only from what we are told. We learn from accounts, usually in words, sometimes in pictures, that others have framed for us. Thus, we learn mostly from what we are told, by journalists, writers, photographers, film-makers, novelists, and playwrights. We learn from our parents, our teachers and our preachers, some still alive, some long gone, most of whom may have endeavored to get it right, but nevertheless got it wrong.
We believe, for the most part, what we have been taught to believe. So, the words that have long been used to talk about the diverse human groups whom we “know” determine what we think we know about them. But we know them only as filtered through those words. Our teachers are in an exalted position, since their words and the meanings conveyed by them, shape our perceptions of the world. Indeed, their teachings become our way of understanding the world.
So, it seems virtually impossible at this moment in our history to deny the social, cultural, and psychological reality of the concept of “race” as used daily in American discourse. In this
sense, the word “race” refers to diverse groups who identify their own group and others in a “racial” way. We all have a “racial identity”, either self-defined or defined by others, and the terminology that is most often used to refer to those identities in the US are predominately the color words, “black” and “white”. Of course there are other terms in use, like Asian (a geographic designation), Hispanic (a linguistic designation), Native American
(an erroneous label that ignores the fact that the people found here by European colonizers were relatively recent migrants from Asia), but the great divide in America is the one between “white” and “black” and that one is rooted in the notion of “racial” origin.
It is a divide that may be crossed, of course, but with great difficulty. And what crossing gets done is mostly out of “black” into “white”, for the social and financial benefits that accrue.
More about “the great divide” in America as well as in other parts of the world can be found in Chapter III.
Acceptance of innovative views of the nature of humankind, whether hinted at by iconoclastic artists like Gauguin or definitively revealed by scientists committed to uncovering truths that might fly in the face of authority and tradition, has never been easy.
If the revelation of April, 2001 was preceded by
many promising, albeit ineffective, false starts, it also did not, more seriously, immediately imprint itself on mass consciousness. Even in America, with its wide-reaching mass
media capable of spreading the word, the findings reported in Science, on that albeit auspicious date in 2001, did not transform the world.
The dramatic insight that human diversity could not be attributed to Araces@ failed to capture any significant portion of
the populace in the days or weeks following the publication of the Human Genome Project. Long after its publication the idea of the end of Araces@ has not yet reached more than a tiny portion of the population, regardless of level of education, regardless of occupation, even regardless of ideology. It may take years for this to happen, but we must fervently hope not, if at all we wish to see the end of the terrible damage we have done, and continue to do, to each other because of the tenacity of the concept of Araces@.
Why hasn=t this new understanding of the meaninglessness of Arace@ penetrated popular awareness? Just think about other profoundly revolutionary ideas in human history. Did they have magic moments when they burst into public consciousness? Not likely. For no sea change in conception of our world, can we determine the precise moment it occurred. Each dramatic departure from ages-old misunderstanding and an embrace of new-found wisdom rested on so many underpinnings, it was quite arbitrary for
historians to choose one step as the crucial one. Usually, the choice was the result of some conventional assignment, with the birthdates of astounding new insights accepted haltingly, via a gradual convergence among historians. In hindsight, certain Akey@ discoveries come to define the boundaries that set new eras apart from earlier times. But the boundaries between eras are imposed. Thus, that the earth revolve
around the sun, rather than vice versa, or that the earth is a sphere and not flat, were revelations that involved decades of sometimes accidental C sometimes sought-after --- discoveries and careful thinking about them. In small steps, we moved away from nearly universally shared misconceptions to a gradual acceptance, based on initially difficult to understand evidence, that after all, in most
respects, our parents and grandparents had gotten it dead wrong.
Scholars have long noted the difficulties of infusing popular thought with scientific fact. Debates between scientists and skeptical laypersons tend to be tilted in favor of the latter because the two camps follow different rules of argument; the scientist must perform systematic and replicable analyses, while the layperson (or the pseudo-journalists on talk radio) can say anything that captures popular attention, however outlandish. Then the onus shifts to the journalists who must learn to make choices between reasoned analyses on the one hand and enticingly quotable propaganda on the other, and not give equal time to both, in a misguided attempt to be “objective” by providing so-called “balanced” reporting.
Consistent with this problem, it is a daunting task to convince most people that “races” in the biological sense don’t exist. To try to demolish the myth of “races” is the reason this book has been written. Its purpose is to displace the mythology with valid
information, to trump the almost universally-shared errors that effectively place blinders on our perceptions of who “we” and who “they” are.
Viewing humankind as enclosed in distinct, unmixable groups, and the relations between them inherently suspicious, competitive, and hostile, prevails nearly everywhere….. Christians vs. Moslems, Shiite vs. Sunni, Protestant vs. Catholic, Walloons vs. Flemish, “Whites” vs. “Blacks”, Serbs vs. Croats, and “Us” vs. “Them” ad nauseum.
The consequences of such mutually antagonistic perceptions are unbearable. Genocides, jihads, crusades, guerrilla wars, horrifying acts of terrorism, and other forms of internecine violence, all rooted in racism, make the change imperative. And the most serious single impediment to that change is the continued pervasiveness of the illusion of “race.”
Everyone’s Family Tree
On February 12, 2001, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in its journal Science published, as its cover story, the initial findings of the Human Genome Research Project, making it abundantly clear that all human beings alive today, wherever we live, and whatever we look like, are so closely related that we can’t possibly be divided from each other into “races”.
Historians may someday designate this early 21st century date a watershed, since it marked the start of a mind-boggling reconsideration of our understanding of our selves. This new view
of us has profound social, political, economic, and psychological implications. Someday, then, the date may matter to historians even more than the “discovery” of America in 1492, celebrating “Genome Day” as today we celebrate Columbus Day.
In the issue of Science containing the Human Genome sequence, Svante Paabo even suggested that “For the general public .... [its] publication ... is likely to be greeted with the same awestruck feeling that accompanied the landing of the first human on the moon and the detonation of the first atomic bomb.”
Sorry! Not yet. The 2001 scientific findings have yet to permeate public consciousness. The revelations which should have sounded the death-knell to the notion of “races” have hardly penetrated most people’s radar.
This is so despite the fact that the revelation of the unity of our species C the oneness of humankind across the globe C did not occur in a flash, as in a AEureka!@ moment. There were, over several prior decades, many good reasons to be suspicious of the notion of human Araces@, and those suspicions were often eloquently, if prematurely, expressed by many natural and social scientists.
Melville Herskovits, the founder of America’s first African Studies program is perhaps best known for his classic book, The Myth of the Negro Past, (1941) in which he pointed out how many features of African-American culture were rooted in African cultures. He noted how these cultural features brought over from Africa even survived slavery. For our present purposes, it is most important to note that Herskovits emphasized that race was not a
biological phenomenon, but rather a sociological concept; his assertion of this fact, very early in his own career at Northwestern University, which began in 1927, was among the first by an American academic social scientist.
His influence was widespread, but I note here incidentally his influence on me. In 1948, coincident with my arrival at Northwestern as a member of the freshman class, he founded America’s first African Studies Program, with grants from the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford foundation.
In 1952, an international team of eminent social scientists, largely under the direction of the American professor M.F. Ashley-Montague, drafted, in Paris, the highly influential UNESCO document entitled The Race Concept: The Results of an Inquiry. In that document, there appeared the clear statement, “Scientists are generally agreed that all men living today belong to a single species, Homo sapiens, and are derived from a common stock, even though there is some dispute as to when and how different human groups diverged from this common stock.”
Somewhat less clear us the following assertion: “The concept of race is unanimously regarded by anthropologists as a classificatory device providing a zoological frame within which the various groups of mankind may be arranged and by means of which studies of evolutionary processes can be facilitated. In its anthropological sense, the word “race” should be reserved for groups of mankind possessing well-developed and primarily heritable physical differences from other groups. Many populatio.ns can be so classified but, because of the complexity of human history, there are also many populations which cannot easily be fitted into a racial classification.”
The document further noted, “National, religious, geographical, linguistic and cultural groups do not necessarily
coincide with racial groups; and the cultural traits of such groups have no demonstrated connexion with racial traits. Americans are not a race, nor are Frenchmen, nor Germans; nor ipso facto is anyother national group. Muslims and Jews are no more races than are Roman Catholics and Protestants; nor are people who live in Iceland or Britain or India, or who speak English or any other language, or who are culturally Turkish or Chinese and the like, thereby describable as races. The use of the term “race” in speaking of such groups may be a serious error, but it is one which is habitually committed.”
A major concern of the UNESCO document was less the concept “race” per se than the issue of so called racial differences, primarily with respect to intellectual (or “mental”) capacity. With
regard to this issue, the UNESCO document stated, “With respect to most, if not all, measurable characters, the differences among individuals belonging to the same race are greater than the differences that occur between the observed averages for two or more races within the same major group. … Studies within asingle race have shown that both innate capacity and environmental opportunity determine the results of tests of intelligence and temperament, though their relative importance is disputed.”
Even though at the time this document was issued, the concept of “race” was still prevalent, and used without quotation marks around it, the statements in the document about “race” clearly signalled an awareness that popular undestanding of the role of “race” in human diversity differed from the developing
views of the the scientific community. Some important insights into what we would later come to understand about “race” arehinted at when it is noted, “ it has never been possible to separate members of two groups on the basis of mental capacity, as they can often be separated on a basis of religion, skin colour, hair form or language.”
Before leaving this UNESCO document, let us note two final observations made in it. “Some biological differences between human beings within a single race may be as great as, or greater than, the same biological differences between races.” And “ There is no evidence that race mixture produces disadvantageous results
from a biological point of view. The social results of race mixture, whether for good or ill, can generally be traced to social factors. Indeed, the notion that there is a worldwide oneness to humankind did not come right out of the blue. Even non-scientists, but prominent and notable public figures asserted it.
Thus, in 1997, Hillary Clinton, following a visit to the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania as first-lady of the United States, said, “it became clear to me ...that we —black, white, brown, of every religion, of every corner of the globe – come from the same place. We share a common home. We are part of a larger family. If we stop for a minute to think about what we have learned about the origins of mankind, we know that we come from Africa.”
Human migrations over the past 150,000 years.
While many of the early human beings stayed more or less put, others, from earliest human history onward, moved. As the first migrants moved out of Eastern Africa, they were followed by other waves of migrants, some of whom joined earlier established settlements within which they mated. And some moved farther, to places never before occupied by their fellows, where they founded new settlements. Others followed later and, of course, some of them mated with the folks they found there. (Contrary to the teachings of the nineteenth-century scientific racists, Amiscegenation A was the norm, not an aberration.)
Over these many thousands of years, the migrations extended well beyond Africa, into Europe, into Asia, across a land bridge to the Americas, down to Australia, until our ancestors were practically everywhere on Earth.
There is much complexity in the details of human migration; it suffices to say that by the eighteenth century, human beings, all descended from our African ancestors, could be found in every inhabitable part of the globe. Be that as it may, the most important point is that there was only one place of origin for all of
us…Africa… wherever we may live now and whatever we may look like now.
Contemporary migrations may not extend the range of human habitation but they mix us up more than ever before in new and complex ways, making us all richer for our increased diversity.
To track the intricacies of those migrations, we now have available the family-tree-tracing miracle of DNA sampling.
However useful the notion of distinct races may be when biologists apply it to finches and other birds, or to spaniels and other dogs, it is of no good use when applied to humans. It is of dubious value even when used for birds and dogs.
As an undergraduate, I had little contact with the ASP, but years later, beginning in 1955, when I returned to Northwestern as a graduate student, we were to become colleagues, working together on a cross-cultural study conducted primarily in several African settings. Moreover, at the beginnings of my own research forays into Africa, my research was also supported by Carnegie and Ford. And later, in 1966, I was recruited to the Program of Eastern African Studies at Syracuse University, where I remained until my retirement in 1998.
