These days, many people say that race is largely a social construct; while it may have a place in describing the population genetics of some species, is not particularly applicable to humans. I’m one of those people. The race concept is generally inapplicable or at best misleading when used as it often is with our species. This is why race should be abandoned in favor of other ways of describing human variation.
At the same time, there are political, social, and pedagogical reasons to put aside the race concept. Race is not that useful of a concept to begin with, and beyond that it has numerous political and social drawbacks. Pedagogically, race interferes with the understanding of variation. Race is at best a model that has some utility some of the time … like the hydraulic theory of electricity (where voltage = the amount of water; resistance = the smallness of the pipe the water flows through; and amperage = the speed of the flow). These limited concepts may be good for explaining certain things or organizing some data in certain ways, but once you step a short distance away from those limited areas, the model is more likely to interfere rather than assist in further attempts at understanding.
Here, I’d like to explore the downside of the race concept and briefly examine why so many informed and intelligent people seem to want to hang onto race as a way of classifying their fellow humans.
A definition of the race concept
A working definition of the race concept would be helpful. People can (and will, I’m sure) argue with this definition, but I believe it is reasonable and accurate, if also a bit informal. The elements in this definition are key to the utility of the concept where it is applied, and at the same time problematic with respect to the validity of races as biological entities.
Races are the same as varieties (a term usually used for plants) and subspecies (a term usually used for animals). Individuals of a given subspecies or variety generally breed true, but can breed with other subspecies or varieties.
A species that can be divided into races demonstrates two additional features without which the term ‘race’ is really not applicable. First, there are usually distinct boundaries between the races. These boundaries must apply to the features that are used to define the racial differences (which may themselves vary by race … the different races need not be distinguished by variations in the same exact set of features) and we do not expect the boundaries to be perfect. Indeed, among the members of a given species, some of the boundaries may be outright vague. But if there are no or almost no clear boundaries, there are no races.
The second feature that technically need not be true but almost always applies is that there should be some correlation between traits. In other words, if you take one trait and use it to define races, then there should be another trait that, if races are defined on its basis, you get a very similar set of races. And there should typically be several such traits that all, if analyzed independently, define almost the same exact set of races. An exception to this is where races can be arguably defined on the basis of a single trait. Were this to be the case, then obviously there could be no correlation.
Generally speaking, all of this is set in a geographical context. Genetic boundaries (between races) are also usually geographical boundaries. Indeed, once causes the other.
Without distinctions and boundaries, the race concept cannot apply to a given species. Species with observable geographical differences in one or more traits may be better described as having clinal variation. Without correlation among traits, the race concept has none of its usual utility, whereby we place individuals into categories and then predict invisible traits (like the likelihood of biting for dog breeds, or the likelihood of having a certain level of intelligence for human races).
The failure of the race concept
One of the reasons I believe the race concept should not be applied to humans is that it has essentially failed to do what it is supposed to do.
Most human traits vary in a clinal way; they are not grouped into distinct populations with clear boundaries. Oh, boundaries do exist, but they have three characteristics that make them irrelevant.
First, they are usually one-sided boundaries. If I put up a fence around my house to keep the dog in, it must be a continuous fence. If I put a fence along only one property line, that may be a very impressive fence, it may be a fence that the dog cannot get across, it may be a true barrier. But the openness of the rest of the property means that there is not a fenced-in area restricting the dog. Most, probably all, racial barriers are visible in only one part of the range of a particular population.
Second, they are not really boundaries most of the time. They are temporary contrasts that emerge because of the movement of people — but that immediately, or shortly, begin to meld. Even as we assert the reality of the boundaries, measure the boundaries, use the boundaries for medical, social, economic, and political purposes, people on both sides of the boundaries are busy doing the horizontal tango and making babies that sillify the boundaries by the very existence of these babies.
Third, and closely related, the conditions that cause a particular boundary to form are often rapidly changing, at least when considered at evolutionary time scales.
The success of the race concept
The race concept has been very successful in its many nefarious applications, but this is not what I wish to speak about here. Rather, I want to acknowledge that a concept that divides humans into a particular set of groups in a useful way might be, well, useful and not such a bad thing. The fact that medical researchers use race to divide subjects, and find differences between races, and that these differences are important to know about, is important, even if it does not validate the races. What it means is that an unworkable race concept works sometimes, even if the races themselves don’t exist. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to acknowledge that even though races don’t really exist and many, if not most, applications of the race concept are obnoxious, it may be that its use is not entirely inappropriate all the time.
I will argue, however, that the down side of the use of race requires its abolition among scientists. Since race is usually not a biologically useful concept for humans (or many other species), and is never a truly valid concept, it is difficult to justify its use given the negative political and social consequences it carries.
A moving target among scientists
Race often seems to be a moving target among scientists who, for whatever reason, want to keep the idea in play. People will use race to mean, quite clearly, that humans can be grouped into a small number of fixed entities (the five or six usual races) but when challenged, quickly admit that there may well be hundreds of races. The same individuals will just as quickly fall back to the usual simplistic black-white-red-whatever distinctions that almost all applications of the race concept require. This is usually an exercise in denial of the invalidity of the concept despite abundant evidence.
I think there are three common reasons why some scientists want to keep the race concept alive. One is that a particular scientist happens to think that race is a valid and useful designator for humans. These individuals believe that race works for humans, that all humans can be placed into racial categories, and that these categories (determined by a select number of visible or measurable traits) then allow us to make reasonably accurate (for biology) predictions about traits that are not so easily seen. I have found that the scientists who have this belief are usually not biological scientists or if so, are not versed in the relevant data for humans, although there are some notable exceptions.
The second reason a scientist might struggle to keep the race concept alive is that while they know it is not accurate, they still find it somewhat useful in limited circumstances and do not realize the negative consequences of what they are doing. These are almost always older white males who have never themselves suffered the consequences of race-based thinking even if they have a reasonably good idea of what racism is all about (and do not consider themselves racists). These individuals are often not particularly political in any way. They are often academics who got tenure in the 1960s or 1970s (when they were still giving out tenure to people with Master’s degrees, desperate as they were to fill the growing number of teaching slots in U.S. universities). This means that their salaries are pretty good today, they own a house that has gone through the roof in value having passed through at least two real estate booms, have their retirement all set. In other words, not only do these individuals not ‘get it’ when it comes to race because they are not ever the object of racism, but they don’t ‘get it’ in terms of need or economic insecurity more generally. Such individuals could of course be more sensitive to the world around them than this, but they simply have not ended up in that place. And I think this group of people is relatively rare.
Much more common are scientists who totally understand what race is as a biological concept, totally understand why it is not a widely useful concept for humans, totally understand that there are a limited number of situations in which race can be used as a sort of shorthand, but are sufficiently annoyed by ‘political correctness’ to stick with the race concept mainly for the purpose of sticking it to their postmodern la la chichi colleagues down the hall in the Cultural Anthropology and Humanities departments.
This, I totally get. If Race were a harmless concept, I might jump on that bandwagon just for fun now and then. But it is not a harmless concept. And no, I’m not interested in the argument that the harmfulness or harmlessness of a concept in science is irrelevant to its truth. It has already been pretty well established that race is a lousy concept for use with humans for scientific reasons. Clearly, adherence to the race concept in this third group is purely political, yet this is the group from which we most often hear the obverse accusation: “You’re denying race for political reasons … how dastardly and unscientific of you.”
Race as the innocent default position
Among non-scientists in Western culture, race is often the default position when observing human variation. It is probably not an accident that modern racism is very much shaped by Renaissance and post-Renaissance concepts of human variation and classification. This is the world in which those who were engaged in grand intellectual works such as the collection and classification of all living things were busy discovering new races as a result of global exploration. The clear and dramatic boundaries defining these new races that were so apparent in those days were the product of geographical discontinuity arising from the nature of discovery of new lands by sea travel, accented by dramatic cultural differences among groups. Those were the days in which you could draw a picture of a headless humanoid with a giant eye in its chest on some remote part of a map, and the people you would eventually sell the map to (Frenchmen, Englishmen, etc.) would think “Oh, what a strange people live there….” without skipping a beat.
Well, as Western society developed … including western classism, colonialism, slavery, western science (and classification), and western real politics … race was easily and almost necessarily incorporated in the model of how things work, at every level. This was to become especially true in 19th century and later America, where slavery and Jim Crow became a pretty straight-forward black- and-white matter, and the distinction between blacks and whites needed to be more than skin deep in order to justify unthinkably horrific social injustices in the face of increasingly intense attention to both democratic and humanistic values.
And so now race is part of the normal way of thinking among westerners. I cannot tell you how many times I am challenged to disprove the existence of races. This is, of course, utterly opposite of the nature of reality. If we look across mammals in general, we see races (subspecies) in many cases, but in many other cases, not. Moreover, where races are used to divide mammals (or birds), these are sloppy, poorly behaved categories that are used (often for historical reasons) out of convenience, with everyone knowing they are not particularly valid. In other words, we don’t really expect race or subspecies to be a very useful concept generally … so why is the burden on me (or anyone else) to prove that it does not apply to humans? The reason for this frequent request is that the normal average western person begins with this belief and must be talked out of it, much like a religious person begins with faith-based concepts or the poorly taught student begins with concepts like “cold is a thing” or that cannon balls fly in an asymmetric arc and so on.
Race as the politically motivated default position
It hardly need be noted that the race concept has great utility in maintaining the status quo in power relationships and in managing and often deepening economic disparity. This is the kind of thing that everyone in a modern progressive society is against. Yet, when it happens, some people benefit. For this reason it is not surprising to find that the race concept remains as part of the conversation. All I really want to point out here is that the conversation about race has advanced to a point in our society where it is no longer possible to assume that the status quo is harmless. The failure to actively push back against the concept is the same thing, in this day and age, as advancing it. This is something that those scientists in two out of the three categories I loosely defined above have to understand. And act on. Those in the other category will eventually go away.
Race as a shortcut derails logical thinking
People will still want to use race terms for certain perfectly noble and legitimate reasons. I remember siting at the desk of a bank loan officer, trying to borrow a large amount of money, and he said to me “OK, I’ve got to ask you the following but you can refuse to answer. ‘What is your race?’ Now, the reason I’m asking you this is so that we can keep track of when people like you discriminate against people like me (he was black). But of course, in this case, I’m the banker and you’re not. So that means anything can happen.” … staring at each other for a moment … “OK, I’m putting you down as white.”
Pharmaceutical research is probably better research if ‘race’ (or something like it) is recorded, affirmative action has to have something to work with, and doctors would do well to use ‘racial’ indicators when diagnosing ill patients. But the fact that race, as a short cut, can and probably should be used in these areas does not legitimize the concept of race. The races are still not there.
Compare the white person and the black person in the doctor’s office. These two people are from the same species, but from different parts of that species’ geographical distribution. If you go back in time and find Ollie Svenson’s great great great … great grandparents hometown in Sweden, and from there walk at a normal pace to Kiesha Jackson’s great great great … great grandparents hometown in northern Angola, where exactly will be the boundary between these two races .. the white race and the black race (or the European and African, or whatever) be? There won’t be one. Which set of alleles are present in, say, 80 percent of the other members of Kiesha’s race but virtually absent for all of Ollie’s race? Really, honestly, which are the traits that you can’t see when you walk into that waiting room that you can reliably and regularly predict based on looking at Ollie’s and Kiesha’s skin color?
Yes, sitting there in the waiting room, these two folks look like examples of two distinct races. But they are not. In a society made up of end points … end points of long journeys, of slavery, of colonialism, of mass migration … race seems to work, but this is an illusion. A temporarily useful illusion, perhaps, but also an insidious and terribly destructive illusion. I, for one, am rather tired of hearing about how race is such a useful concept when it is in fact one of the most damaging concepts that we humans have ever conceptualized, and at the same time, scientifically misleading and of only minimal utility.
Moreover, the degree to which Ollie and Kiesha could be served (or not) by placing them in categories that kinda work under the present circumstances is diminishing with every year in this country. Black people are no longer almost exclusively the descendants of West African and west Central African slaves. White people are no longer mainly the descendants of Germans, Irish, and Italians. Asian people are no longer mainly the descendants of Chinese and some Japanese people. The Somalis and Ethiopians, the Russians and Serbians, the Hmong and the Vietnamese have ruined racism for everyone!!!!
Populations and Demes: More of the same or proper replacements?
In recent years, some scientists have started to use other terms to replace “race,” such as “population” or “deme” or some other term. It is more correct to call a group of people a population if they are a population than to call them a race. However, this is often not what is being done. In many cases, these other words are being substituted for race as a mere replacement of lexicon with no replacement of the faulty concept. In fact, I hear these terms being served up with a side dish of snark more often than not. And every time I hear that, I am reminded of the once infamous but now forgotten Vaughn Meter, an impressionist and comedian of the 1960s, doing his routine parodying a speech pathologist who is trying to teach Lyndon Johnson to properly say the word “Negro.”
“Nee-grow” slowly intones the speech pathologist.
“Nig-rah” quickly replies the President of the United States.
“No, no, that is too much like that other word. Let’s try again … Neee (pause) Grow.”
“Nig-rah” quickly replies the President of the United States.
And so on. And so forth.
Until eventually all the people who religiously believe in the race concept have joined Vaughn Meter in the Annals of Obscurity.