Genetic anthropologist
Henry Harpending of the U. of Utah
explained that over the 40,000 or so years since
humans left Africa:
"’Human races are evolving away from each other,’
Harpending says. ‘Genes are evolving fast in Europe,
Asia, and Africa, but almost all of these are unique to
their continent of origin. We are getting less alike,
not merging into a single, mixed humanity.’ …
" ‘Our study denies the widely held assumption or belief
that modern humans … appeared 40,000 years ago, have not
changed since and that we are all pretty much the same.
We show that humans are changing relatively rapidly on a
scale of centuries to millennia, and that these changes
are different in
different continental groups."
“The increase in human population from millions to
billions in the last 10,000 years accelerated the rate
of evolution because ‘we were in new environments to
which we needed to adapt,’ Harpending adds. ‘And with a
larger population, more mutations occurred.’
So, it is a good time to step back and try to understand
the underlying concept of race. Here's a Frequently
Asked Questions [FAQ] list about how to think about
race. It's a non-technical introduction to this topic
that so confuses Americans.
Q. Why do you talk about race so much?
A. Most human beings talk about race a fair amount. I
write about it.
Q. Why do people care about race?
A. Why do people care about
who their relatives are? Maybe they should care,
maybe they shouldn't. I'm not here to
preach morality. But people do care, so it's
important to understand the implications.
Q. What's race all about?
A. Relatedness.
Race is about who is related to whom.
Q. Do you mean a race is a family?
A. Yes, an extended family. (To be precise, a
particular type of extended family, one that's more
coherent over time than the norm, a distinction I'll
explain below.)
Q. Race means family? I've never heard of such a thing!
A. It's remarkable how seldom this concept essential to
understanding how the world works is mentioned in the
press. Yet, in my Random House Webster's College Dictionary
,
the first definition of "race"
is:
"1. A group of persons related by common descent or
heredity."
Q. If races exist, then, pray tell, precisely how many
there are?
A. How many neighborhoods are there in the place where
you live?
For some purposes, an extremely simple breakdown into,
say, City vs. Suburbs is most useful. For other uses, an
extremely detailed set of neighborhood names is helpful:
e.g., "The proposed apartment complex will aggravate
the parking shortage in Northeastern West Hills."
Similarly, racial groups can be lumped into vast
continental-scale agglomerations or split as finely
as you like.
For instance, should New World Indians be considered a
separate race—or merely a subset of East Asians?
Every system of categorization runs into disputes
between
"lumpers" and "splitters." Whether
lumping or splitting is more appropriate depends upon
the situation.
Q. Isn't race just about skin color?
A. That's a simplistic verbal shorthand Americans use to
refer to ancestry. Nobody really acts as if they
believe race is synonymous with
skin color.
Q. What do you mean?
A. Consider the
golfer Vijay Singh
, who during 2004-2005 became the
only
man in this decade besides Tiger Woods to be the
number one ranked player in the world. Singh, who
was born in the Fiji Islands of Asian Indian descent, is
much darker in skin color than Woods.
Singh is
at least as dark as the average African-American.
Yet, nobody in America ever thinks of Singh as
black or African-American. There's an
enormous industry that
celebrates the triumphs of blacks in nontraditional
venues such as golf. But Singh's accomplishments
elicited minimal interest in the U.S.
A 2007
article, for example, asked where are all the black
golf champions who were expected to emerge in the wake
of Tiger Woods's first Masters championship in 1997. It
never mentions the blackest-skinned player on tour,
Singh … because we're not actually talking about skin
color when we use the word "black," we're talking
about
sub-Saharan African ancestry.
Q. Aren't we all related to each other?
A. Yes, that's why we're
"the human race."
Q. If we're all related to each other, how can one
person be more related to some people than to other
people?
A. How can you be more related to your mother than you
are to your aunt? Or to my mother?
Q. If races exist, how can somebody
belong to more than one race?
A. If extended families exist, how can you belong to
your mother's extended family and to your father's
extended family?
Q. How many races can you belong to?
A. How many extended families can you belong to?
Consider Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's children. Clearly,
they are part of the Schwarzenegger clan via their
father and grandfather. But they are also part of the
Jadrny extended family through
their father's mother. Yet, they also belong to the
well-known liberal Catholic
Shriver tribe through their mother,
Maria Shriver, daughter of
Sargent Shriver, the 1972 Democratic
Vice-Presidential candidate. And, they are,
famously, Kennedys, because their maternal grandmother
is
Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the sister of
the late President.
Q. So, everybody belongs to four extended families?
A. You could keep going beyond the four grandparents.
The Schwarzenegger kids, for instance, are also
Fitzgeralds, because they are the
great-great-grandchildren of
John F. "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, the mayor of
Boston.
Q. So, your family tree just goes on out to infinity?
A. No, it eventually turns increasingly in on itself, as
you can see it must from the basic arithmetic of
genealogy. This tendency to turn back in on itself is
the reason that racial identity exists.
Q. How does the math work?
Assume 25 years per each generation in your family tree.
Go back 10 generations to the 1750s, and you have 1024
ancestors.
Go back another 250 years to the 1500s and you have 1024
times 1024 slots in your family tree; call it a million.
Back to the 1250s and you have a billion openings. (Were
there even a billion people alive then?)
And back in the 1000s, 40 generations ago, you have a
trillion ancestors. Yet there definitely weren't a
trillion people alive then.
Q. So, where did all my ancestors come from?
A. They did double duty, to put it mildly.
Q. So my family tree doesn't extend outward forever?
A. At some point in the past, the number of unique
individuals in your family tree (as opposed to slots)
would start to get fewer in number, ultimately forming a
diamond-shaped rather than fan-shaped family tree.
Genealogists label this "pedigree
collapse."
Demographer
K.W. Wachtel estimated that an
Englishman born in 1947 would have had two million
unique ancestors living at the maximum point around 1200
AD, 750 years before. There'd be a billion open slots in
the family tree in 1200, so each real individual would
fill an average of 500 places.
Pedigree collapse would set in farther into the past
than 1200.
Q. Wait a minute! Are you saying my ancestors married
among themselves? So I'm inbred???
A. Yes. It's mathematically certain. There just weren't
enough unique individuals alive.
Q. Ooh, yuck!
A. I suspect that the
American distaste for thinking about inbreeding,
even when it's so distant and genetically benign as in
this English example, is one reason why our
understanding of relatedness and race is so deficient.
Q. What does this have to do with race?
A. Pedigree collapse reveals how the
biology of race is rooted in the
biology of family. We can deduce from the necessary
existence of pedigree collapse that while everybody is
related to everybody else in some fashion, it's more
genealogically significant to note that every person is
much more related to some people than to other
people. Even a Tiger Woods can identify himself as being
of
Thai, black, Chinese, white, and American Indian
descent, but not of, say,
Polynesian, South Asian, or
Australian aborigine origin.
Pedigree collapse is how extended families become racial
groups. A race is a particular kind of extended
family—one that is partly inbred. Thus it's socially
identifiable for longer than a simple extended family,
which, without inbreeding, disperses itself
exponentially.
Q. Can racial groups merge?
A. Over time, yes. Think of the term "Anglo-Saxon."
The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes intermarried until they
lost their separate identities. (The
Jutes even lost their name.)
Similarly, the official ideology of Mexico is that
whites and Indians have merged seamlessly into
La Raza Cosmica, "The Cosmic Race."
(African Mexicans
play the role of the forgotten Jutes.) The
reality is different, but the mestizaje
propaganda isn't wholly false.
Q. But race is just identity politics!
A. Well, there's
a reason that identity politics are a big deal.
However you feel about all the various kinds of identity
politics, you need to understand them.
People tend to organize politically around some aspects
of shared identity, but not around others. For example,
language and religion tend to be politically salient,
but not handedness. No politician fears the Lefthanders
Lobby, because
left-handedness is distributed too randomly
throughout the population.
Sex can be politically relevant, but it frequently turns
out to be less important than feminist activists hope.
As
Henry Kissinger supposedly said, "No one will
ever win the battle of the sexes; there's too much
fraternizing with the enemy."
Relatedness or race is typically the single most common
dimension along which people align themselves
politically.
Sharing
relatives gives people more reason to trust each
other—for instance,
Jared Diamond notes that when two strangers meet on
a lonely and lawless jungle path in New Guinea, they
immediately start a far-reaching discussion of who all
their relatives are, looking for overlap so they can be
more confident the other person won't kill them.
Similarly,
organized crime families typically have real
extended families as their nuclei because relatives can
trust each other more when outside the law.
Further, blood relatives are more likely to share other
potent "ethnic" identity markers, such as
language and religion.
Q. But, if we're all part of the human race, then why
don't we always act that way?
A. Because we're not, currently, under
alien attack. Throughout his Presidency, Ronald
Reagan, to the alarm of his less-imaginatively
insightful aides such as Colin Powell,
repeatedly pointed out that the differences between
the Superpowers would seem insignificant if Earth
was under assault by hostile flying saucers.
Reagan, for instance, told the UN in 1987:
"I occasionally think how quickly our differences
worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat
from outside this world."[Address
to the 42d Session of the United Nations General
Assembly in New York, New York]
But little green men are not threatening us at present,
so we compete against each other in the meantime.
And relatedness (i.e., race) is the most common
dimension along which people cooperate in order to more
effectively compete against other groups politically.
Q. Isn't race just a social construct?
A. Relatedness is the most real thing in the world:
mother, father, baby.
Q. But, don't different societies have different rules
about who is considered to be related to whom?
A. Yes. Indeed, every culture comes up with a way to
deal with the exponential unwieldiness of family trees.
For many purposes of daily life, you have too many
relatives. The sheer numbers of ancestors, distant
cousins, and potential descendents you have expand out
beyond any manageable boundaries. The amount of
relatives you'll send a Christmas card to might be
larger than the number you'll volunteer to cook
Thanksgiving dinner for, but, still, there's got to be
an end to everything.
Many cultures have devised rules to limit who counts as
a relative for the purposes of, say, inheritance.
English aristocratic families didn't want their land
holdings divided up into unimpressive and inefficient
parcels, so they followed the rule of
primogeniture, passing the claim to be of noble
blood down through the first-born son, with latter-borns
falling out of the aristocracy within two generations.
For instance, Mr.
Winston Churchill was the first-born son of Lord
Randolph Churchill, who was the
second-born son of the
Duke of Marlborough. That seems awfully
aristocratic to us plebian Americans, but by English
law, he wasn't a peer because his father wasn't
first-born. And thus, to Winston's political benefit,
his parliamentary career was spent in the House of
Commons rather than the House of Lords.
The Chinese treated sons more equitably, but almost
completely ignored daughters.
In contrast to these attempts to nominally define down
the putative number of relations, many Middle Eastern
cultures have come up with an actual biological solution
(of sorts) to reduce the number of relatives:
cousin marriage. In Iraq,
half of all married couples are first or second
cousins.
Q. Why?
A. One reason is this: If you marry your daughter off to
your brother's son, then your grandchildren/heirs will
also be your brother's grandchildren/heirs. So, there is
less cause for strife among brothers. Cousin marriage
helps make family loyalties especially strong in Iraq,
to the detriment of national loyalties.
Q. Do you ever want more relatives?
A. For many political struggles, the more the merrier.
Ibn Saud, who founded Saudi Arabia in the 1920s,
consolidated his victory over other desert chieftains by
marrying
22 women, typically the daughters of his
former rivals. Thus, today's vast Saudi ruling
family represents the intermixing of the tribes, which
has helped it survive in power for 80 years.
On the other hand, the wealthy
Syrian Jews of Brooklyn, with few political threats
hanging over them here in America, don't need blood
relations with other power centers, so the community
fiercely ostracizes anyone who marries outside it.
Or, political entrepreneurs can attempt to widen or
narrow their followers' working definition of who their
relatives are by rhetorical means. For example, in the
1960s, black leaders encouraged African-Americans to
call each other "brother" and "sister" to
build solidarity.
Q. In America, wasn't there a "one-drop rule" for
determining if one is a minority?
A. For blacks, yes: for American Indians, no. Herbert
Hoover's VP,
Charles Curtis, was famous for being 1/8th Kaw
Indian. Being a little bit Indian added glamour to his
image.
Indian nations have the right to set ancestry minimums
(generally, at least 1/4th) required for legal
membership in the tribe, and they often police
membership with a vengeance.
Q. Isn't all this outdated?
A. Both blacks and Indians are standing by the
traditional definitions, because it's in their
interests.
Ever since Congress allowed Indian nations to each own
one casino in the late 1980s, many tribes have been
expelling racially marginal members to
increase the slice of the pie for the more
pure-blooded remainder. That's because the main benefit
of belonging to a tribe—the rake-off from a single
casino—is finite.
In contrast, black and Hispanic organizations have
backed broad, inclusive definitions of who is black or
Hispanic because the rake-off from being black or
Hispanic—affirmative
action quotas—is indefinite in magnitude. The larger
the percentage of the population, the larger the quota,
and the larger the number of voters who are
beneficiaries and thus supporters.
Q. So cultures change their definitions of who deserves
to be a relative?
A. Not just cultures, but individuals change their
definitions to fit their needs at the moment.
For example, right before the Battle of Agincourt, King
Henry V needed all the loyal relatives, real or
exaggerated, he could get, so
Shakespeare has him address the English army:
"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother".
On the other hand, once the bloodshed was over, King
Henry probably wasn't inclined to let his old yeomen
archers come over and hang around the palace whenever
they liked as if they were his actual brothers.
Q. So, leaders can persuade their followers to see
themselves as more or less closely related?
A. Yes, but the more they follow existing genealogical
fault lines, the more likely they are to succeed.
Q. What's an ethnic group?
A. The Census Bureau draws a sharp distinction between
race and ethnicity, stating that individuals of Hispanic
ethnicity can be of any race. The way the federal
government uses the terms can be formalized like this:
