The Race Myth: Why We Pretend Race Exists in America - Softcover

Graves, Joseph

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0452286581 ISBN 13: 9780452286580

Publisher: Plume, 2005

Synopsis

“Graves’ integration of science and objective analysis with popular biological assumptions of race makes this an enlightening and provocative work.”—Booklist

DOES RACE AS WE KNOW IT REALLY EXIST?

Preeminent evolutionary biologist Joseph Graves proves once and for all that it doesn’t. Through accessible and compelling language, he makes the provocative argument that science cannot account for the radical categories used to classify people, and debunks ancient race-related fallacies that are still held as fact, from damaging medical profiles to misconceptions about sports. He explains why defining race according to skin tone or eye shape is woefully inaccurate, and how making assumptions based on these false categories regarding IQ, behavior, or predisposition to disease has devastating effects.

Demonstrating that racial distinctions are in fact social inventions, not biological truths, The Race Myth brings much-needed, sound science to one of America’s most emotionally charged debates.

About this title

About the Author:

Joseph L. Graves Jr. is one of the world’s leading evolutionary biologists. He is currently Professor & Associate Dean for Research at the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering (JSNN) of North Carolina A&T State University and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He has appeared in multiple documentaries about race and his opinions have appeared in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. He is also the author of The Emperor’s New Clothes.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Introduction:
The Problem, Simply Stated

The traditional concept of race as a biological fact is a myth. I am going to show you that nearly everything you think you know about race is a social construct. You donÆt have to be a racist to be wrong about what race is. That doesnÆt make the effects of a belief in race any less damaging, or the situation any less perilous. Most Americans still believe in the concept of race the way they believe in the law of gravityùthey believe in it without even knowing what it is they believe in.

If you ask the average American college student if biological races exist, most will say yes. In my classes, when I asked students to identify their own race, most couldnÆt be any more specific than a vague catchall like ôwhite.ö They couldnÆt say what the criteria are for membership in a racial group, and most believed that black, white, Asian, Hispanic, and American Indian are biological races. Some of them thought that every country has produced its own biological race.

A few students responded that races had existed since the beginning of time. I asked them if they meant 1980, when the universe began for them, or 19 billion years ago, in the big bang? Several had to think about it for a while. Some thought races had existed since the breakup of Pangaea, around 300 million years agoùwhich would have been tough, since humans didnÆt evolve until 299,999,999 years later! Some thought that races were formed in antiquity at about the time of the fall of the Tower of Babel, as described in the biblical book of Genesis. (Surprisingly, none related the curse of Ham as a source of modern human races.)

Many also believed that race determined intelligence quotient (IQ) and other personality traits, as well as sexual characteristics, athletic ability, and disease predisposition, following commonly held social stereotypes. When asked about intellect, most cited the superior performance of their Asian classmates in their science courses. When asked about sex, most stated that blacks had higher sexual appetites and larger genitals. When asked about athletic ability they again cited the superior performance of black basketball and football players. Finally, almost all agreed that sickle cell anemia, Tay-Sachs, and cystic fibrosis were all proof positive of the existence of racially defined disease.

These examples clearly show the prevailing ignorance that our society exhibits about the definitions and significance of human biological diversity, and its confusion with socially constructed races. In this book, IÆm going to show you in detail how to tell the difference, and why itÆs so important.

How We Got Here

It was the ultimate missed opportunity, with devastating consequences. The European colonists who founded the United States had a chance to start over with an egalitarian social order, but they blew it: They accepted the idea of racial hierarchy that was prevalent in Europe at the time. It was just too convenient: The socially constructed concept of race was a powerful tool that aided them in the conquest of the continent.

This concept allowed them to build a society in which superficial physical differences would be used to determine an individualÆs worth. It justified racism, the belief that groups were different in their very natures, and that these differences should be used to stratify society.

The colonists did not see themselves as racists, nor did many question their treatment of non-Europeans. They saw what they were doing as good, necessary, and even unavoidable. It is ironic that many of these people were outcasts from Europe, who came to the New World seeking religious freedom. Yet they brutally conquered, then imposed their civilization upon, the native people that they called Indians in the New World.

Because they believed that races were genetically different (although they didnÆt describe it in those terms), many saw the exploitation of the Indians and Africans as no different from the use of farm animals. For such thinkers, the fact that the Bible had no explicit proscription against slavery justified the importation of millions of slaves from the western shores of Africa to meet the growing needs of agricultural production in the colonies.

Even if we accept conservative estimates of the loss of life that resulted from the slave trade, it is still the greatest sustained act of genocide in the history of our species. Those who survived the passage to the New World were gradually transformed into a new biological and cultural population. They had been gathered from different ethnic groups along the western coast of Africa (Fula, Jolla, Mandinka, Manjago, Wolof, and many others); some were African spiritualists, some Islamic, and many of these groups spoke different languages. In America, they would be both genetically and culturally hybridized amongst themselves and with Europeans and Indians.

The economy of the English colonies, and in turn, that of the new American nation, was wedded to chattel slavery. The African descendents enslaved in America would be denigrated, exploited, tortured, and murdered. They would be culturally and scientifically relegated to the bottom of American society. They would be called a variety of names: nigger, mulatto, Nigra, and Negro.

Later, new groups of immigrants from Europe and Asia would arrive. Irish, Poles, Italians, Chinese, Japanese, and (eventually) virtually every nation of the world would send people, bringing both their genes and culture to America. The early pioneers had been predominantly Protestant; Catholics and Jews would later add to the American tapestry. These people would also be named: Paddies, Polacks, Wops, Chinks, Nips, and so forth.

Anglo-Saxon Europeans did not manage to create a racial state in their own image, although many tried hard to accomplish that goal. One, Madison Grant, would argue that the loss of so many Anglo-Saxon males in the Civil War led the country to allow in too many immigrants from non-Teutonic European countries, who were reproducing faster than the Anglo-Saxons. Another, General Francis Amasa Walker, actually stated that the idea of bringing forth sons and daughters who would have to compete with people who were clearly their inferiors had dulled the desires of Anglo- Saxons to have and rear children!

The anti-immigrationists thought that the great race was being destroyed both from within and without. Their thinking would lead to the formation of a large eugenics movement in the United States. Charles Benedict Davenport would become its chief executive officer, and his Eugenics Record Office would help enact laws that led to the sterilization of ten of thousands of Americans against their will.

Despite the efforts of the likes of Grant and Davenport, the Klan, and the segregationists, European Americans who once had sole dominion over AmericaÆs social and political life now wake up each day in a nation that has been both biologically and culturally hybridized. The founding fathers would not recognize the racial and social composition of todayÆs America.

TodayÆs Euro-American youth idolize Shaquille OÆNeal, look up to the great neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson, and read Toni Morrison. Thomas Jefferson would have never thought it possible that we could have both a secretary of state and a national security advisor of African-American ancestry.

However, we have paid dearly for the policies of racism, and are continuing to pay in a currency of despair, unfulfilled dreams, and blood. We paid in King PhilipÆs War, in the middle passage, on the cotton fields, in the masterÆs bedchamber, and along the underground railway. John Brown warned us we would pay further, and we saw the fulfillment of that terrible prophecy on the battlefields of the Civil War. We paid along the trail of tears and at Wounded Knee. We paid at Promontory Junction: twelve hundred Chinese rail workers died building the Transcontinental Railway, but not a single person of Chinese descent was allowed to attend the pounding of the Golden Spike. We paid all through Jim Crow. We paid in the Japanese internment camps.

Yet we learned little: We witnessed the atrocities of the Holocaust, but then allowed Nazis into America to help us build rockets. We paid still more with the lives of four little girls in Birmingham, with the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, and in the rebellions of Watts, Detroit, and Newark. We paid by sending disproportionate numbers of young African-American and Hispanic men and women to die on the battlefields of Vietnam. We damn sure paid again when the world watched Rodney King and Reginald Deny being beaten over and over again on network newscasts.

We are paying now with academic underachievement, the drug epidemic, health disparities, unequal justice, urban malaise, and the ongoing social and political division that still exists between the socially defined races. Every time we pay, we slide closer toward hell on a road paved with our racial misconceptions. We will continue to pay until we reject the notion that there are biological races in the human species, and that race determines an individualÆs worth.

The Essential Elements of Racist Thought

All of AmericaÆs racist thinkers have relied on three unchallenged assumptions: that races exist; that each race has its own genetically determined characteristics; and crucially, that social hierarchy results from these differences. Here are the five pillars of racist thought:

òòBiological races exist in the human species.
òòRaces have genetic differences that determine their intelligence.
òòRaces have genetically determined differences that produce unique diseases and cause them to die at different rates.
òòRaces have genetically determined sexual appetites and reproductive capacities.
òòRaces have genetically determined differences in athletic and musical ability.

Although not always stated openly, most or part of these views are widely held by many Americans. Not everyone who believes these ideas is an evil person, of course. Given the history of AmericaÆs approach to race, many are just like my students: They accept these views because no alternative has ever been clearly presented to them. More dangerous are those who still actively use the social construction of race to advance their own economic, social, and political agendas. These individuals never tire of advancing pseudo-scientific arguments to protect the concept of race, and to argue for its utility in solving the crucial problems in our society.

I hope that this book will be the definitive statement of the difference between the biologically and socially defined concepts of race. WeÆre going to look at each of the five pillars of racist thought in turn: the biological aspects, in both historical and contemporary settings, and the ongoing harm that is inflicted on our society by maintaining these false stereotypes. And I will outline my vision of what our society could look like if we eliminate racist thought and practice.

We must recognize that the underlying biological diversity of the human species cannot be artificially apportioned into races, because races are simply not biologically justified. If we can understand that all allegiance to racism is ideological, not scientific, then we may be able to silence the bigots once and for all. We may be able to construct social systems that allow all of our citizens to actualize their biological potential. If we can live up to our creed of equality for all, then maybe we will have a chance to finally actualize the true spirit of democracy and the American dream.

A Note on Terminology

All discussions of the concept of race in America are mired in confusion by both the definition of the concept and the vocabulary used to describe it. Since race is socially constructed, various terms have come into and out of use concerning specific groups in American or world society. At any given time in our history, the motivation for these changes has come from both those describing the groups and from within the groups. Further adding to the confusion is that the terms have also included both biological and social conceptions of race at the same time. For example, when the Spaniards came to the Western hemisphere they first thought that they had arrived in India, hence the use of the term Indians to describe the people they encountered. The Arawaks and Caribe did not know that they were ôIndians.ö The Spaniards also described the various African ethnicities they encountered as ôNegroes,ö which comes from the Spanish word negro, meaning black. The English often used the term ôneggarsö or niggers as a derogatory form of the term Negro.

These terms were all socially constructed, but also took on some implied biological meaning. Indians were people who had descended from the original inhabitants of the Western hemisphere and Negroes had African ancestry. However, as the populations of the new world began to intermix, new terminology had to be invented to describe them, such as mulatto, mestizo, Creole, half-breed, again carrying some biological meaning. Mulattoes were the offspring of European slave masters and African slave women; mestizo meant offspring of Europeans and the natives of Western hemisphere; Creole meant descended from the French, Spanish, or Portuguese settlers of the Caribbean; a halfbreed could refer to any mixture.

Throughout American history, various groups fought to socially define themselves, in opposition to the ideas of the socially dominant European population. No struggle is more illustrative of the confusion over racial terms than that of the African descendents in the Americas. Most likely, the first African slaves brought to the Americas considered themselves members of their own African ethnic groups, such as Fula, Jolla, or Mandinka. However, their descendents were soon stripped of African cultural identity. They became what the masters named them. The struggle for African-American social and political freedom was thus always associated with the question of how to identify. In various historical periods the terms Africans, Negroes, blacks, Afro-Americans, and African Americans have all been preferred terms. Clearly, these terms are socially constructed, but in this sense by the social movements associated with the struggle for freedom. In this book I utilize material from across the entire experience of African descendents in America and use terms that are historically appropriate for a given time period.

Other groups have faced the same issues of self identification. Therefore I have attempted to use terms that are culturally sensitive and historically appropriate whenever possible. To redress the social dominance that European-Americans have enjoyed throughout the literature I use the principle of parallelism when comparing groups. So, socially constructed terms such as blacks, browns, reds, whites, and yellows are compared equivalently. Whenever possible I refer to recent geographic origin when referring to genetic ancestry. All anatomically modern humans are descended from ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Plume
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0452286581
• ISBN 13: 9780452286580
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320