Race - The Blunt Object Of History
Why we can avoid race but shouldn't avoid talking about ethnicity and culture
Many years ago a coworker used an old standard that I hate. He said “I don't see race.”
I asked if he saw his own. Likely shocking no one, he did.
This is the problem with discussing ideas such as race, they're more discussed than engaged with.
Race is not a biologically valid concept, race fails as a meaningful lens through which to understand our fellow man as it is neither experiential nor evolving.
It is a social construct, but in the case of race that doesn't mean it is a personal fiction that one can just pick up mid-game - think scammer Rachel Dolezal. The social experience and history of race has and does affect our biology in a multitude of ways and has done so for generations, but people use the term when they really mean ethnicity.
As homosapiens have spread out over the earth, we have made a series of choices that have created what would more accurately be called ethnic groupings (or ethnicities) but which are often called races as this is the lexicon of the last time race as a serious concept was discussed outside academic circles.
Race is a blunt object, sometimes you need a blunt object. Ethnicity is more precise, it is culture and it evolves and mutates as it bumps up against history.
It would be completely inaccurate to say, for example, that African Americans are more likely to be great athletes due to their race. It would be more accurate to note that African Americans communities are more likely to see athletics as a way to elevate their social status for multiple generations now.
This has a knock-on effect of prioritising, in the rare number of situations where this is possible, mates who are athletic as this is seen as a sign of a good provider. This is not a matter of racial superiority or inferiority, it is a cultural reflection of the very limited opportunities provided to African Americans historically.
Looking beyond media representations of them, you will find a wealth of unsurprising health data that show the majority of African Americans are far more American (the most statistically overweight nation on earth) than African.
Ultimately the greatest deciding factor of whether someone will become a great athlete is whether their immediate family members were great athletes. NBA legend Stephen Curry is the son of an NBA legend, both specialise in shooting a 3 pointer, a unique technique that doesn’t require athletic prowess. This skill set was taught, not inherited through genetics, hence it is by virtue of their families priorities, and the culture they were raised in, that made Stephen Curry a star.
Now that I’ve torched race as a concept - calling it both biologically invalid and a blunt object - let’s talk about what it is.
Race is a way to incorporate diasporas back into their original groupings. There are many origins for the term, but I was taught it dates back to Kant.
Kant was the first to seriously differentiate between species and race - acknowledging, in different wording, that we are all the same species as we can all breed together to create fellow human beings, not something akin to a Liger. Kant referred to the “races of mankind”, to identify that there were visual differences between peoples from different continents.
What Kant couldn’t have known in the 1700s is that these crude visual measures were virtually useless, and would become even more useless with the greater spread of racial groups across the globe thanks to mass transit and war.
Where race is useful is in determining the likelihood one may have of inheriting certain DNA variants that are more common amongst people who trace their ancestry to certain regions of the world.
This is how now popular DNA tests like Ancestry and 23andMe work, they map a subject's DNA and look for a number of common genetic markers that are more likely to be found from people whose ancestry traces back to a region.
It is not precise enough to really explain someone’s family history, but it can find something like the genetic disorder Tay-Sach disease - an incredibly rare inherited disease that is found predominantly amongst Ashkenazi Jews - and put two and two together to make four.
Many Ashkenazi Jews, like African Americans, ended up in America. Some of their children and grandchildren went on to be incredibly influential in the various fields of Anthropology (biological, cultural, evolutionary, and the many other more niche varieties), with three even moving to New Zealand and eventually teaching me at both Victoria and Auckland Universities.
One of the first things I was taught in first year Anthropology was, if you want to understand the world and people who fill it you need to let go of your preconceptions about race. Ideally drop the word completely until you’re able to discuss its comparative merits and limitations.
Race can tell you where someone is from, very broadly and bluntly, but it can’t tell you where someone is at - what makes them tick, how they see the world, where they feel at home. It is childish to say you are simply ‘blind to race’, what many people mean when they say that they know race is just a collection of crude elements. Like an unmade Lego set.
I am a racial complexity - containing clear visual cues of my connection to my rohe (my hapu’s homeland of south Wairarapa) and also to my Scottish roots, with various European and Polynesian elements mixed in as well - and a living example of the futility of race as a descriptor.
We should acknowledge race, in as much as it has historically been used cruelly to dispossess people of their inherent worth, but we should celebrate cultures.
Culture - as the expression of ethnic history, wisdom, skills, and art - is the true form of what is lazily called race. It is always evolving, intermixing, and it is key to understanding the complex world outside and within.
I avoid quoting other writers, I see it as lazy, but for the great D.E.B. DuBois I will make an exception.
“I believe in pride of race and lineage and self; in pride of self so deep as to scorn injustice to other selves.”
Oh that your piece on race could be more widely read. A masterpiece of its kind. Thank you.