Races within modern humans are artificial, nefarious, perverse constructs

Races within modern humans are artificial, nefarious, perverse constructs generated by the misapplication of the taxonomic category subspecies or  socio-political skulduggery.

The use of the subspecies as a biological category was formalized in the 18^th Century by Carl Linnaeus, the “Father” of taxonomy.   Linnaean subspecies were seen originally as variant ‘types’ within species delineated by essential differences in morphology (overall anatomical form), but which ‘mix’ in areas of geographical intersection.  Linnaeus and contemporary racist philosophers, geographers and historians popularized the misuse of subspecies by dividing humanity by morphology and “demeanour” into a handful of “races”.  For example, Homo sapiens europaeus was described as “white, sanguine, muscular”, whereas Homo sapiens afer was said to be “black, phlegmatic, relaxed”.

20^th and 21^st Century taxonomists have added ecological, behavioural, physiological and molecular genetic evidence to their taxon-diagnosis ‘toolkit’, and have dropped the ‘typology’ and ‘essentiality’ of subspecies and species.

Racialism – the beginnings

In fact, ‘racialism’ has existed since the earliest humans, and post-Linnaean racialism was further misused to identify a vast multitude of ‘racial’ groupings, delineated by sharing, for example, a common language, religion, culture, class and/or national affiliation.  Within the “First People”, the southern African KhoiSan, the Khoi (literally “Real People”), regarded neighbouring, morphologically similar, ‘bushmen’, hunter-gatherers as “San” (Khoekhoe for “Others/foreigners”).  The ‘San’ (perhaps their earliest genetically-definable modern humans), in turn, have no collective name for themselves and are highly diverse linguistically and genetically – self-identifying as more than 10 ‘nations’.          

World-wide, as many as 200 ‘races’ have been recognized.    Within Haiti alone, as recently as the early 1970s, the local populace employed more than 100 different racial terms.    In extreme instances, ‘races’ in power have used beliefs in their superiority (and inferred inferiority/threat) to ’justify’ their hyper-oppression, exploitation, enslavement and even genocide of ‘others’: ’ni**ers’/’ka**irs’/’untermensch’/’mud-people’/’half-black’-‘bog-trotter’-Irish/’redskins’/’savages’/‘cockroaches’, etc. 

Regardless of how many races that were/are ‘recognized’, the primary purpose of this human ‘taxonomy’ is to denigrate/subordinate/victimize ‘others’/’them’.

These actions cannot be justified, biologically, culturally, educationally or socio-politically.

Nature: biology

Since the latter half of the 20^th Century, there has been widespread consensus that human races have no biological basis.   Modern Homo sapiens speciated once, in Africa about 200000 years ago, and cannot be biologically meaningfully subdivided further, despite some significant ‘hybridization’ with Neanderthals, Homo erectus, and Homo habilis.   So, pioneer Pan-Africanist Robert Sobukwe hit the racial nail on the head in 1959 when he said: “There is only one race to which we all belong, and that is the human race”.

Genetics:  Humans all share the same set of genes.  The DNA of any two human beings is +-99.9% identical.  In stark contrast, the four genetically distinct populations of our nearest living relative the Chimpanzee Pan troglodytes - confined to Central Africa and sometimes less than a mile apart - are more genetically distinct than humans that live on different continents. 

There is greater genetic variation within human populations confined to a given continent than between populations residing in different continents. For an extreme example, there is more genetic variation within the KhoiSan peoples than among those throughout much of the non-African world and many Brazilian “whites” have more African ancestry than some U.S. “blacks”.  In short, we are all  ‘kissing cousins’ sensu lato.    

If one were forced to use modern genomics to divide humans into ‘discrete groups’, the entities that would emerge would mostly divide humans into perhaps half a dozen African groups, and then lump all other humans together with one or other of these groups.  This is not surprising, since most human groups arose after our migration out of Africa between 60000 and 130000 years ago.   In short, non-African modern humans are ‘alien-invasive paleo-refugees’.

The major human biological groups are not Asians, Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans.  Studies claiming the opposite (e.g. newsman Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History)  and that societal differences largely reflect their differential evolution in intelligence, impulsivity, manners, xenophobia, etc. are nothing more than a “mountain of speculation teetering on a few pebbles”.

This is because the ‘racial researchers’ first separated groups of humans geographically or by assumed ‘race’ and then looked for the few rapidly evolving, adaptively neutral, molecular genetic markers (non-coding “junk DNA”)  that can delineate them.  They avoided groups that don’t easily fall into these categories.  Although genetic studies designed biasedly like this might, in some cases, recover some traditional racial groups, they are fabrications based on a ‘cherry-picking’ sampling.  Furthermore, if one pursued such a strategy to the extreme, it is possible to subdivide humans much, much more finely – providing Hendrik Verwoerd and his apartheid kindred with tools that could have been used to potentially ‘justify’ separate development.

This molecular genetic capacity has been exploited by a large and growing genetic ‘ancestry/roots’ industry, aggressively advertised in the media sensu lato.  One can even get a ‘certificate’ that indicates (with varying precision) the geographical provenance of your ‘ancestors’ and your geographic (read racial) genetic makeup.  As far as I can understand, this makes some sense as a probabilistic, forensic scientific statement.    But, the accuracy of the ‘conclusion’ depends inter alia on the marker(s) used and the scale of geographical coverage of the comparative material.  One thing is certain; this ‘genetic astrology’ is not is legally actionable evidence of genealogical ‘identity/connection’.  For example, markers derived from one source (e.g. mitochondrial DNA) might place ‘roots’ in different areas and suggest a markedly different ‘racial signature’ than those from Y chromosomes.  

A noteworthy recent example of human genetic ‘connectedness’ is the finding that millions of Americans may be descended from 4^th Century Irish King, Niall of the Nine Hostages.  During an episode of the The Oprah Winfrey Show, eminent African-American Harvard historian and ardent ‘gene-genealogist’ Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr.  announced that both he AND the Irish-American police officer who made headlines by arresting him when he was trying to gain entry to his locked home are among them!

Also based on this ‘diagnostic capacity’, some 21^st Century researchers, e.g. South African-based, ‘decolonist’ philosopher Achille Mbembe, seem to advocate the biological rehabilitation of human races.  He maintains that: “ongoing re-articulations of race and recoding of racism are developments in the life sciences, and in particular in genomics” and allow delineation of human races, making them “amenable to optimization by reverse engineering and reconfiguration”.    This assertion is based on nothing more than blatant misuse of forensic genetics.  

Morphology (overall anatomical form) and Physiology:  Humans vary, often strikingly, in whole-organism ‘appearance‘.  Potential diagnostic features include, inter alia, tolerance to alcohol, body odour/earwax, cold adaptations, eyelid folding, head hair structure, height/mass, high altitude oxygen metabolism, HIV resistance, microbiomes, menarche, skin/eye/hair pigmentation, steatopygia, prevalence of sickle-cell anaemia and other genetically-based diseases, ability to sense bitterness, toxin tolerance and osteology (especially of the cranium). http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Race_and_morphology/physiology  But, according to the American Anthropological Association http://www.americananthro.org/ConnectWithAAA/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=2583 such physical and physiological variations tend to change clinally (gradually), rather than abruptly, with geography and are generally inherited independently of one another.  Furthermore, the clinal pattern of geographical variation in one trait generally does not parallel that of others and those of genetic markers.  In short, they are ‘discordant’.
These facts render any attempt to establish lines of division among human populations both arbitrary and subjective.
For example, skin pigmentation results from natural selection operating differently in different parts of Earth.  As early as the 14th century, the Islamic sociologist Ibn Khaldun proposed that dark skin in humans was an adaptation to the hot climate of sub-Saharan Africa. https://criticalencounters.net/2013/07/05/reading-ibn-khaldun-in-kampala-mahmood-mamdani/   Modern research ties this to protection against melanoma-inducing sunlight in lower latitudes, and selection for lighter pigmentation at higher latitudes to allow production of vitamin D in the skin. http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/biology-skin-color  Indeed, darkly pigmented skin may have been evolutionarily rapidly lost and regained (over as few as 100 generations, or about 2500 years) in humans depending on the ultra-violet radiation in areas ultimately ‘colonized’ by dark-skinned Modern Humans that emerged from Africa. http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.anthro.33.070203.143955

Nurture: culture, sociality and politics

Some South African humanities scholars, e.g. University of Cape Town sociologist Xolela Mangcu http://www.groundup.org.za/article/race-transcends-class-country-response-seekings-and-nattrass_2806/ , media personalities (Eusebius McKaiser https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggxdfphdeg0 ) and politicians (Julius Malema http://www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2016/12/02/ANALYSIS-Malemas-race-bashing-a-sign-EFF-struggling-for-a-purpose-after-election-loss ) advocate continuation of official and de-facto use of ‘race’ (in various guises).   Their goal is to ‘justify’ material redress, ‘affirmative action’ and/or even violence to offset past or continuing socio-economic oppression/exploitation or to effect ‘Afrocentric’ educational and/or political “decolonization”.   ‘Race’ is re-conceptualized from a social perspective based on “self-identification” according to shared attributes including: pre-colonial nationality/history, language, religious faith/myths, behavioural norms, values/traditions, common expressive symbols, etc.  Radical South African university student/staff ‘protesters’ (Fallists) have even taken on the mantle of ‘race’ to justify the establishment of quota-‘race’-based academic appointment/promotion policies and the creation of racially exclusive associations/caucuses/societies.  Extreme Fallists use racially-based defamation, illegal intimidation, vandalism, destruction and extreme violence in an attempt to topple real or imagined the ‘white’ supremacist/capitalist “hegemony”. http://www.politicsweb.co.za/opinion/getting-away-with-murder?utm_source=Politicsweb+Daily+Headlines&utm_campaign=f36ad25cbc-DHN_30_June_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_a86f25db99-f36ad25cbc-140202025

Racialistic ‘philosophy

To give such racialism academic/legal ‘credibility’, based on the premise that racism and ‘white’ supremacy remain engrained in the legal and institutional fabric of society, some postmodern social scientists and legal ‘scholars’ have developed Critical Race Theory (CRT) "a [Eurocentric] collection of critical stances against the existing legal order from a race-based point of view". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory#Definition  They envision a “landscape” within which “people of colour are the decision-makers”.
CRT attacks the very foundations of South Africa’s internationally acclaimed Constitution, the non-racial/academic-freedom ‘Dream’ of legendary UCT Vice Chancellor T.B. Davie and its implementation by subsequent VCs Stuart Saunders and Mamphela Ramphele.  CRT advocates assert that the “values” underpinning constitutional law and academic freedom have no enduring basis in principle and are mere social constructs calculated to legitimize “white supremacy”.  They amount to nothing more than “false promises”.  In effect, CRT seeks racial emancipation by replacing broadly consensual systems of law with racial power.
Debunking a menacing myth

Nowhere is this racial fallacy and nefarious activity better exposed than by UCT’s (and arguably Africa’s) greatest ‘racial scholar’, Crain Soudien, in his final public address as an employee at UCT in July 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2015/jul/14/higher-education-in-africa-race-is-an-invention-university-cape-town-crain-soudien  According to Soudien, ‘race’ in humans has no essence or ontological status biologically, culturally, socially or politically. He elaborates on this in his book Realising the Dream http://www.hsrcpress.ac.za/product.php?productid=2291 : “Race is an invention”… “only being framed in opposition to whiteness” … “an ideological smokescreen” … “viscerally inscribed in our heads and in our bodies”.  In short, it is a relational concept, and has no inherent reality in the absence of an antithesis - whiteness.  To get a handle on the even harder-to-demonstrate “whiteness”, I could refer Mangcu et al. to Rachel A. Dolezal and Dylann Storm Roof or, better still, Nell Irvin Painter, professor emerita of history at Princeton University and the author of “The History of White People.”  https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/opinion/sunday/what-is-whiteness.html?_r=0

To my mind the most nonsensical use of the racial term ‘black’ is that proposed by founder Black Consciousness advocate Steve Biko to socio-politically ‘encompass’ dark-skinned African (‘Bantu’ sensu Verwoerd), Asian and ‘coloured’ South Africans. http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/definition-black-consciousness-bantu-stephen-biko-december-1971-south-africa   The only ‘essential’ common character of this subset of humanity is their ‘non-whiteness’ defined by long-gone segregation/oppression-based Apartheid Laws.  If any of these ‘groups’ warrants preferred status, it’s the ‘coloureds’ due to their genetic connectivity to the KhoiSan.

Regardless, of how ‘racial’ identity is allocated, assigned or assumed, in the end, the favoured ”group” will use its ‘status’ to impose dominance over (or victimize) the “other(s)”.  To allow the rehabilitation of ‘race’-motivated rule in post-Mandela South Africa defaces the non-racial Constitution for which he was “prepared to die”.  But, making Desmond Tutu’s dream of a Rainbow Nation a reality requires the ruthless eradication of racialism’s inevitable spawn – racism, its ‘sister-isms’ and xenophobia.  That cannot be achieved by the emerging ‘neo-racism’ advocated by Wade, Mbembe, Mangcu et al. and extreme Fallists.

My personal ‘race-lived-experience’ in the USA is, oddly, similar to that of my UCT colleagues from working-class families, irrespective of their geographical provenance.  I grew up in sections of Boston, Massachusetts USA, in exclusively ‘white’ (largely Irish/Italian, Roman Catholic) neighbourhoods.  My racialist family members referred to ‘blacks’ as “ni**ers”, but did not portray them as inherently ‘inferior’ or ‘dangerous’, just as ‘different’.  My parents raised me and my siblings to respect people as individuals and to adhere to Crowe Family ‘principles’.  Curiously, my namesake paternal Irish-born grandfather, Timothy Davern Crowe, had stronger ‘racial’ antipathy towards the English and the elitist, Anglophile Boston ‘Brahmins’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Brahmin whose shops once displayed warnings to ‘patrons’/job-applicants saying: “No dogs, ni**ers or Irishmen”.  He was elated when he bought (on auction) the house of a failed Brahmin stockbroker during the Great Depression.

When my cousin, Mary Elizabeth, began dating a ‘black’ fellow student, my 92 year-old maternal grandmother rationalized the association, saying: “At least he’s not English!”   Lastly, when I sought out my genealogical ‘roots’ in the tiny Tipperary village where grandpa Tim was born, I met a wealthy, university-educated distant cousin.  After a few drams of Irish whiskey he blurted out: “I wish that the Troubles [Irish war of liberation] still existed so I could kill Englishmen!”

I first encountered ‘blacks’ on a day-to-day basis at high school without any racially-based negativity.  Indeed, for what it’s worth, I was a member of a rock-blues band that incorporated music by Chuck Berry and James Brown.  So: “Roll over Beethoven” and tell Tchaikovsky “I feel good!” However, it was only when I attended the local, ‘inner-city’ University of Massachusetts/Boston (UMB) during the late 1960s, that I associated regularly with ‘black’ colleagues. 

Despite graduating at the top of my class at a fee-free ‘government’ high school, there was no hope of a working-class ‘Mick’ attending the almost exclusively ‘white’, male, Anglo Saxon Protestant’ (WASP), patriarchal, Brahmin Harvard University [although my younger son eventually did].  Since this was during the height of the pro-civil rights and anti-Vietnam movements, UMB students of all ‘races’/classes were drawn together by shared opposition to racist and pro-war government actions.  Like most other freshmen, irrespective of ‘race’, I struggled to make the transition from high school to university life.  This was made successfully through sheer hard work and mentoring by academics with open-door policies.

Despite my inability to attend nearby Harvard, I ‘got in through the back door’.  My UMB supervisor was a Harvard Ph.D. grad and introduced me to his supervisor, eminent Harvard evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Mayr  Mayr has been described as the “20^th Century Darwin” and was awarded the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for his evolution-synthesizing research on speciation and sub-speciation.  Mayr (with whom I and Cecil Rhodes share a birthday – 5 July) helped me to formulate my initial ideas on the biology of ‘race’/subspecies.

During my visits to Mayr at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, I also interacted with young Stephen Jay Gould https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Jay_Gould#Scientific_career an expert in (amongst many other things) employing multivariate statistical analyses of morphology to describe geographical variation in animals and identify and diagnose subspecies. 

Even before my scheduled graduation, I was ‘drafted’ into the US Army because I had accumulated enough ‘points’ for a bachelor’s degree.  On the day I should have donned cap and gown and been awarded my degree magna-cum-laude, I wore olive-drab fatigues and washed pots and pans, side-by-side with my platoon-partner, Jack Washington, an Afro-American from Alabama.  During that stint in the Army, I encountered (believe it or not) Bobby Joe Stump, my first hardcore racist from Mississippi.  After a few beers, when I tried to explain my then nascent ideas about race and subspecies, he bowled me over when he said: “Ni**ers have rights, but they’re not human.”

After completing my B.A. at UMB, I expanded my work on the sub-speciation of Helmeted Guineafowl Numida meleagris during my M.Sc. research at the University of Chicago.  While at UC (1970-72), I worked with Richard Lewontin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lewontin#Work_on_human_genetic_diversity  who was conducting landmark molecular genetic research that debunked the validity of human ‘races’.  He demonstrated that that 80–85% of the genetic variation within human populations throughout the world is found within local geographic groups.

After immigrating to Africa to pursue my Ph.D. studies, I had a chance meeting with Robert Sobukwe in 1975 in the Kimberley offices of a common friend.  We spent the best part of an hour discussing my research on ‘racial’ variation in Helmeted Guineafowl.  Two years later, after taking up an academic post at UCT, I married a lecturer who later served within UCT’s Academic Support Programme for first-year ‘black’ students.  When our eight-year old daughter (who attended a non-racial school) was asked about her experiences with fellow ‘black’ students, her reply was: “What is a black?”

While I was a post-doctoral student at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in the 1980s, I formed a life-long friendship with a young Scott Edwards, a local Afro-American undergrad interested in avian molecular evolution.  Some years later, I bunked and worked with him at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was conducting his pioneering Ph.D. research on within-species molecular evolution of Australian birds.  His career skyrocketed and he is now professor and curator of birds at Harvard University, filling Mayr’s old post, and a member of the US National Academy of Sciences.  He and I are involved in robust debate about how to analyse DNA-source data.

As a UCT educator, from the early 1990s, with the relaxation of restriction Apartheid legislation I helped to recruit ‘black’ colleagues and students from throughout Africa to UCT, especially into its MBA-like Postgraduate Programme in Conservation Biology (CB) which I designed and co-ordinated.  To date 25% of the 289 CB grads so far have been ‘black’ and 52% female.  They hail from 43 countries, 23 African.  My ‘black’ postgrads include museum/NGO directors and university academics.

If I could, I would exclude the words “race”, “black”, “coloured” and “white” from my day-to-day vocabulary, but not from history. 

Despite all this, my critics will still brand me as a ‘not enough’ anti-racist or a ‘closet/invisible’ racist and my successful ‘black’ graduates and colleagues as “sell-outs” or, worse still, “house ni**ers”.

Racism is the ideology of discrimination against and prejudice towards people based on the assumption that all members of each ‘race’ possess essential characteristics or abilities specific to that race that distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.  I follow the definition of racism promulgated in 1965 at the United Nations as the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination:
“any distinction, exclusion, restriction, or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin that has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life”.
To carry out acts of racism, a dominant race must have power and privilege, and is a practice that operates on both an individual and institutional level.  UCT is on the fast-track towards reborn institutionalized racism.