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January 1 - February 2, 2025
Even people who tenaciously cling to races as biological categories do not lump Black, Asian, and Hispanic or Latino people into one group. To suggest that apparent increased vulnerability to the novel coronavirus is evidence for biological races would serve only one purpose: to separate White people from everyone else.
We know that vitamin D production is stimulated by ultraviolet light from the sun—and that melanin inhibits its production, such that people with darker skin sometimes have vitamin D deficiency.
Vitamin D deficiency also more significantly affects men than women, people with obesity and type 2 diabetes, and other categories of people who seem to have elevated COVID-19 risk. In any case, if that theory turns out to be valid, it will account for only a small portion of the disparities we are seeing.
People from these groups are much more likely to be essential workers and therefore, they were not under enforced lockdown. In addition, social isolation hasn’t been an option for them to the same extent that it has been for those of higher socioeconomic status. Minority groups tend to live in densely populated urban areas—often in effectively segregated housing—where social distancing is more difficult to practice. They are more likely to live in multigenerational households, again making social distancing more difficult and increasing the risk to elderly people.
As Charles Darwin wrote 150 years ago, “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge,” and this remains as applicable today as ever.
The earliest known members of our species—Homo sapiens—evolved in what is now Morocco around three hundred thousand years ago, though most early remains are from the east of Africa.
These differences are rooted in biology, in DNA, and also in our behavior as social animals—in our dress, our speech, our religions, and our interests. In the pursuit of power and wealth, the fetishization of these differences has been the source of the cruelest acts in our short history.
In one sense, nothing has changed. The US has never resolved its racist history, and the daily frustration of normalized prejudice endured by Black people—and other non-White Americans—tipped over into public protest and violence in May 2020, as it has many times before.
The schisms of a country built on racist foundations—on the backs of the enslaved—are now more than ever exposed, like a nerve. The revolution was not televised; it was livestreamed.
Structural racism is everyday—and rooted in the everyday. It is rooted in indifference to the lived experience of the recipients of racism.
Stereotypes and myths about race are the foundations on which structural racism is built, and these have been ingrained in western culture, while laced with centuries of pseudoscience that I will dissect in these pages.
The ideas examined in these pages form a scientific description of real human similarities and differences that will provide a foundation to contest racism that appears to be grounded in science.
Therefore, science and racism are inherently entwined. Racism is an expression of prejudice, whereas science, in principle, is free from subjectivity and judgment. Reluctance by scientists to express views concerning the politics that might emerge from human genetics is a position perhaps worth reconsidering, as people who misuse science for ideological ends have no such compunction and embrace modern technology to spread their messages far and wide.
Eugenics and racism are not the same ideas, but they are inherently connected, and eugenics policies disproportionately affected and targeted racial minorities.
Nevertheless, Pew surveys in the US in 2019 indicate that more than half of Americans think that race relations in the US are currently bad, and have soured during the current administration, and two thirds think that the vocal expression of racist sentiments is now more common in the Trump era.
Attempts to justify racism have always been rooted in science—or more specifically in misunderstood, misrepresented, or just plain specious science. It never went away, but now we stand at the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century, racism is making an overt comeback, revitalized by the new genetics.
Most (though not absolutely all) contemporary geneticists disagree with the idea that genetic variations between traditional racial groupings of people are meaningful in terms of behavior or innate abilities.
Racism has many definitions; a simple version is that racism is a prejudice concerning ancestral descent that can result in discriminatory action. It is the coupling of a prejudice against biological traits that are inalterable with unfair behavior predicated on those judgments, and can operate at a personal, institutional, or structural level.
Race most certainly does exist because it is a social construct. What we must answer is the question of whether there is a basis to race that is meaningful in terms of fundamental biology and behavior.
The crude categorization of peoples is done by physical traits such as pigmentation or physiognomy, and we have to acknowledge that these are characteristics that are determined in large part by the expression of genes, which vary between people and populations in ways that we can scrutinize with more depth and accuracy now than at any time in history. Cultural categorizations are mostly derived from ancestry, and this means broadly that people within one group are more similar to each other genetically than they are to people not in that group.
Nature—meaning DNA—has never been versus nurture (meaning everything that isn’t DNA). Our genomes are the totality of our DNA, and that is where our genes are. Nurture—meaning the nongenetic environment—does not mean whether your parents cuddled you or ignored you as a child; it means every interaction between the universe and your cells, including how you were raised, but also everything from the orientation of you as fetus in utero to the randomness of happenstance, chance, and noise in a very messy system.
Evolution deceives our eyes; it presents people as being similar when the underlying code says something different.
These two examples, physical prowess and intelligence, are a recapitulation of views that were aired at the birth of genetics as a discipline, a century ago, when racism was far more culturally acceptable. Arguments to support people’s casual observations sometimes take this form: “Jews are good at intellectual pursuits because their own history of persecution and association with financial businesses over centuries has rewarded and bred superior cognitive abilities into them.” Similarly: “Centuries of enslavement have bred physical power into Black people, which accounts for their success in
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The result of this network is that contrary to what we learn in school, it is possible for a child to have any color eyes despite the color combination of the parents’ eyes.
While these basic principles are understood, the picture is complicated by the fact that there are several types of melanin, whose production varies according to the cell’s location in the body. Pheomelanin is a version that is pinker and features in red hair, the nipples, penis, and vagina. Eumelanin is more common and is found in skin, the iris, and most hair colors. Many genes are involved in the biochemical pathways that result in melanin production, and natural variation between people in the genes is the root cause of the spectrum of skin tones that humans have. Melanosomes vary in size
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The emergence of a scientific (or, more accurately, pseudoscientific) approach to human taxonomy coincided with the growth of European empires. Characterization of different populations before the expansion of Europeans around the globe was more likely to be based on religion or language than skin color, but with the birth and growth of the era of scientific revolution, pigmentation became essential to the character of humans.
This was known as the degenerative hypothesis, that races emerged from local environmental conditions, as in the case of darkened pigmentation in Africans as a response to the sun.* Within this scheme, Blumenbach was adamant that these five varieties were all one species.
In the years following the unveiling of natural selection, the continuity of life on Earth became the prevailing idea, though classification and taxonomy are still necessary: Life is continuous, but there are real and nonnegotiable boundaries between creatures.
The continual failure to settle on the number of races is indicative of the folly of the endeavor. No one has ever agreed how many races there are, nor what their essential features might be, aside from the usual sweeping generalizations about skin color, hair texture, and some facial features.
The invention of race occurs in an era of exploration, exploitation, and plunder, an era when the othering of people from colonies extended to actual human zoos.
This deep prehistory of our species is intrinsically important from the point of view of the history of racial taxonomy. Anthropological sciences had begun to merge with new biochemical techniques at the beginning of the twentieth century, a trajectory that would be fully realized with genetics in the twenty-first. The biology of difference was about to get molecular, and it began not with skin but with blood.
So here is the baseline: All humans share almost all their DNA, a fact that betrays our recent origins from Africa. The genetic differences between us, small though they are, account for much, but not all, of the physical variation we see or can assess.
When it comes to pigmentation, we are in even more treacherous waters. Eye color genes are plentiful, and if you want to know what color eyes a long-dead person had, we can give you probabilities, not answers: My report from the commercial ancestral company 23andMe tells me that 31 percent of people with the same version of the gene OCA2 as me have dark brown eyes, which means that 69 percent do not, and 13 percent have blue or green eyes. I have dark brown eyes—I know this because I own a mirror; if aliens were to dig me up in fifty thousand years and extract my DNA, on current knowledge what
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More and more we are discovering that genes play multiple roles and have many interactions with other genes in complex metabolic pathways. The traditional anthropological view has been that humans in Africa before the great diaspora were dark skinned as an adaptation to the hot sun. Lighter skin evolved probably in response to colder, cloudier latitudes, as described earlier.
There is more genetic diversity in Africa than the rest of the world combined. What this means is that there are many more points of genetic difference between Africans than between Africans and anyone else in the world—two San people from different tribes in southern Africa will be more different from each other in their genes than a Briton, a Sri Lankan, and a Ma-ori.
Only in the last few years have researchers begun to study the genetics of African skin, which is somewhat ironic given that five centuries of racism have been almost entirely based on it.
What we can also say with an arsenal of scientific ammunition is that though skin color is the first and most obvious way we see humans, it’s a superficial route to an understanding of human variation, and a very bad way to classify people. Our view of reality, so profoundly limited, has been co-opted into a deliberate political lie.
Many of the arguments put forward by racists center around belonging to specific demographics, the othering of different groups, and the displacement of people. Many non-racists are also concerned with immigration in the modern era, but few express the sense of a people being replaced or a culture somehow being weakened.
When all you’ve ever known is privilege, equality feels like oppression.
The fact that multiple positions are occupied by the same people indicates that the notion of a tree is again not the most accurate metaphor for describing genealogy: Trees only ever branch, but family trees contain loops. Your own pedigree rises from you like a tree, but sooner or later two of those branches will collide in a person from whom you are descended twice. These people sit atop genealogical loops.
We think of certain areas, lands, or people being isolated either physically or culturally, and these boundaries are insurmountable. But that is neither what history nor genetics tells us. No nation is static, no people are pure.
Nevertheless, every Nazi has Jewish ancestors. Every White supremacist has Middle Eastern ancestors. Every racist has African, Indian, Chinese, American Indian, and Aboriginal Australian ancestors, as does everyone else, and not just in the sense that humankind is an African species in deep prehistory, but at a minimum from classical times, and probably much more recently. Racial purity is a pure fantasy. For humans, there are no purebloods, only mongrels enriched by the blood of multitudes.
As discussed in part 1, Africa is not yet well represented in terms of understanding the genetic histories of its people. We have seen that there is much more genetic diversity within Africa than in the rest of the world put together, which means that people within Africa are on average more different from each other than anyone else on Earth is from each other.
By sampling the DNA of 101 people with Kuba ancestry and comparing it to several hundred people from other local populations, they showed that Kuba people had a far greater mix of DNA from around the region, indicating that the lore about the fusion of diverse and disparate groups via immigration and integration is indeed true.
The anthropological, anthropometric (measurement of the body), and phrenological (measurement of the skull) bases for these claims were all bogus, and derived from centuries of European scientific racism passed on to groups that became hostile rivals.
This grand picture is not fundamentally different for any nation. Only the timings and the details change: New Zealand was humanless until around the eleventh or twelfth century, the Americas received their first peoples only some twenty thousand years ago. The only true indigenous Brits lived almost a million years ago, and we are not sure what species they were. So, when racists say Britain is for the British, or when they talk about indigenous people, I do not know whom they mean or, more specifically, when they mean. I suspect that they don’t either.
Over the generations, descendants begin to shed the DNA of their actual ancestors. The amount that vanishes is cumulatively huge: You carry DNA from only half of your ancestors eleven generations back. Genealogy and genetic genealogy are not perfectly matched, and progressively grow apart as we go back in time.
It is therefore possible that you are genetically unrelated to people from whom you are actually descended as recently as the middle of the eighteenth century. This is a point that further undermines the appropriation of genetics as a means of asserting membership of a tribe, race, or other identity.
That doesn’t make them scientifically robust though. What these services are actually doing is comparing your DNA to databases of other customers—that is, other living people—and charting where on Earth they live today. The maps that you receive after a few weeks show your similarity to living populations, and from that you are to infer ancestral roots. This is not incorrect, as it reveals populations who have made a genetic contribution to your genome. It reveals a probability of a proportion of ancestry.
Arguing with racists with conspiracy mindsets about science is a fairly fruitless endeavor, and exhausting. To be so locked in and fixated on a facile idea is an entrenched stance. While haunting these racist forums, particularly ones that focus on commercial genetic ancestry tests, one sees the occasional discussion of results that appear to reveal previously unknown heritage from people whom White supremacists despise.
