The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea

by Robert Wald Sussman

In 1950, UNESCO issued a statement asserting that all humans belong to the same species and that “race” is not a biological reality but a myth.

This was a summary of the findings of an international panel of anthropologists, geneticists, sociologists, and psychologists.

Since that time similar statements have been published by the American Anthropological Association and the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, and an enormous amount of modern scientific data has been gathered to justify this conclusion.

Today the vast majority of those involved in research on human variation would agree that biological races do not exist among humans. Among those who study the subject, who use and accept modern scientific techniques and logic, this scientific fact is as valid and true as the fact that the earth is round and revolves around the sun.

Yet as recently as 2010, highly acclaimed journalist Guy Harrison (2010) wrote: One day in the 1980s, I sat in the front row in my first undergraduate anthropology class, eager to learn more about this bizarre and fascinating species I was born into. But I got more than I expected that day as I heard for the first time that biological races are not real. After hearing several perfectly sensible reasons why vast biological categories don’t work very well, I started to feel betrayed by my society. “Why am I just hearing this now?… Why didn’t somebody tell me this in elementary school?” … I never should have made it through twelve ...

Many of our basic policies of race and racism have been developed as a way to keep these leaders and their followers in control of the way we live our modern lives.

However, over the past fifty or sixty years, anthropologists, biologists, and geneticists have written many articles and books explaining why biological race in humans is nonexistent.

At first, scientists attempted to classify human races based on variations in characteristics such as skin color, hair color and form, eye color, facial anatomy, and blood groups. In the recent past, various scientists have divided us into anywhere between three and more than thirty different races, without any success (see Molnar 2006). Most of these hypothetical “races” were developed using assumptions about genetic relationships and distributions among different human populations.

We humans are more similar to each other as a group than we are to one another within any particular racial or genetic category.

In biology, a species is defined as a population of individuals who are able to mate and have viable offspring; that is, offspring who are also successful in reproducing.

Given advances in molecular genetics, we now have the ability to examine populations of species and subspecies and reconstruct their evolutionary histories in an objective and explicit fashion. In this way, we can determine the validity of the traditional definition of human races “by examining the patterns and amount of genetic diversity found within and among human populations” (Templeton 1998, 633) and by comparing this diversity with other large-bodied mammals that have wide geographic distributions.

A commonly used method to quantify the amount of within- to among-group genetic diversity is through examining molecular data, using statistics measuring genetic differences within and between populations of a species. Using this method, biologists have set a minimal threshold for the amount of genetic differentiation that is required to recognize subspecies (Smith, Chiszar, and Montanucci 1997).

Compared to other large mammals with wide geographic distributions, human populations do not reach this threshold. In fact, even though humans have the widest distribution, the measure of human genetic diversity (based on sixteen populations from Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Australia-Pacific region) falls well below the threshold used to recognize races for other species and is among the lowest value known for large mammalian species (Figure I.1). This is true even if we compare humans to chimpanzees (Templeton 2013).

As summarized by Templeton (1998, 647), who is among the world’s most recognized and respected geneticists: Because of the extensive evidence for genetic interchange through population movements and recurrent gene flow going back at least hundreds of thousands of years ago, there is only one evolutionary lineage of humanity and there are no subspecies or races.… Human evolution and population structure has been and is characterized by many locally differentiated populations coexisting at any given time, but with sufficient contact to make all of humanity a single lineage sharing a common, long-term evolutionary fate. Thus, given current scientific data, biological races do not exist among modern humans today, and they have never existed in the past.

in the fifteenth century, the Spanish introduced a new form of racism. In order to squelch the large and rising number of Jews who had been forced to convert to Catholicism and who were gaining status financially and in the church, Old Christians were separated from New Christians, or conversos, on biological grounds.

Anyone with Jewish ancestry in the previous five generations was considered a New Christian and was subject to a number of restrictions, including an inability to attend college, join certain religious orders, or hold government positions. Certificates of “purity of blood” were issued to non-Jews to prove that an individual was not a member of this “inferior” group.

Although it was mainly directed at Jews, the inquisition also focused on Christianized Muslims and Gypsies and later moved to Asia and America, where it targeted indigenous people (Popkin [1974] 1983; Kamen 1998; Murphy 2012). In Spain, the inquisition was formally established in 1478, although it built on earlier inquisitions in other places.

After the debates between the church and the conquistadores discussed above, one of the earliest well-known proponents of the degeneration theory was John Locke. Locke was the seventeenth-century architect of English colonial policy who drafted the constitution for the Carolinas. He accepted the biblical account of human origins but believed that the equality at creation and the endowment of natural rights to all humans no longer had to be applied because the American Indians were not using their land properly.

He also believed that they should lose their liberty because they had unjustly opposed the Europeans. Locke justified the maltreatment and slavery of nonwhites based on what he considered their personal failures (Locke 1690).

Hume, who is considered among the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment, advocated the separate creation and innate inferiority of nonwhite peoples. In the mid-1700s, Hume wrote: “I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufacturers among them, no arts, no sciences” (cited in Popkin [1974] 1983, 143).

In this statement, Hume was applying his methodology of historical “inductive” reasoning. Human nature was best studied by observations of human historical behavior, and from the European point of view civilization had never existed outside of Europe.

Following in Hume’s footsteps but adding and enveloping similar racist ideas into a whole system of philosophical thought, Immanuel Kant essentially created a racist anthropology based on skin color. A contemporary of Linnaeus’s Kant (1724–1804) developed his own classification of human races. Kant i...

In fact, he is widely thought of as the most important moral theorist of modern times (Guyer [1998] 2004). However, he also can be considered the father of the modern concepts of race and scientific racism (Count 1950; Van de Pitte...

Kant, who introduced the term anthropology to German science and philosophy, was the founder of what might be considered racist anthropology, which dominated much of anthropology up until World War II. His classification of humans included four races based on color and climate (Kant [1775] 1950). Kant believed that all races of man were...

This made his polygenic view more acceptable to biblical interpretations of humanity. Climate determined the natural predispositions or character of each race, and once the process toward eac...

Existing races and racial characteristics could not be undone by changes in climate or circumstance, “for once a race like the present one has been founded through long sojourn of its original stock … it could not be changed...

For only the stem-formation can exspeciate into a race; but once the latter has taken root and has stifled the other germs, it resists all further remodeling because the character of the race has now become pre...

Kant’s theory of race corresponded to intellectual ability and limitation. He included the typical color-coded races of Europe, Asia, Africa, and Native America, differentiated by their degree of innate talent (Kant [1798] 1974). In Kant’s theory, the nature of the white race guarantees its rational and moral order, and they ...

Nonwhites do not have the capacity to realize reason and rational moral perfectibility through education. To Kant, color is evidence of unchanging and unchangeable moral quality and thus ultimately of free will. White Europeans have the necessary talent to be morally self-educating; Asians ...

Innately idle Africans can only be educated as servants (to follow orders) but must be kept in order by severe punishment (and he explains how to properly beat them with s...

Native Americans are hopeless and cannot be educated at all (Mills 1997). Furthermore, mixing of races should be avoided because it causes m...

Although Kant was a champion of the equality of all men and of civil rights, these were only for humans who have the ability to educate themselves and thu...

Eze (1995) summarizes: “The black person, for example, can accordingly be denied full humanity since full and ‘true’ humanity accrues only to the white European.” Kant believed that to be human one must be able to think moral thoughts (reason) and have the ability (free will) to carry them out. Native Americans and blacks did not have these qualities and thus could not be considered fully human.

As the philosopher E. C. Eze notes, for Kant, “the ideal skin color is the ‘white’ (the white brunette) and the others are superior or inferior as they approximate whiteness” (Eze 1995, 217).

To Kant, nonwhites counted as subpersons who were of considerably less value than whites because they were nonmoral agents (Mills 1997; Hachee 2011). Furthermore, nonmoral agents lacked moral worth and became mere objects to be used as means to the ends of others. They were nothing but irrational ...

Rephrasing Hume directly, Kant stated: “The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling. Mr. Hume challenges anyone to cite a single example in which a Negro has shown talents, and asserts that hundreds of thousands of blacks who have been transported elsewhere from their countries, although many of them have been set free, still not one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality.… So fundamental is the difference between these two races of man, and it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in color” ([1764] 1965, 110–111).

Kant also generalized his depiction of nonpersonhood to Jews. Motives could be good or moral only if they were not motivated by a desire for material benefit, and he saw Judaism as an inherently materialist religion. He equated the Jewish religion with such undesirable traits as superstition, dishonesty, worldliness, and cowardliness (Mack 2003).

going back to at least the 12th century, European culture had developed a rich and ghastly tableau of imaginary Jews.… Kant’s division of humanity reiterated and reinvigorated the religious and racial hierarchies of the past.… He took this earlier religious hostility toward Jews and reformulated it in philosophical language.… Kant set the stage for modern secular anti-Semitism … [and] provided the framework for future anti-Semites, notably G. W. F. Hegel and the musician Richard Wagner. Since Wagner was a cultural hero for Adolf Hitler, Kant’s own anti-Semitism can be seen as having a far-reaching effect.

Kant taught a combination of physical geography and anthropology courses for forty years (1756–1797), introducing a “scientific” concept of race and a particular brand of physical racial anthropology first in Germany, then in Europe and the United States (Kant [1775] 1950, [1798] 1974, 1802; May 1970; Eze 1995; Mills 1997; Elden 2011; Jablonski 2012).

Kant had an exalted reputation; there was great respect for his work, and his writings were widely circulated.

the anthropologist Nina Jablonski (2012, 130) stated: “Through his writings and lectures, Kant successfully instilled some of the most trenchant and potent classifications of humanity into the minds of i...

He became one of the most influential racists of all times, and his racial philosophy was passed on for centuries. Because Kant is widely thought of as the most important moral theorist of modern times and the father of modern moral theory, his theories on race have, until recently, been essentially igno...

However, as Jablonski (2012, 135) states: “In the history of humanity, few intellectual constructs have carried so much weight and produced such a river of human suffering.” As philosopher Charles W. Mills summarized (1997, 72, emphasis in original): “The embarrassing fact for the white West (which doubtless explains its concealment) is that their most important moral theorist of the past three hundred years is also the foundational theorist in the modern perio...

Modern moral theory and modern racial theory have ...

His biographer (Horsman 1987) stated “as a Southern Gentleman, Nott expected to be believed … though he had raised his innate prejudices to the level (of what he assumed to be) scientific truth” (87, 296). Although he claimed to be a scientific realist, Nott’s writings on race between 1843 and the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 and again in 1866 were colored by arrogant racist prejudice.

Nott gave two lectures in 1843–1844 that he called his “lectures on Niggerology” and subsequently published in 1844 as a pamphlet entitled Two Lectures on the Natural History of the Caucasian and Negro Races (Hammond 1981).

Agassiz’s basic view was that all humans were created differently, with different talents. People of color had different but inferior talents to those of whites, and these differences should be studied so the best could be gotten out of each race. Just as Hume and Kant had before him, he based his theory on the supposition that Africans had never created a civilization, never developed “regulated societies,” had always been slaves and therefore should remain so. Furthermore, Agassiz believed that because of this, it was a waste of time and effort to give Africans the educational and cultural benefits of European civilization (Popkin [1974] 1983; Brace 2005).

In fact, he argued along with the pre-Adamites “that God had created blacks and whites as separate species” (quoted in Gould 1977a, 243).

As Brace (2005, 102) stated: “These judgments were not reached by anything remotely like scientific procedure. They were simply the assertions of opinions, and that opinion was largely a reflection of the attitudes held by Aga...

As Smedley (1999, 254) states: “The racial theories of Henri de Boulainvilliers were essentially rooted in the class conflicts of the times, but they carried the invidious notion that each class had distinct and unalterable hereditary qualities derived from separate origins. The weaker classes were naturally inferior to the stronger and owed obedience to them.”