How to Argue With a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality

by Adam Rutherford

The pigmentation of a pale-skinned redheaded Scot is a long way on a colour chart from that of a typical Spaniard, though we call both of them white. The skin colour of more than a billion East Asians is similarly variable, yet nowadays, we tend not to refer to them by skin colour at all. Yellow, though an integral part of the description of East Asians for several centuries during the development of scientific racism, has fallen out of usage and is now generally accepted as being entirely inaccurate and simply racist. Instead, the main racial signifiers for East Asians are the epicanthic fold of the upper eyelid (which is also present in Berbers, the Inuit, Finns, Scandinavians, Poles, Indigenous Americans and people with Downs syndrome), and thick, straight black hair. Traditional racial categories are not consistent in their taxonomic boundaries.

The continual failure to settle on the number of races is indicative of its folly. No one has ever agreed how many races there are, nor what their essential features might be, aside from the usual sweeping generalisations about skin colour, hair texture and some facial features. It is difficult to untangle the rationale, the evidence and the motivation for the plurality of pre-Darwinian views of human origins.

In the 1972 paper ‘The Apportionment of Human Diversity’, Lewontin found that the vast majority (85 per cent) of genetic differences were within classical races, not between them. Only 6 per cent of differences segregated by race.

There is more genetic diversity in Africa than the rest of the world. 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 Māori. And there is more diversity in pigmentation in Africa than in the rest of the world too. Only

The idea that we were ancestrally dark skinned before diversifying as we crept around the globe is now known to be incorrect. Not only were we diverse in our skin colour long before the dispersal from Africa, we were diverse in our skin colour before we were our own species.

In the study of genetics, we assume a generational time of twenty-five to thirty years, and in every generation back through time, the number of ancestors you have doubles. What this means is that over a 500-year period, you have 1,048,576 ancestors. By a thousand years ago, you have 1,099,511,627,776 –

The last common ancestors of all people with longstanding European ancestries lived only 600 years ago – meaning that if we could draw a perfect complete family tree for all Europeans, at least one branch on each tree would pass through a single person who lived around 1400 CE. This person would appear on all our family trees, as would all of their ancestors. 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. Much

This, astonishingly, comes out at around 3,400 years ago. Everyone alive today is descended from all of the global population in the fourteenth century BCE.

Nevertheless, every Nazi has Jewish ancestors. Every white supremacist has Middle Eastern ancestors. Every racist has African, Indian, Chinese, Native American, aboriginal Australian ancestors, as well as 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.

Genetic ancestry tests may be fun, but in my opinion, mostly offer nothing much more than a gaudy bauble.