THE NONEXISTENCE OF RACE

(Published in the East Bay Psychiatric Association Newsletter, September 2000)

When I was a little boy, before the age of 4, I lived in a town in upstate New York. In my neighborhood, there lived a family with two girls close to me in age, the Chu sisters. I would play at their house and they at mine. When we moved away, the Chu family gave my brother and me a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales as a present, inscribed with best wishes from them. I did not know that they were Chinese, as I had no concept of race.

A few years later, my parents were told by our extended family who still lived there, that the Chu’s were forced to move--that some of the neighbors had maliciously banded together and pressured them to leave: “No Chinese Allowed!” As a youngster, I did not understand then what had happened, as I still had no real concept of race.

When I was growing up as a schoolboy, race began to be presented simplistically. One was either of the Black, White, or Yellow race, and everyone could see that such differences existed. Then as Native Americans were considered, a Red race was discussed. As time went on, I began to ask questions about people who were not Black, White, Yellow or Red. Few answers were forthcoming, so I turned to the encyclopedia. There the concept of race was enlarged to 9 groups, including such exotic peoples as Micronesians, Melanesians, and Australoids. I felt satisfied, based on encyclopedic information, that I now was beginning to really understand the concept of race. However, later, while in college, I read an article that expanded racial groupings to 21, and now I was beginning to get confused and to question how scientists were coming up with these groupings.

Now that the human genome project is marching forward, some remarkable information is being uncovered. The geneticists at Celera Genomics Corporation, which were the first to unravel the human genome sequence, have drawn some dramatic conclusions. The different physical characteristics that make up different “races” appear to be only “skin deep.” One-hundredth of one percent of our genetic material accounts for these physical differences, such as skin color, lip contour, hair texture, etc. The other 99.99% of our DNA is the same from one ethnic group to another. Genetic endowment of such complex characteristics as intelligence requires at least 1000’s of genes, and cannot be distinguished by looking at the DNA of one ethnic group or another.

In a recent article in the New York Times, the “Out of Africa” theory is outlined. According to this theory, modern Homo Sapiens originated between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago, at which point, a small number of them, perhaps 10,000 or so, began to migrate into the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and across the Bering land mass into the Americas. Since that time, a mere 7000 generations have passed. Because of such a limited founding population and such a short time since dispersal, humans are strikingly homogeneous, differing from one another only once in a thousand subunits of the genome.

Because Homo sapiens have only been around for these 7000 generations, only different ethnicities, with differing physical traits, have become distinguishable. Ethnicity is a broad concept that encompasses both genetics and culture, whereas race only takes genetics into consideration, and therein lies the crucial difference. We seem to be a single human race, as biologically we have the same complex set of human genetic characteristics, as do all our fellow men.

Those obvious physical ethnic differences that do exist are adaptations to the environment, stemming from specific mutations that gave that group living in a certain region an advantage (like pale skinned people in Northern Europe being more able to produce Vitamin D from pale sunlight). Formulating the concept of a single human race, which comes in a variety of “flavors,” should alter our current categorization of each other which falsely places us into several different racial groups.

Learning about race while growing up in American society has misled most of us into believing that somehow we are biologically different from people of other races. What may be true, is that we are significantly different culturally, and that may be the source of distrust or prejudice. Race is very politicized in this country, unlike elsewhere. Here, it may be good to be of a different race, as you represent diversity. (College admissions committees are intensely interested in racial diversity of their student bodies). Or it may be bad to be of a different race, as is the case when people band together to keep away people who are unlike themselves. (Realtors often work hard to keep neighborhoods racially distinct, believing that this keeps property values higher). Whatever the case, race in America is rarely viewed from a neutral perspective.

The elimination of biology from the formulation of race as a result of the human genome project may be a quantum leap forward toward helping us all coexist more compatibly. Unfortunately for the Chinese family in that neighborhood of my early youth, this data comes somewhat late, as it does for all other individuals who have suffered the indignities of racial prejudice. However, just as placing a man on the moon led to a variety of scientific discoveries unrelated to space travel, the human genome project may lead to certain sociological advances unanticipated by this biological research.