Race

Let me preface this article by expressing my sorrow at the unjust death in custody of George Floyd and my solidarity with opposition to racism. Also, let me say that I realise my own need to read more about the history of phenomena such as the slave trade, racism and imperialism (which I am not equating).

Now, I want to share some thoughts on the issue of 'race'.

Firstly, when people pre-17th century spoke of race, they were not talking about skin colour. Race meant 'language and culture'. That is what was meant in Roman times and what Winston Churchill meant when he entitled his history of the British Isles, 'Island Race'. We need to recognise that the diversity of humanity is not only, or even primarily, biological. Differences in language and culture may be far more significant.

Secondly, it is popular today to say, "There is only one race: the human race." That makes a lot of sense to me. Interestingly for me as a Christian, the very basis for this assertion, namely the monogenesis of the human race from a single couple, i.e. Eve and her husband, Adam (see Acts 17:26), long maligned and ridiculed, is being taken for granted in public discourse. Historically, it was, among other things, the multi-genesis theories of human origins which facilitated racial discrimination.

So what is a good way to describe the obvious differences between groups of humans? 

At this point maybe you are thinking, "Why bother?" Why not, indeed, ignore these differences, finding reasons to question them altogether? To me this seems crazy, a total over-reaction to racism. The richness and diversity of the human race should be acknowledged and celebrated, not shamefully ignored. And there are all sorts of situations where recognising such difference can be helpful, not least in respect to outcomes in the recent Covid-19 epidemic.

Here are some ways we could talk about 'races':

- Phenotypes. Basically this boils down to shared biological characteristics. I remember when my Chinese friend, who used the name Anatoly in Russia, pointed out to me that my eyes were set back in deep eye sockets, unlike his which were on the surface of his face. It's obvious when you think about it. Again, interestingly for evolutionary theory, in many cases biological similarities cannot be attributed to shared ancestry.

- Clades. Another term for this would be "ancestrally differentiated populations"; a clade is the set of all those people descended from a common ancestor. Templeton (1998) gives the following, interesting qualification, "Human population groups are not monophyletic, as there appears to always have been considerable gene flow between human populations." Interestingly, Walsh and Yun observe, "Genetic studies using very few chromosomal loci find that genetic polymorphisms divide human populations into clusters with almost 100 percent accuracy and that they correspond to the traditional anthropological categories." Those categories would be the 3-5 traditional 'races': Negroid (Black) race.and Capoid (Bushmen/Hottentots) races; Mongoloid (Oriental/Amerindian) and Australoid (Australian Aborigine and Papuan) races; and the Caucasoid (White) race. In traditional Christian thought, these were associated with the three sons of Noah: Ham, Shem and Japheth.   

- Geography/proximity, i.e. "a group of organisms of the same species occupying a particular space at a particular time". This is really fascinating. Basically, this recognises that organisms (in our case humans) who share the same environment at a particular time are more likely to be similar to one another, even if they have divergent genetic origins. Ossorio and Duster (2005): "Anthropologists long ago discovered that humans' physical traits vary gradually, with groups that are close geographic neighbors being more similar than groups that are geographically separated."

Let me finish by reiterating that this is not 'racism by the backdoor'. I want to draw on knowledge to find ways to acknowledge and celebrate the biological diversity of the human race.

"Y de una sangre ha hecho todo el linaje de los hombres, para que habiten sobre toda la faz de la tierra." (Hechos 17:26)