Thoughts on race- Pt. I

In 1996 I was working in a Barnes and Nobel in Sioux Falls S.D. One day, while working behind the cash register, a customer approached me and asked, matter-of-factly, if we carried “that book, you know, the one that proved that white people were smarter than blacks”. I stared at him in total disbelief, not sure what to say, and finally stammered, “I… I don’t think so.” The customer shrugged his shoulders and walked away. Later, when I told my manager about the incident, he told me that the customer was probably referring to The Bell Curve, by Richard HernStein.

For those unfamiliar with this book, its central point is that intelligence is a better predictor of many factors including financial income, job performance, unwed pregnancy, and crime than socioeconomic status or even education. The controversial assertion, the part that my customer was interested in, concerned Chapters 13 and 14, in which the authors wrote that intelligence broke down along racial differences, arguing that IQ differences are genetic.

In retrospect I believe my stunned silence to be a product of my naivete and incredulity that overt racism still existed and that people continue to publish books justifying these divisions. Incredulous that The Bell Curve had as many supporters as it did critics. Set aside arguments for a moment that the findings of books like this are nothing more than scientific justification for racism and ask a deeper question. What is race?

Senator Obama brought this question to the forefront in a recent speech on race and racism, made in the wake of the release of comments about race made by Obama’s former pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright, which were widely viewed as inflammatory. Obama said "unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction - towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren."

In this statement, Obama seems to be getting to the heart of his definition of race. Race is, after all, a concept based on the assumption that we can divide people into groups based on a subjective set of categories, typically visual characteristics like skin color, hair texture, or self-identification. (i.e. please check the box that best describes your race: white, black, Hispanic, Native American, Asian) and include environmental, social and cultural factors. Still, I would argue that these notions of race are arbitrary, imprecise, or based on historical fallacies, while books like the Bell Curve argue that these observed differences vary to a degree in ability and achievement that can be categorized on the basis of a product of inherited (i.e. genetic) traits. Genes, it seems are the latest scientific trend, used to justify what, in my mind seems to be nothing more than a Xenophobic intolerance of others.

While the notion of race may be a myth, racism, it seems, is very real. Interestingly, in a recent National Geographic Magazine article on the reign of Black Pharaohs in Ancient Egypt, Author Robert Draper discusses how for 75 years, from 730 to 655 BCE Nubian kings ruled over Egypt, reunifying the country rebuilding the Egyptian empire. Draper makes the interesting claim that “The ancient world was devoid of racism. At the time of [the pharaoh] Piye’s historic conquest, the fact that his skin was dark was irrelevant. Artwork from ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome shows a clear awareness of racial features and skin tone, but there is little evidence that darker skin was seen as a sign of inferiority. Only after the European powers colonized Africa in the 19th century did Western scholars pay attention to the color of the Nubian’s skin, to uncharitable effect. ”Draper seems to be espousing a similar belief of ancient Egypt that Obama set forth in his speech, namely “we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction.”

Not that the ancient world was entirely devoid of racism. Both the 5th Century BCE author Hippocrates, and the 2nd Century BCE author Vitruvius depict dark skinned people as cowards. Still, in our own time, it seems we like to think about how far we have come; how different we are from our ancestors who were a backward thinking, prejudiced lot and how, having a black man and a white women as presidential candidates proves that we Americans are a more enlightened people, when in truth the fact that these issues continually arise, are questioned, and have to be justified, speak equally about how far we have yet to go.