The Race Myth - A Brief History of Racism

Excerpted from
The Race Myth: Why We Pretend Race Exists in America
By Joseph L. Graves Jr., Ph.D.

Nineteenth-century naturalists believed that race or biological features determined a person's position in society. They saw these positions as natural, the result of special creation, fixed and unchanging. These ideas were not new or original. We know that this idea goes back as far as the Greek philosopher Plato (c. 428-347 B.C.). Plato created the concept of the natural scale. Every species and every individual within a species had a rung on the scale. The scale began with inanimate objects, to simple life, humans, and finally to the gods. The gods revealed the scale to man and it was as fixed and eternal as the heavens and as the gods themselves. The Greeks did not create a system of racism or racial slavery; however, they did believe that some people were born with more noble natures. Plato espoused that it was the natural order for more humbler folk to serve the more noble.

For close to two thousand years, Plato's ghost haunted Western science. The universe and all in it was thought to be fixed and unchanging. Newton saw the universe as an orderly machine. Geologists thought the earth was essentially unchanged since biblical creation. However, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, Platonic thought was fading. Uniformitarian geology had proposed that the earth was ancient and that it had gone through consistent change. Platonic ideals held on the longest in biology. Life was still specially created in essential forms, fixed, unchanging, and hierarchical.

In the tradition of Plato, nineteenth century American scientists sought to find objective means to prove the inferiority of nonwhite races, and to that end the most credentialed of them labored to find objective means to prove a fact that all learned whites already knew. Louis Agassiz theorized about why, Samuel Morton measured skulls, and Josiah Nott and George R. Glidden popularized the results. Agassiz and Morton were amongst the most respected scientists of their age, while Nott and Glidden were amateur naturalists. Charles Darwin threw a monkey wrench into all this when he showed that natural selection was responsible for both the origin of species and for their varieties. Few people realized that Darwin also wrote about how the processes of natural and sexual selection might be responsible for the evolution of our species, particularly its unique characteristics. Yet even before he wrote On the Origin of Species, Darwin questioned the prevailing logic concerning the origins of human social institutions. While aboard HMS Beagle he wrote about the evils of slavery: "If the misery of our poor be not caused by nature, but by our social institutions, then great is our sin." Here Darwin provided us a tremendous insight. In this statement, he asks to what degree do human societies derive their features from innate or genetic attributes of humans, which are therefore difficult to change, versus cultural features that are learned and are therefore easier to change. Yet, by invoking either mechanism genetic or cultural, Darwin differs from Platonic or creationist thinking in that for him change is inevitable. There is no scale of nature, neither are the social conditions in our world fixed and eternal.

This question is at the core of what most people think about race. The human species does not contain biological races now nor has it at any time in the past 250,000 years. Yet America's entire history is intertwined with racial injustice. As Gil Scott Heron once lamented, "From Plymouth Rock to acid rock ... " Even today, most people still believe that races exist, routinely describe individuals by their perceived race, and engage in racist behavior. Institutional racism is still a major impediment to social democracy.

How Can This Be True If People Don't Belong to Races?

To understand this contradiction, it is important to study how human cultures and societies evolve. Cultures change through time and space, but in ways very different from genetic evolution. Consider the fact that once Latin was the most widely spoken language among scholars in the Western world. Or that once there was only one Christian church. Aspects of culture change through time. There are scientific rules that govern cultural change through time. Modern racism, just like any other cultural behavior, is not the result of some deeply ingrained human instinct. Racism, as we live it today, is an artifact of ancient behavior that evolved for a different purpose. The good news is that the solution to our racial quagmire flows from precisely this revelation.

Cultural Versus Genetic Evolution

Most people believe that there is a direct or simple relationship between genes and culture. They also believe that the genetic composition of our species is unchanging, and many people have difficulty with accepting the fact that cultures also change. What most people consider as genetically determined, innate aspects of human behavior, particularly with regard to race, are artifacts of cultural evolution. A culture is a complex whole of the beliefs, art, morals, customs, and other capabilities and habits acquired by humans as members of their society. All human cultures have roots in our biology. But the relationship between biology and culture is complicated. This complex interrelationship allows for seemingly broad cultural variation throughout our history. Yet this diversity is still based on biological constraints. All humans had to find a way to gather or grow food. All developed language. All had to reproduce, develop forms of marriage, and rear their children through kin networks. All developed music, art, dance, myths, and religion. Men dominate the political hierarchy of almost every human culture. The current focus on cultural diversity is laudable, but the pendulum may have swung so far that we have forgotten how fundamentally similar the world's cultures really are.

Parents give their offspring two things: its genetic material and its culture and social position. Human genes and cultures must have evolved in association, however, they evolve by slightly different rules. The small difference in mechanism is profound and this accounts for why cultures can evolve much faster than genes. Appendix 3 summarizes and contrasts features of genetic and cultural evolution.

Genetic evolution occurs because the genetic code DNA is replicated in each generation and passed on to offspring. It is impossible for any physical mechanism to copy anything without making mistakes. The code is resistant to change because most genetic change (mutation) is bad. What would happen if a person reached under the cabinet of their television set and switched any two parts at random? It is not likely that this would make the television work better. A mutation in DNA is like switching parts at random. The DNA code consists of four chemical nucleotides. Along a single strand of DNA, groups of three of these nucleotides spell out the code of a specific amino acid. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, and these proteins carry out the business of the living cell. If the code were changed, these proteins might not function properly. For example, changing just a few nucleotides causes valine to be substituted for glutamic acid in hemoglobin. The result is that the protein changes shape and produces sickle cell anemia. Fortunately living cells actually have a complicated set of enzymes that replicate, proof-read, and repair DNA, precisely to preserve the code, but these mechanisms are not perfect and some mutations are missed.