Richard A. Goldsby - Thinking Race: Social Myths and Biological Realities

Thinking Race

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham Boulder New York London

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This book is dedicated to the memory of three young men: James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, one of them Black and the other two White, who were martyred near Philadelphia, Mississippi, on the night of June 21, 1964, for their efforts in the struggle for equality for all Americans.

If you live in the United States, you and most of your friends probably assume membership in some race or another. After all, race is a pervasive feature of the American Experience. It was there in the early 1600s when the curtain was raised on the drama that became the United States, and it offers no promise of exiting the stage anytime soon.

But what is race? Is it something akin to being Republican or Democrat, labels with important social and cultural distinctions but having no basis in DNA? If this is the case, race is solely cultural, and biology and medicine have nothing to contribute to a conversation about it. On the other hand, if race is something mostly determined by DNA, and therefore biological, social construction will have little role in determining its nature. So is race social construct or biology?

We show here that like so many things, it is not all one or the other. Our discussion of the medical implications of race makes the connection between race and biology firm and clear. As we wonder about the origin of race and some of the characteristics associated with this or that race, both culture and biology will prove informative. However, when we explore the approaches to managing and perhaps even solving some of the societal problems that have grown out of race, we find biology largely irrelevant, offering little, if any, help.

We hope your journey through this little book allows you to understand race as yet another manifestation of the enormous cultural and much smaller biological variety found in our species. Have an informative and surprising trip.

We are grateful to the many friends and colleagues who have generously given advice and offered opinions that have helped us think about race and about this book presenting our thoughts on race. We thank Johnnetta Cole, Joan Godsey, Carl Krause, Thomas Kindt, Joanna Wilbur, Charles Osborne, Barbara Rell, Robert Shoenberg, Susan Houchin, Leodis Davis, June Wilson Davis, Joan Weiss, Meng Zhang, and William Zimmerman for their thoughtful reading of various chapters and sections of our book. The detailed edits, advice, and suggestions provided by David Ratner, Amy Weinberg, Lydia Villa-Komaroff, Gerald Fink, and Richard Godsey were very helpful. We thank Meng Zhang for helpful conversations on population differences in drug efficacy and toxicity. We are deeply grateful to our respective spouses, especially to Barbara Osborne who generously, patiently, and thoughtfully read successive drafts of our manuscript offering advice and encouragement during difficult stages of the project, always providing useful suggestions, and to J. B. Kassarjian, who urged us toward thematic coherence. Robert Weinbergs gift of many reprints and commentaries examining biological diversity in a variety of populations and ethnic groups was very helpful in the early formative stages of our writing. We thank George Greenstein for directing us to the work of Martha Sandweiss on racial passing. We are indebted and grateful to Robert Wedgeworth for his critical help in placing our manuscript in the capable hands of Rowman & Littlefield. We are grateful for the material assistance of Amherst Colleges superb Beneski Museum of Natural History and to the generous and resourceful advice and help of Alfred Venne, museum educator, and Diane Hutton, administrative coordinator for the Amherst College Department of Geology. We also thank Jiayu Liu, the skilled and energetic Amherst College photographer.

But our debt to Amherst College goes further back. We met at Amherst College when one of us, Mary Catherine Bateson, was dean of the faculty, and recruited the other, Richard Goldsby, to a distinguished chair in the Biology Department, where he served as Amanda and Lisa Cross Professor, and where our friendship and collaboration (this is our second joint book) developed and came to include our respective families. Although we do not point to specific institutions, Amherst resembles many other fine academic institutions in having a history of striving to address inequities related to race.

Because we currently live in separate states (Massachusetts and New Hampshire), this collaboration has involved a lot of commuting and telephoning, as well as lunches and dinners rich with conversation and debate. Each of us is grateful to the other for what we have learned from each other and for our shared commitment to equality of opportunity for Americans who have traveled out of Africa over many millennia, both willingly and as captives, to take root and contribute richly to the resilience and creativity of this human community. We are especially grateful to a restaurant in Peterborough, New Hampshire, called Kodetsu, where two Americansone black, one white, and both devoted to sushi and sashimihave sorted out our ideas. In spite of the ugly history, we celebrate the diversity with which our country is blessed.

2Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob; and Jacob begat Judas and his brethren;

3And Judas begat Phares and Zara of Thamar; and Phares begat Esrom; and Esrom begat Aram;

4And Aram begat Aminadab; and Aminadab begat Naasson; and Naasson begat Salmon;

5And Salmon begat Booz of Rachab; and Booz begat Obed of Ruth; and Obed begat Jesse;

6And Jesse begat David the king; and David the king begat Solomon of her that had been the wife of Urias; 7And Solomon begat Roboam; and Roboam begat Abia... And so on.

Matthew 1:27 of the King James Bible

Whoever we think we are, if we trace back far enough, the family tree is rooted in Africa. Analysis of DNA sampled across the broad diversity of human populations shows a common African ancestry for modern humans, the term we will use interchangeably with Homo sapiens, our species of human. Wherever our current homeland, we all share a motherland in Africa. We know that somewhere on that vast continent the apes that are modern humans arose and humanity began its climb to dominance. Following our branch back down the family tree we find that five to seven million years ago, our lineage shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees, the smart, agile, and strong little apes Jane Goodall has told us so many fascinating things about. These are our closest living relatives. As different as these two creatures seem to be, comparisons of the DNA sequences of chimpanzees and humans reveal that almost 96 percent of our DNA sequence is identical to theirs. On average, almost ninety-six out of every hundred letters in the DNA sequence is the same in humans and chimps. This provides an ironclad chemical confirmation of our evolutionary similarity to this primate relative with whom we share the planet. It also shows that even small differences can make a difference; in this case, a very big one. The 4 percent difference that separates us from them results in profound differences in outward appearance, the size and architecture of the brain, analytical ability, tool-making capacity, and even lifespan. We speak, they dont. Jane Goodall writes about chimps, they dont write about her.