July 26, 2005
Kamloops Daily News



Racism is getting so complicated these days.  It used to be
so simple when people could be divided into convenient
colours - - whites, blacks, yellows and reds.  Back then,
races could be determined visually and the hierarchy of
humans was clear. Caucasians were superior to Negroes,
Asians and Natives.

Then science came along to spoil everything.   The study of
genetics determined that appearances are not a reliable
method categorization.  Take Africans, for example.   They
might be all dark-skinned but they are not a single race. 
Not even close.

Two Africans can be more dissimilar than any other two
races, more than one light and another dark-skinned person. 
The reason is simple.  Africans are the source of all other
races.  They have been around since the dawn of humans about
150,000 years ago.  As such, they have had more time for
mutations to occur in their genetic makeup.

The rest of humanity is relatively new.   We all originated
from a small band that wandered out of Africa about 60,000
years ago.

In the light of this discovery, the argument of racists
seems silly.  Racists claim that interbreeding contaminates
the purity of the white races.   If genetic diversity is
something to guard against, the mixing of African bloodlines
would be more or a threat.

But none of our human species, Homo sapiens, needs to worry
about purity.  We share 99.9 per cent of our genes.  Dr. Tom
Hudson, director of the genome centre at McGill University,
explains it this way "Humans as a species are just so young
there hasn't been enough time for the genome to alter that
dramatically."

Most of the mutations took place before our restless
relatives in Africans began to wander.  "Almost all the
differences you see in people in North America are the
differences you see in Africa, are the differences you see
in Asia," says Dr. Hudson.  "It's very rare to have
something you see in only one place, and when you do, it's
uncommon in even that population."

Although differences in humans amount to only one-tenth of
one percent, small differences matter.  As pockets of
Africans settled around the globe, environment and disease
produced isolated groups with unique characteristics.

For example, one per cent of all Caucasians have resistance
to HIV (AIDS) infection.  In Ashkenazi Jews the resistance
is more like 10 per cent.  Scientists suspect that this
resistance was acquired in the European survivors of
medieval smallpox plagues.   The only ones who remained had
the mutation that provided resistance.

But this discovery is not a cause for racist claims about
the superiority of Caucasians.  It turns out that other
human groups have advantages.  Some Africans have a genetic
resistant to Malaria, for example.

These small but significant differences can be valuable to
scientists in developing medical treatments specific to a
patient's genetic makeup.  One such treatment is Bildil,
which was recently approved to treat heart failure in
African Americans.

When the genetic makeup of a person is known, medical
treatments can be specifically designed to take advantage of
individual strengths and weaknesses.

This genetic science is quite different than the racist
quack pseudoscience, such as eugenics, that attempted to
measure non-genetic traits such as intelligence.

The whole notion of race is called into question.  Not
because we aren't slightly different, but because race has
been used as a justification for colonialization.  The word
"race" comes with so much baggage that it is no longer
useful for describing the core difference of our subtle
diversification.  In the past, race has been used to
legitimize inequality and to enslave others.

Let's define race so that it becomes irrelevant.  If race is
defined as the difference between people, and everyone on
the planet is different to a degree, then there are as many
races as there are people.  Under this definition, there
would be 6 billion races.  Race equals a unique person.

Then some other word for difference must be found. 
Anthropologists prefer the term "populations" to refer to
the unique ancestral bloodlines of humans.   Another term is
"families," which suggests relatives not far removed from
our branch of the family tree.

Once we define neutral terms that describe differences, we
can take advantage of distinction without putting others
down.

There is a simple test of the language of difference.  Does
the term describe human diversity without suggesting
superiority of one group?

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