Race Does Not Exist

If you base your worldview on an accident of evolution, you are an idiot.

Cheddar Man

A recent study shows that most Europeans had dark skin until about 3,000 years ago. The picture above is a representation of “Cheddar Man,” the man with the oldest complete skeleton ever discovered in the United Kingdom. Cheddar Man is believed to have lived over 9,000 years ago and is as you can see from the recreation of him from his DNA - he’s a rather dark skinned fellow.

Back to the research. The researchers analyzed 348 ancient human genomes from individuals who lived between 45,000 and 1,700 years ago. The results show that about 63% of ancient Europeans had dark skin, while only about 8% having light skin. The genes for lighter skin, hair and eyes emerged in Europe only about 14,000 years ago. The researchers believe that this evolution may have come from dietary changes and the need to synthesize vitamin D from sunlight.

The light skin that I have, that most Europeans have and that white supremacists claim makes them pure, is nothing more than a fluke. Thousands of years from now, if humanity is still around, the color palette of human skin will change again partially due to the intermingling of genetics that wasn’t the norm thousands of years ago and to evolutionary branches awaiting us that we won’t see coming.

Race and racism is something we made. I know that’s probably not a surprising thing to hear, but it is instructive to know where a bad idea comes from when combating it.

The first articulation of racism on an industrial scale came from a Portuguese man who wrote a book in the 1450s. Sure, people must have noticed skin color before that and I’m sure some people were jerks about it, but that book in the 1450s was the first to lump all the people of Africa together and describe them as “a distinct group, inferior and beastly”. That man’s name was Gomez de Zurara.

Zurara was hired to write the book by the Portuguese king. This was about that time the Portuguese had perfected the African slave trade. If you are a king who wants to profit off the African slave trade, you hire someone to write a scholarly work, telling everyone that the people you are enslaving aren’t really human anyway, so it’s okay. It’s the modern-day equivalent of a political party paying influencers to tout their horrible ideas. It was all about the money. Nothing new under the sun.

In this sense, Zurara invented race as we see it today. As journalist John Biewen describes in his excellent Ted Talk on the topic, the industrial strength racism we know today didn’t start with a misunderstanding, it started with a lie.

Other European countries followed this very profitable business model. Just dehumanize a whole continent of humans, and watch the money roll in.

Before this, slaves had been of all races. But over time it became harder to enslave an Irishman, or an Eastern European, because he could just disappear into a white crowd. Someone from West Africa could not.

Fast forward to today. In the United States, if you are black your ancestors probably couldn’t build wealth, couldn’t buy a house, couldn’t go to college and were shut off from the better things in life for most of the nation’s history because a Portuguese king five centuries ago knew he could get more gold if he perpetuated a lie.

Turn on your television or surf the internet. You can pretty easily find an ICE officer in Minneapolis telling someone he needs to see his papers because “you have an accent.”

Point of order. Everyone has an accent. Someone who is not you just has a different one than you. There is no “one pure” voice.

That ICE officer believes he has blanket immunity to do whatever he wants. And he’s right … at least for now. The law is behind him, at least for now - as it is very hard to sue an ICE agent.

The lie told by Zurara over 500 years ago gives an overzealous asshole the right to step on your neck because you have an accent.

As always, the science exposes the lie.

According to science, all humans are about 99.9% the same as each other. Race is a completely human made construct. It would make the same amount of sense to classify “races” by hair color or height, which is to say, no sense at all.

By separating people with different skin color into groups, we do create distinct cultures, but that is mostly due to place. If you separate people by height for centuries they will develop different customs, foods, literature and art than their short cousins in a different region. The differences between these short and tall people would be almost completely explained by their separation. If you put them together and let them interact with each other for a few hundred years, their cultures would meld together.

So, what to do?

The Portuguese King that commissioned the work from Zurara, did so for wealth and power. The ICE agent today dehumanizes our brothers and sisters for wealth and power.

Money and power are always a problem, but not all societies are organized that way, and we could organize ourselves in different ways if we so chose. In many societies throughout history, mutual aid and care was a much higher priority than wealth or status accumulation. In their book The Dawn of Everything, anthropologist David Graeber and archeologist David Wengrow show that the Native Peoples of America were horrified by what they saw in European societies when they first visited Europe. They saw a European society overly concerned with squabbling over unimportant matters linked to status, a troubling lack of mutual aid that allowed citizens to fall into poverty and a blind submission to authority no matter how bad that leadership was for the society as a whole.

Graeber and Wengrow note that many Native Peoples in the Americas at the time considered themselves “richer’ than the Europeans they encountered because they had more comfort and free time than their European counterparts who had more worldly possessions.

Degrowth is the answer because it takes away the need to dominate your fellow man. We are in the death throes of a domination culture. On the other side is a cooperation culture of some sort. It may be a very long way away. Or it could start tomorrow. It just takes a preponderance of us to choose it.

Race has been used for over 500 years to divide us. The poor man in Appalachia has no reason to fear the black man in Detroit, other than that he is told to do so. As the old system crumbles, they both those men will realize that they share the same struggle, and that they don’t have the luxury of hating one another.

If we keep letting race divide us, we will continue on this path. The real enemies are the one that spends much of their money and much of their power keeping us divided. We can turn this around.

That might look something like this:

But I’m sure we can teach them to hate each other with just the right set of economic incentives.