The Concept of Race

Nothing has raised man to higher peaks of creativity or lowered him to greater depths of destructiveness than the dual notion of human similarity and dissimilarity.

Every man is like every other man in that he belongs to the same species, Homo sapiens. The seven-foot Watusi, the four-foot Pygmy, the milk-white Swede, the coffee-colored Latin American mestizo, and the almond-eyed and almond-tinted Oriental are all capable of interbreeding. Consequently, the idea of human likeness has biological origins. But so does the idea of human unlikeness. Every man differs physically and mentally from every other man, which accounts both for human individuality and group differences.^[1] As Shakespeare wrote:

Strange is it that our bloods,
Of colour, weight, and heat, pour'd all together,
Would quite confound distinction, yet stand off
In differences so mighty.^[2]

The average person probably starts life as a similarist and ends as a dissimilarist. The child grows older and wanders from the family hearth, only to find that all fathers do not look like his father, all mothers not like his mother, all children not like his brothers and sisters. As he strays farther afield, he discovers noticeable physical and cultural differences among the populations of big cities and foreign countries.^[3] Inevitably he recognizes that some human beings have a set of physical and cultural characteristics similar to his own while others do not. With or without the help or advice of father, mother, teacher, book, or television, he has separated one group of people from another. Like it or not, he has subscribed to the concept of race.

The belief that every man belongs to a distinct human breed is the bugbear of social anthropologists and a challenge to physical anthropologists who have been trying to eradicate such "loose thinking" by coming up with a more rigorous definition of race. So far their efforts have been largely concentrated on the accumulation and classification of biometric data and have produced as much controversy as agreement. Even if they eventually succeed in establishing the physiological component of race on firm scientific ground, they will still be faced with the mysteries and complexities of the psychological component. Race, as every American politician is well aware, goes far beyond the realm of the physical.

Unfortunately for those anthropologists and biologists who work with tape measures and computers, and will only permit biological factors to determine and define race, the concept of race leans as heavily on the awareness of blood relationship as on the fact.

Statesmen, poets, and prophets take a less scientific approach. They know the immense power that feelings of kinship exert on human affairs and the vast political and social transformations that take place when these feelings are kindled or rekindled in human hearts. When men cannot appeal to anthropology to justify the existence of race, they will often appeal to history and folklore. "The device of myths to establish a common ancestry for an ethnic group," psychologist E. K. Francis noted a half-century ago, "is a very ancient one."^[4]

Ethnic group is a favorite term of those social anthropologists who wish to drain race of its emotional content and subjectivity. Even more anemic is population group. But changing man's vocabulary does not necessarily change his thinking. Although ethnic group, population group, cline, Formenkreis, and the like are handy and appropriate labels for classifying certain segments of mankind with minimal friction, they fall far short of telling the whole story.

There are other, less watered-down synonyms for race, a few of the more common being stock, breed, and nationality. They still hit rather wide of the mark. More descriptive, though more awkward, are such neologisms as we-feeling and we-group. William Graham Sumner, a pillar of the once dominant conservative school of sociology, had a particular fondness for ethos, a word of Greek origin for the ideas, standards, and habits that characterize an individual or a group.^[5] Ethos, however, leaves much to be desired because of its tendency to sidestep the physical stratum.

Perhaps the word that most closely approximates race is people, either modified by a possessive pronoun, my, our, your, or as used by Oswald Spengler when he wrote, "The Roman name in Hannibal's day meant a people, in Trajan's time nothing more than a population."^[6] More highly charged expressions for race are the crude but communicative "blood brother" and "soul brother," which black store owners sometimes paint on their windows during ghetto riots to escape the wrath of arsonists and looters.

So meaningful and at the same time so meaningless, the concept of race encompasses so many facts and fancies, so much love and hate, so much reason and unreason that it is more easily sensed than understood. In some respects race is similar to certain other four-letter words in English. It throws a hard emotional punch, and its use is studiously avoided in polite and academic circles. For all its semantic sloppiness, however, race exerts a profound influence on men's minds. As one leading social scientist put it a half-century ago, "The absence among the people of a clearly formulated definition of race, far from weakening it, actually adds to the potency of the race idea."^[7]

Man is the amalgam of his physiological inheritance and his sociological acquisitions. He can shed the latter but not the former. He can give up his religion, his country, and his culture. He cannot give up his race. Or, more precisely, he cannot give up the physical side of his race, which, apart from superficial alterations by plastic surgeons and beauticians, is inexorably determined by the laws of genetics.^[8]

References

[1] Even identical twins differ slightly in height, weight, head length, and head width. L. C. Dunn and Theodosius Dobzhansky, Heredity, Race and Society, New American Library, New York, 1960, p. 27. "Deux jumeaux identiques, provenant du même oeuf, possédant la même constitution génétique, manifestent chacun une personnalité differènte." Alexis Carrel, L'Homme cet inconnu, Librarie Plon, Paris, 1935, p. 336.

[2] All's Well That Ends Well, act 2, scene 3.

[3] One social scientist, George Murdock, claims to have found 73 elements common to all cultures, among them: courtship, dancing, division of labor, education, family, folklore, games, hairstyles, hospitality, law, and magic. The Science of Man in the World Crisis, editor Ralph Linton, Columbia University Press, New York, 1945, p. 124.

[4] "The Nature of the Ethnic Group," American Journal of Sociology, March 1947, p. 396.

[5] William Graham Sumner, Folkways, Ginn & Co., Boston, 1906, p. 12.

[6] The Decline of the West, trans. C. F. Atkinson, Knopf, New York, 1957, Vol. II, p. 165.

[7] Edgar T. Thompson. "Race in the Modern World," Journal of Negro Education, Summer, 1944, p. 8.

[8] Even the phenomenon of passing is primarily involved with non-physical aspects of race. Essentially the man who passes is trading the cultural trappings of one community for those of another. Biologically speaking, the black who "looks" so white that he is accepted as a white is still a fractional black.