The scientific construct of race is disintegrating around us.
This phenomenon has been a long time coming. Though the word "race" signifies rigid, almost-scientific classifications and divisions to most people, scientists have been developing a new outlook. The introduction to the 1960 reprint of L.C. Dunn's "Race and Biology" comments that "the old views of fixed and absolute biological differences among races of man... [are] without scientific justification." Dunn goes on to sight the laws of heredity as the cause for the seemingly unamenable divisions of race, giving more weight to generational proliferation of particular genes within a specific geographic area than to false notions of race-specific traits.
A little over 30 years later, the scientific community is moving still further away from any scientific justification for race. A 1995 article in Newsweek calls attention to a scientific study which concluded an individual person is more likely to be genetically similar to a person of a different "race" than to a person of his own. That is, less than seven percent of our DNA is race-specific-and some scientists are even deconstructing that small percentage. So, with anthropologists at the forefront, and geneticists supporting their claims from the rear, the concept of race is being termed "arbitrary," "unscientific," "a mere social construct."
Hip-hip-hooray! Is this the vaunted end of racism? Have minorities and "foreigners" finally got the crucial backing they need to demand equal footing? Is science finally showing us the light at the end of the tunnel?
Probably not.
In light of this new information, many have been lulled into the overly optimistic notion that the social revolution is upon us. But let's stop and think for a moment: We have known for decades that no one race, via biology, is intellectually superior to another, yet The Bell Curve is still a bestseller. Whites have been winning the Olympics and breaking athletic records for years. Yet I am still amazed at the number of people who actually believe that there is a biological basis for superior black male athletic prowess. Belief that the new voices within the scientific community will abolish racism is stimulated by another treatise on race, or rather racism, that most people subscribe to: Ignorance is the key to racism.
Unfortunately, this once gospel truth is also finding an end to its usefulness.
The incidence of racism at this country's colleges and universities is on the rise. At the supposed bastions of intellectual refinement, we see cowardly messages left for the "niggers," corrupt theme parties fashioned like slave auctions and billboards plastered with lewd depictions of Jezebel and frightening caricatures of hanged men. At these institutions-some slowly becoming home to "guerrilla" warfare in the fight against racism-our nation's leaders are taught. These are our finest scholars, our most brilliant students. This is not a problem of your local, mediocre state institutions; this is the dilemma of the best of the best-welcome to Duke, Harvard, Stanford.
Some of the most vitriolic racists today are in politics. Though some would argue differently, politicians are intelligent, rational professional men and women, supposedly the best we have to offer-they do run this country. If ignorance were the only factor, David Duke would be without support, Jesse Helms without an office. But they, and intelligent men like them, succeed and flourish. Neither their intelligence, nor the intelligence of our nation's brightest minds have stemmed the flow of racism.
So what if scientists can prove that race doesn't exist? Alone, those facts only add another useless intellectual twist to the idiocy that is racism
Equating racism to ignorance ignores the human factor in the equation. People not only think, but also feel. Most prejudices are not founded on any factual basis and assuming that presentation of information will absolve these fallacies belittles the difficulties involved in deprogramming people. Deprogramming learned, comfortable responses requires much more enlightenment than simple fact-finding missions have to offer.
It would be inexcusably cynical to assume that the new scientific revolution won't have some impact on race relations in this country. But, then again, putting all our eggs in the scientific basket enormously oversimplifies the situation, especially since scientific theory can never override good old fashioned observation. No matter what science tells us about microscopic similarities among all people, black people still look more like black people than like Asians. People do not act only on what they read, but also on what they see, what they've been told and how they were raised. Successful weapons against racism must also comprise a psychological deconstruction of race.
Even in this age of scientific and legal respect for the wonderful insights of DNA testing, we cannot expect the average citizen to be swayed simply by genes and genomes. After all, it didn't work for Marcia Clarke.
Tonya Matthews is an engineering senior and editorial page editor of The Chronicle.
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