Posted on 12/13/2001 2:20:09 PM PST by Utah Girl
Americans are currently enjoying an unaccustomed sense of national unity. We have so far put aside petty differences that it may be hard to remember what a racially divided year we had before September 11. It was a period of greater than usual racial gamesmanship. The race grievance politicians and the advocates of reparations for slavery played their cards. And there are ominous signs that they are waiting to play them again.
On June 8, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission issued a highly partisan report declaring that thousands of African Americans had been improperly disenfranchised in the Florida presidential elections. Abigail Thernstrom and Russell G. Redenbaugh, the only members of the panel appointed by President Bush, strongly dissented. Later in the summer, The World Conference Against Racism convened in Durban, South Africa. As the conference drew to a close the weekend before September 11, Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree, who co-chaired the "Reparations Coordinating Committee," announced that a team of lawyers hoped to follow up with a slavery-reparations suit against the US government and corporations. In November, the country watched a New York City mayoral election that seemed entirely dominated by racial politics.
Against this background, it might be well to take note of one of the engaging popular science books of the year, The Seven Daughters of Eve, by the British geneticist Bryan Sykes. It offers mixed news for racists. On one hand, science has now found definitive proof that humans belong to several genetically distinct, non-overlapping lineages. On the other hand, those lineages are located exclusively in mitochondrial DNA and have nothing to do with our outward appearance or abilities.
Regardless of its scientific nullity, race remains a pivotal idea in American political and institutional life. A substantial majority of Americans regard the government's use of racial categories as wrong, but the race industry hangs on, living off emoluments from jobs that are artifacts of government regulation; needling people to think of themselves primarily as members of a race; caressing the insecurities of business leaders; and always searching for that elusive high ground said to lie on the far side of the swamp of racial demagogy.
But what is "race"?
It has been roughly 100 years since the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's experiments on garden peas opened the door to a scientific understanding of genetics, and about that long since the concept of race lost any real claim to empirical validity. We have known for a century that each child's identity is a unique recombination of the inheritable characteristics of both parents, and we've known for nearly half a century that the main mechanism of this inheritance is nuclear DNA. The older idea that racial identity was somehow carried "in the blood" proved to be simply false. To say that someone is "half" African, or one-quarter Chinese, or one-tenth Native American is, at best, to indulge in a crude metaphor, since there is no such thing as an African, Chinese, or Native American genome.
The idea of race lingers not because of residual scientific merits, but because it serves the interests of professional racialists whose careers and livelihoods depend on fostering a poly-generational grudge. The outstanding examples of the moment are those members of the black professional elite who are demanding reparations for slavery. But the reparations crowd is hardly alone in clinging to the idea of race. Where would the east coast Indian casinos be without our ability to conjure "Indians" out of the thin-air of long-extinct cultures? The trick is to find people who have some vaguely plausible ancestral link to a recognized Pequot, Mohegan, Wampanoag, etc. and play the race card.
In 1977 I met Gladys Tantaquidgeon, who, together with her brother, Harold, ran a small Indian museum in Uncasville, Connecticut "to preserve and perpetuate the history and traditions of memory of the Mohegan and other Indian tribes." When I asked Gladys what happened to the Mohegan language, she explained that the last speakers, who died around 1900, deliberately did not pass the language along to their children. The Mohegans had chosen the path of assimilation. Gladys herself had published some "salvage anthropology" about the tribe, before its traditions were entirely lost.
Today, Gladys Tantoquidgeon, now 102, helps to provide the "authenticity" for the resurgent Mohegan tribe and its giant casino, The Mohegan Sun. Let me not be accused of lack of sympathy with the ancestral Mohegans, a people eradicated by historical forces beyond their control or comprehension. But as for the Mohegans of the moment, we have entered an epoch of cosmic jokes. To be sure, tens of thousands of living people might have some Mohegan ancestry, and perhaps a few hundred have some faint family tradition that connects them with a distinct Mohegan culture. And the peoples of the United States ought to be, within measure, grateful for the Mohegan's gift announced last June of $10 million to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian.
In 1907, Buffalo Bill staged a horseback visit to the grave of the 18th century Mohegan sachem, Uncas, and ignited a revival of sorts among New England Indians, some of whom were drawn into the costume drama. So it is not as if "Indian-ness" simply disappeared until someone got the bright idea of exploiting the legal loophole of opening casinos on reservations. But the individuals who improvised and reinvented themselves as Indians, occasionally weaving fragmentary threads of old traditions into popular stereotypes and their own idiosyncratic imaginings, are not bearers of a living culture.
On the genetic side, most of us, if we only knew it, are a bit of everything. Even Sykes' mitochondrial DNA testifies to our wandering genes. He tells of the genes of an ancient Korean woman turning up among Norwegian fishermen and a white dairy farmer in Somerset who proves to have an unsuspected African heritage.
Science gives no quarter to those who would construct a superstructure of race over the worldwide mixing of genetic legacies. But if race is not in our genes, is it perhaps in our culture? This is the intellectual move favored by many in the universities who are determined not to abandon the idea of race. For without the idea of race, what entitles living people who did not suffer slavery, internment, removal to reservations, etc. to claim the privileges of collective victimhood?
As the crude quasi-biological divisions of "race" have lost their credibility, academic theorists have attempted to "save the phenomenon" by translating race into the infinitely more subtle game of culture. Within culture, people create themselves. According to this view, race may have begun as a European imposition of social categories intended to justify and reinforce subordination of native peoples, but over time the people forced into these categories subversively claimed them as their own. There may have been no such thing as a "black" in 18th century Whydah on the African Gold Coast, but there certainly was in Virginia. There were certainly no "Indians" in the New World when Columbus arrived, but by the end of the nineteenth century, every Native American could certainly understand that, whatever else he was, he was also "Indian."
According to this view, the victims of Western oppression appropriated the originally stigmatizing racial categories and turned them to a different purpose: to sustain — or sometimes to create — a culture outside the purview and understanding of the oppressors. This is an extraordinarily appealing idea and one that has been elaborated endlessly both in academic works and in popular novels and art. Race may lack any "real" biological referent, but no matter: It is as real as the culture, traditions, and identities of those who live it.
This "cultural" reconstruction of the idea of race, however, has a fatal flaw. For in the end, it only vindicates the importance of "culture" and "tradition," not race. Oppressive racial classifications did stimulate resistance that took the form of new and sometimes subversive traditions. And some of these traditions may, because of their richness, their poignancy, their redemptive power, deserve to live long after the oppressive racial classifications have disappeared into cold archives of historical fact. But once we admit that in talking about race in America we are really talking about culture and traditions, the entire legal, constitutional, and political debate about race is transformed.
Few people would be willing to grant me reparations or a license to run slot machines just because I choose to associate myself with a particular culture or a tradition. The claim to be a deserving victim depends to a great degree on the assumption of a deep identity between the present generation and the generations of those who actually suffered. The idea that race is "in the blood" offered a metaphor that made that deep identity seem plausible, but the idea that "race" is really just shorthand for "cultures and traditions of the formerly oppressed" carries no such cachet. If "race" is no more than the sum of personal choices I make about my own identity, it has little claim on your time and attention, and none on the public purse.
Properly understood, the "culturizing" of race is the end of race, and the beginning of a long historical movement towards removing racialist thinking from public life into the inner sanctum of individual privacy. Most of us don't care what culture the murderer and "Indian activist" Leonard Pelletier thinks he exemplifies. The public category he belongs to is convicted felon.
The transformation of racial categories into cultural categories promises liberation from a past that owns us more than we own it. And our longing for that liberation is what is likely to carry to victory the Racial Privacy Initiative, the ballot measure in California that would end the "race box" on government forms. The emerging de-racialized consensus in the United States will also provide a solid foundation of public support as the U.S. Supreme Court proceeds to dismantle the racialist apparatus in college admissions and the other remnants of outdated affirmative action.
In 1899, the British biologist Baldwin Spencer and his Australian collaborator F. J. Gillen published their pioneering anthropological work, The Native Tribes of Central Australia. Their research interests were broad and, not to neglect any important scientific data, Spencer brought along a little kit first created by the French surgeon Paul Broca, who put together a numbered series of color samples to standardize anthropological reports of skin color. Spencer and Gillen found the Australian aborigines "chocolate-brown which is numbered 28 on Broca's scheme." And they offered this tip to fellow researchers: "The only way in which to correctly judge the colour is to cut a small hole in a sheet of white paper and to place this upon the skin; unless this is done there is a tendency on first inspection to think the tint is darker than it really is."
Anthropology has long since thrown away its race cards. It is time American society did so too.
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