Biology & Race

It is not simply in class that the notion of biology has arisen. More often than not, this is the central argument that is chosen to defend why people are different, in terms of race and I have found this to be especially irksome and exceedingly disturbing. I believe that it is important to state that there is not a single biological element unique to any of the groups we call white, black, Asian, Latino, etc. There has never been a successful scientific way to justify any racial classification in biology. This is not to say that humans don’t vary biologically, we evidently do, a lot.  However, that variation is not racially distributed. If your thinking deviates from this notion, I would highly recommend doing some degree of independent research (to start, there are some links to studies I have attached below). While race is not biology, racism can undoubtedly affect our biology, especially our health.  Racial social structures, from access to health care to one’s own racialized self-image, have the ability to impact the ways our bodies and immune systems develop. This means that race, while not a biological unit, can have important biological implications because of the effects of racism. Thus, solutions to racial inequalities and the problems of race relations are not going to emerge if a large percentage of the public holds on to the myth of biological races. There is currently one biological race in our species: Homo sapiens, and that does not mean that what we call “races” don’t exist. However, an issue arises when there are constructions of racial classifications, not as units of biology, but as ways to lump together groups of people with varying historical, linguistic, ethnic, religious, or other backgrounds (Taylor, 49). Additionally, these categories are not stagnant, they change over time as societies grow and diversify and alter their social, political and historical make-ups.

There is no genetic sequence unique to blacks or whites or Asians. In fact, these categories don’t reflect biological groupings. Its was difficult for me to believe (when I first learned) that there is more genetic variation in the diverse populations from the continent of Africa (who some would lump into a “black” category) than exists in all populations from outside of Africa (the rest of the world) combined. Additionally, there are no specific racial genes and even something thought to be as omnipresent as skin color works only in a limited manner as dark or light skin tells us only about an individual’s ancestry relative to the equator, not anything about the specific population or part of the planet they might be descended from. Therefore, the biological argument is inherently flawed because it does not hold any factual evidence.

Human DNA Sequences - More Variation and Less Race:

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/62133/21011_ftp.pdf?sequence=1

Human Variation: http://personal.uncc.edu/jmarks/pubs/tenfacts.pdf