Timothy McGhee

Blog 1:  Race as a Social Construct with Biological and Non-Biological Determinants

            In the film “Race:  The Power of Illusion ep. 1”, Pilar Ossorio reasserts the popular rhetoric that race is a social construct and that, “There’s as much or more diversity and genetic difference within any racial group as there is between people of different racial groups.”  Part of this rhetoric is an attempt by contemporary scholars to redress the racial ideologies that support white supremacy.  By espousing the socio-cultural reforms of the Civil Rights era, and directly countering biological racism, Ossorio joins the aggregation of scholars and researchers who expound the ideas of racial equality.  These types of scholars are addressing the issue of race with new language that denotes the intricate workings of racism and seeks to erase the notions of racial differences being biological.  This process at once relieves the descendants of racists of responsibility for the views of their ancestors by expounding a colorblind mantra, and seeks to quell the fervor behind minority population’s adamant conviction that racist processes are generationally inherited and ongoing.  I submit that by reducing the concept of race to a sociological construct, we are oversimplifying racial formation and the processes of human evolution.

In Alondra Nelson’s article “Genetic Genealogy Testing and the Pursuit of African Ancestry”, we learn that there are two pronounced schools of thought on racial formation; pragmatists and naturalists. Pragmatists believe race is totally a social construct revolving around indexes of power.  Naturalists believe that race is a consequence of influences by Nature and that there is a biological reality of race (note:  Nelson avoids the debate of whether Naturalists apply value to the differences).  Nelson poignantly details how both of these arguments have setbacks and are underdeveloped theories.  Of this she says,        

“Invoking scientific objectivity, naturalists may abjure responsibility for participation in research programs that presume inherent human difference and for how subsequent findings are socially reified.  On the other side, while pragmatists attend to past injuries and the potential risks of scientific racism when they consider recent developments in genetics research, some do not fully appreciate how ‘race’ can be a non-deterministic biological ‘discourse about the body’. 

I think Nelson uses some very ‘safe’ language to describe the positions, yet was very accurate in communicating the ideals of both groups.  When she says racial formation may include non-deterministic biological factors, she subversively steers the conversation to the arena of biology by pigeonholing the idea to ‘discourse about the body’.  What of biological determinants that affect behavior such as empathy, sensitivity, and collective consciousness?  How does racial formation play into our culturally inherited and innate behavior patterns? 

In an Anthropology of Human Origins class I took last semester the argument was bought up about new research finding that indigenous Africans have no calculable Neanderthal DNA, while Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, and mixed persons have anywhere between 1-7% of this genetic inheritance.  (Larson, p.256)

https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/neanderthal/

https://youtu.be/D8vYSiKE3E4

Understanding race as a sociological construct and a scientific concept will entail deconstructing the evidence that racial formation is both a sociological concept and has no proven biological determinants on social behavior, but perhaps there are other dimensions of humanity and human experience besides the social and the biological that need to be explored in mapping out racial formation.  I contend that just as research is being conducted to determine the advantages of having Neanderthal DNA such as immunity to certain pathogens, research investigations must be made into the sociocultural pathology of whiteness as it pertains to a propensity for violence and a lack of empathetic sensitivity.  James Baldwin said that, "I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” (Baldwin)

I consider myself a mixed person.  I have had my ancestry DNA done and I am 83% African from all parts of the continent and 17% European from the Northern Isles and Scandinavia.  I am quite sure that since my family has spent hundreds of years in the Diaspora that I too have some Neanderthal DNA.  This makes my questions that much more poignant and timely, because whether the answers are enriching or negating to the ideals of whiteness or blackness, I am affected just like countless others.  In the end, we are a human family and we must learn our origins while we accept that we are tied to a common destiny.  This planet belongs to all of us and we to it.  We must harmonize ourselves with ourselves if we are to all survive, thrive and continue to evolve.

Bibliography:

Larsen, C. S. (2008). Our origins: Discovering physical anthropology. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014.

Baldwin, J. (1963). The fire next time. New York: The Dial Press.

Nelson, A. (n.d.). The social life of DNA: Race, reparations, and reconciliation after the genome.