What We Know About Race
WHEN Europeans set sail to explore the earth some 500 years ago, they wondered what sort of people they would meet. There were legends of giants who could wade into the ocean and crush a ship with one hand. There were tales of dog-headed men breathing flames. Would they meet the fabled “unsociables,” who fed on raw meat and whose large, protruding lip shaded them from the sun? Or would they see men with no mouths, who lived by smelling apples? And what about those with ears big enough to serve as wings or those said to lie on their backs under the shade of their single, large foot?
Men sailed the seas, scaled mountains, hacked their way through jungles, trudged through deserts, but nowhere did they find such strange creatures. Instead, explorers were surprised to discover people much like themselves. Christopher Columbus wrote: “In these islands [the West Indies] I have so far found no human monstrosities, as many expected, on the contrary, among all these peoples good looks are esteemed. . . . Thus I have neither found monsters nor any report of any, except . . . a people . . . who eat human flesh . . . They are no more malformed than the others.”
Classifying Mankind
Thus, with the exploration of the earth, human diversity was removed from the realm of fairy tale and myth. Peoples could be observed and studied. In time, scientists tried to classify them.
In 1735 Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus published his Systema Naturae. In it man was christened Homo sapiens, meaning “man the wise,” a term that one writer said was possibly the most oafishly arrogant definition ever given to any species! Linnaeus split mankind into five groups, which he described as follows:
AFRICAN: Black, phlegmatic, relaxed. Hair black, frizzy; skin silky; nose flat; lips tumid; crafty, indolent, negligent; anoints himself with grease; governed by caprice.
AMERICAN: Copper-colored, choleric, erect; hair black, straight, thick; nostrils wide; face harsh; beard scanty; obstinate, content free; paints himself with fine red lines; regulated by customs.
ASIATIC: Melancholy, rigid; hair black; eyes dark; severe, haughty, covetous; covered with loose garments; governed by opinions.
EUROPEAN: Fair, sanguine, brawny; hair yellow, brown, flowing; eyes blue; gentle, acute, inventive; covered with close vestments; governed by laws.
WILD MAN: Four-footed, mute, hairy.
Notice that while Linnaeus grouped mankind according to genetically acquired traits (skin color, hair texture, and so forth), he also made biased personality assessments. Linnaeus asserted that Europeans were “gentle, acute, inventive,” whereas he depicted Asiatics as “severe, haughty, covetous” and Africans as “crafty, indolent, negligent”!
But Linnaeus was wrong. Such personality traits have no place in modern race classifications, since scientific research has shown that within each human population, there is the same variety of temperaments as well as a similar range of intelligence. In other words, we find the same positive and negative qualities in every race of people.
Modern systems often classify humans in three groups based strictly on physical differences: (1) Caucasoids, with fair skin and straight or wavy hair; (2) Mongoloids, with yellowish skin and epicanthic folds around the eyes; and (3) Negroids, with dark skin and woolly hair. But not everybody fits neatly into one of these categories.
For example, the San and the Khoikhoi of southern Africa have coppery skin, woolly hair, and Mongoloid facial features. Some Indian peoples have dark skin but Caucasoid facial features. Aboriginal Australians have dark skin, but their woolly hair is often blond. Some Mongolians have Caucasoid eyes. There exists no clear dividing line.
These problems have caused many anthropologists to give up attempts to classify mankind, asserting that the term “race” has no scientific meaning or value.
UNESCO Declarations
Perhaps the most authoritative scientific declarations on race were made by a group of experts gathered together by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization). Meetings were held in 1950, 1951, 1964, and 1967 at which an international panel of anthropologists, zoologists, doctors, anatomists, and others jointly produced four statements on race. The final statement emphasized the following three points:
A “All men living today belong to the same species and descend from the same stock.” This point is confirmed by an even more eminent authority. The Bible says: “[God] made out of one man [Adam] every nation of men, to dwell upon the entire surface of the earth.”—Acts 17:26.
The UNESCO statement continues:
B “The division of the human species into ‘races’ is partly conventional and partly arbitrary and does not imply any hierarchy whatsoever. . . .
C “Current biological knowledge does not permit us to impute cultural achievements to differences in genetic potential. Differences in the achievements of different peoples should be attributed solely to their cultural history. The peoples of the world today appear to possess equal biological potentialities for attaining any level of civilization.”
The Scourge of Racism
So there is no basis for believing that any race is inherently superior to or has the right to dominate another. But people have not always acted in harmony with the facts. Consider, for example, the African slave trade.
When the European nations began to build colonial empires, it was economically profitable for them to exploit the indigenous peoples. But here was a paradox. Millions of Africans were being dragged from their homes, torn from their loved ones, chained, whipped, branded, sold like animals, and forced to work without pay until the day they died. How could this be morally justified by nations who claimed to be Christian and who were supposed to love their neighbor as themselves?—Luke 10:27.
The solution they chose was to dehumanize their victims. This was the reasoning of one anthropologist in the 1840’s:
“If the Negro and Australian are not our fellow creatures and of one family with ourselves but beings of an inferior order, and if our duties toward them were not contemplated . . . in any of the positive commands on which the morality of the Christian world is founded, our relations with these tribes will appear to be not very different from those which might be imagined to subsist between us and a race of orangutans.”
Those seeking support for the idea that nonwhite people were subhuman seized on Darwin’s theory of evolution. Colonial peoples, they argued, were on a lower rung of the evolutionary ladder than were whites. Others claimed that nonwhites were the result of a different evolutionary process and were not fully human. Others quoted the Bible, twisting scriptures to support their racist views.
Of course, many people didn’t swallow this thinking. Slavery has been abolished in most nations of the world. But discrimination, prejudice, and racism have lived on and have spilled over to ethnic groups that were races only in people’s imagination. Said one professor of zoology: “Since it would appear that anybody is entitled to create races to suit his fancy, politicians, special pleaders, and plain adventurers have engaged in race classifications. They devised specious racial labels to confer an aura of ‘scientific’ respectability on their pet notions and prejudices.”
The racist policies of Nazi Germany stand as a prime example. Although Adolf Hitler extolled the Aryan race, biologically there is no such thing. There never was. There are blond, blue-eyed Jews in Sweden, black Jews in Ethiopia, and Mongoloid Jews in China. Nevertheless, the Jews, and others, were the victims of a racist policy. That policy led to concentration camps, gas chambers, and the murder of six million Jews, and many others, such as Slavic peoples from Poland and the Soviet Union.
[Blurb on page 5]
Scientific research has shown that within each human population, there is the same variety in intelligence
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‘Politicians, special pleaders, and plain adventurers have devised specious racial labels to confer an aura of “scientific” respectability on their pet notions and prejudices’
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As these notices show, Africans were advertised and sold as if they were cattle