Species vs. Race: My Perspective on Humankind

In this article I want to discuss my theory on race. The reason is that I so often find myself getting into debates regarding race. And usually halfway through the conversation I realize my interlocutor did not actually grasp my perspective on race because they inserted their own ideas somewhere into my argument. This has happened several times in just the past week, and frankly, I think it’s time I did something to clarify what my critical theorist view of race really is. Now, most of the time when I am in a discussion about race I am given the impression that the average person does not hold to a concrete definition, but are rather ambivalent about the topic altogether. But the term is used in some amorphous equivocation to suit the needs of a given person at a given time. The most empirically false assertions, however; are those that confuse race with speciation.

SPECIATION As you can see, the title of this article is Species vs. Race and the reason for that is very simple. I view humankind as a single, viable species, and that is in lieu of there being differing races. This is because I adhere to scientifically valid evidence held in schools of biology and anthropology. So, to explain by what I mean by “viable” species: it is a reference to genetic viability, which is the ability of the genes present in an organism to produce cells that proliferate, survive their organic environment and consistently reproduce. Despite there being superficial differences in racial phenotypes (the physical attributes of humans) there is almost never a case where interracial offspring of humans are rendered sterile, and if there are cases, they are almost never correlated to the couple’s racial background, but rather their individual lineages. In fact, any perception that miscegenation (that’s interracial reproduction) produces somehow weaker or less intelligent offspring is just scientifically invalid. The opposite is true, actually. There is no such thing as interracial reproduction at the cellular level, and this is evidenced through the use of blood transfusions. Blood types based on alleles (which are attributes of genes shared in all humans) and factors stemming from antigens in red blood cells (which goes down to the molecular level) are basically distributed non-correlatively throughout all of the human species’ genome. There are only four categories for such blood types: A, B, AB, and the O categories. And these types are found around the world regardless of a person’s phenotype.

The human species shares ancestors with extant great apes, but we are not descended from them, as many people misattribute the claim. Rather, we are the result of some six million years of development out of Africa and Asia as a primate known as Australopithecus. Currently scientists are near the consensus that there have been fifteen to twenty different species of hominid (human relatives) throughout at least 4.2 million years. Through the process of migration and ecological adaptation our ancient ancestors developed genetically diverse answers to problems regarding food and climate. But the genetic foundations of our ancient ancestors did not really diverge in the superficially apparent sense until two million years ago. And like dogs of differing bone structure and hair patterns and colors, humans of differing phenotypes moved as tribes and populated key regions around Eurasia after leaving Africa. This pattern of migration is known to scientists through examining the path of mitochondrial DNA in fossilized human remains. Mitochondrial DNA could be termed “the mother’s DNA”, because we can trace all human mitochondrial DNA to a common female ancestor known as mitochondrial Eve- but also because we inherit our mitochondrial DNA from our mothers. The consistency of mitochondrial DNA and our genetic viability shows that we are genetically the same species. And this dispels any attempt to place significance on racial differences. What’s more, as far as we know, humans share a bell-curve of the same neurological attributes. And the neural network of the human brain is so complex that it is highly unlikely that we could be genetically viable while having drastically different mental faculties. Actually, the cognitive functions of the human species are more or less the same, with a mere variance in neurological activity, but, like what’s found in blood types, variation is not correlated with race, but between individual lineages dispersed among races.

COGNITIVE ABILITIES

So humans can reproduce viably and are all commonly linked by blood types that do not correlate with their outward appearances. But then what about those phenotypes? Some people have said even phenotypes are important, socially and racially, because we cannot get past a person’s appearance without at least making a fleeting judgement about their character. Well, although that is true, I do not place nearly as much importance on a person’s initial appearance than I do about their demeanor, body language, and verbal language. The initial state of a human’s awareness of other humans in a crowd is kind of like a blur of anthropomorphized shadows. We all have common silhouettes, more or less, that is, an anthropomorphic shape consisting of a head, shoulders, arms, legs, and an upright posture distinct from other bipedal animals such as birds or kangaroos. This shape is not shared by other animals- not even our closest relatives, the great apes. And it would take a trick of the brain to mistake other extant animals on this Earth for members of our species. Humans, although diverse, are essentially uniform in this fundamental shape. The cognitive phenomenon pareidolia has also shown several cases where humans see human faces in inanimate objects. And babies can recognize and become familiar with faces in a short amount of time. In developmental psychology it is known that infants are instinctually prone to recognize facial patterns, and this plays a role in developing empathy and linguistic capabilities. Facial recognition is connected with neural correlates which are patterns in the human brain that aid in developing consciousness and sentience. This is just another trait that is shared with all members of the human species, and it is what makes us distinct from other animals that lack self-awareness or that of other members of the same species. Of course some animals can recognize their kin, but this is often considered a sign of intelligence relative to other species. And when there are humans that fail to exhibit development in this faculty, they are often diagnosed with psychological disabilities. But they are outliers when we are discussing the human species as a whole. Dog and horse breeding is an arbitrary social construct based on traditionalism and human social conventions culminating in something called artificial selection. Racialization is the same situation. The superficial distinctions we see between races result from long-term tribalism and resource conflict, historically. So, for example, epicanthic eyes of East Asian people are so common in Asia due to an extensive evolutionary lineage that must have initiated somewhere in central Eurasia due to ecological effectors such as snowy terrain, but also due to an attraction to the trait. But the epicanthic eye is actually not exclusive to East Asia and people even in Northern Europe have it but do not share any known lineage to East Asians. And even if that were the case, it would only prove the genetic viability of the human species even further. I often say that what people call race should more be defined along the same lines as dog or horse breeds. I know that is a bold and controversial statement to make, so I am happy to hear different opinions. But the main point is that the differences we see in the human species result from complex ecological and social variables, but these ultimately develop due to the choices and circumstances of our ancient ancestors more than those of genealogical and biologically divisive traits. Considering that humans are all genetically viable; and that we possess the same cognitive faculties; and that the superficial differences we see in each other are explained through ecology, natural selection, and artificial selection, rather than fundamentally differing genomes; this begs the question: What is race then? The answer is: race is a social construct. But the question that follows should be: how is race a social construct? And that can be answered by understanding the following key factors of human sociology: cultural mores, cultural bias, linguistic relativism, and religion.

CULTURAL MORES

A person’s views on physical science and the fundamentals of their argumentation are informed by the majority population (notwithstanding their agreement or disagreement with the prevailing norms). And this is regardless of their race or how they perceive their place in society. If we are to be objective, cultural mores (the norms passed down through cultural upbringing) are not objective truths, nor are they substantiated by objective analysis. In other words, cultures in and of themselves are not what define humans in the empirical sense. They are mere descriptions of cognitive beliefs, processes and subsequent behaviors. But cultural mores are often factors in how cognitive racialization is manifested within a given culture. Individuals most influenced by cultural mores experience something known as cultural bias, which is a cognitive bias that compels them to assess social interactions through the lens of their cultural upbringing and is thus a tell that the individual is a proponent of racializing norms. This all seems specific or abstract at first, but even norms with things as simple as expressive behavior vis-à-vis reserved and stoic behavior could be factors in how racializing occurs.

CULTURAL BIAS People of a reserved cultural background will be less receptive to expressive cultures because their cultural bias tends to repel them from expressive behavior. But this is not any indicator that this is a racial difference, because people of all races exhibit varying personality types. As an educator in Japan, examples crop up all the time among school children that they are so full of variety and differing interests. But that starts to change when their social reward and punishment system is guided by cultural mores starting at around junior high school. And in the inverse sense, I was a reserved child starting out my life in elementary school in the US. I was very introverted and spent a lot of time in my own head, not minding others too much. But I was pressured through our system of reward and punishment to behave in a more expressive and extroverted fashion. Additionally, the extremes of cultural bias manifest when a given society conflates culture with race in the stereotypical sense. Meaning, if a society points to a person's ancestral lineage in addition to superficial features as being markers of their cultural ingroup, they are proponents of racializing cultural bias. And this is how a social construct is formed and enforced in social groups. Key indicators of this cultural bias are easy to discern, simply look at the faces printed on money and the statues sculpted to depict cultural heroes of that society. And likewise, to understand whether or not this cultural bias is upheld, there are cases where members of the same society deface or tear down these cultural symbols. This concept of cultural conflation of race in symbology and state sanctioned symbolism relates to the field of semiotics (which is the study of symbology and how humans perceive signs as linguistic markers). And like the semiotic indications of cultural bias, language itself has also been a means of promoting racialization.

LINGUISTIC RELATIVISM

Humans are the only species on Earth that is capable of verbal language. Since I am a humanist, I find any attempts to demonstrate language in animals, outside of the primate family, insipid. But as clever as we are as a species, languages really are the barriers they are said to be. And oftentimes language has been a tool to solidify cultural mores and biases. As many know, Hitler attempted to weaponize the German language specifically in his notorious book, Mein Kampf, to exclude non-Germans from his concept of Volk or a homogeneous and racially pure population. But it doesn’t take much critical thought to understand that language is not at all connected to race. In fact, I have German and Italian ancestry and I can only speak intermediate German and not a lick of Italian. From a cognitive and developmental standpoint, language and linguistic relativism plays a conceptual role in race as a social construct because the perception of specific tasks and issues are put in completely different contexts depending on the language that is used. But these contexts are mere cognitive tricks of language. And just how phrasing and semantics can change even within a given language --to the point where fluent speakers can talk unintelligibly between one another-- languages are not indicators of race. There are innumerable cases that have occurred, occur now, and will continue to occur, where people of a minority adopt the same cognitive approach to language and cultural norms as the majority. Specific traditions and beliefs, such as religion also played a role in transferring language. But like linguistic relativism, religion has often been a means to disseminate racialization. RELIGION Religion often takes turns in the values hierarchies of ethnic groups depending on whether cultural mores are directed via secular means, or through religious beliefs. But religion has often been the central impetus for racial interaction, conflict, or lack of contact. In fact much of the conflict we see in the colonial period was based in religion. And like most post-secular theorists, I attribute much of the violence and culture clashes to power dynamics (the seeking of legitimacy to rule over others) and economic motivations. Religion can be a barrier to miscegenation, but it often plays a role in reinforcing racial identities as well. History has been replete with examples of this, and this has been noted by influential scholars such as Edward Said and Frantz Fanon. Said revealed that the literally repulsive portrayal Western nations made of near Eastern Muslim cultures in art and narrative did a lot of functional work to keep the cultures out of genuine contact with each other. And this was exacerbated by religion on both sides. And since religions of the Abrahamic branch function dogmatically, families of each of them have historically required religious conformity and conversion. And Fanon famously proclaimed that the utility of Christianity in the New World colonies was an instrument to instill “the ways of the white man, of the master, of the oppressor.” For Americans in the times of chattel slavery, the Civil War period, the segregation period, and to this day, Fanon’s critique of white Christianity lives on. It was a tool used to exacerbate the process of racialization in the minds of everyone in the nation. To be white was to be godly and to be black was to be unclean and wicked. This religious influence paved the way for specific hate symbology and further resistance to miscegenation and recognition that we are of the same species. Since the crusades, the division between Christian, Jew and Muslim has been superficially identified with racial phenotypes. And this conflation is still prevalent in Muslim cultures where I have heard, often enough, Muslim scholars state that North Americans and Europeans are Christians even if they don’t identify as such. This declaration is also a result of the pressure they feel to be tolerant to “people of the book” (meaning Christians and their Bible, Jews and their Torah, and of course Muslims and their Quran). This is both an indication of cognitive dissonance and cultural bias. As with race, religion is oftentimes conflated and predicated on culture. And these are just more features of a social construct. Well, I think it is time to wrap it up from here. So far I discussed how humankind is a species and the concept that race is a social construct based on the key factors: speciation, cognitive abilities, cultural mores, cultural bias, linguistic relativism, and religion. Before I conclude, I want to just reassure people that my perspective on race is not colorblindness. The difference is that where colorblindness suggests we ignore people's differences to the extreme. I am saying we should absolutely recognize unique members of our species and even celebrate cultural plurality. I don't even mind if races persist to exist in a majority sense. But I do want to dispel tensions, hatred and exploitation by nefarious groups that still try to use outmoded concepts about race as a means to harm and oppress people. And that goes for any given society. Because as Martin Luther King Jr. said, “an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”. As a species we are put to the challenge to prevent our own extinction on this planet. I believe it is my life mission to at least be a proponent for taking proactive measures against the extinction of the human species. And this means I have to also share my theory on race in the framework of peace education.

Currently all nation states (and I mean all 195 countries recognized by the UN) are failing at educating the general public on racism, and I think this is a serious issue considering we will eventually face extinction as a species sometime down the road. In this vein, my next article will discuss the concept of nationalism and my distrust of nation states as legitimate governing institutions.