Race as Shorthand, Not as Reality

It has always been impossible to define race. Most humans who have ever lived have had characteristics that were recognizable for their race, although nobody could ever figure out how many races there were. For example, are subsaharan Africans all one race? Bantu people (e.g. Nigeria) look very different from Ethiopians and San (e.g. from Namibia).

But in many societies the dominant people found it extremely important to define race with an exactitude that the concept will not allow. This was particularly true for people of mixed ancestry, as many of us are. This resulted in such absurdities as the one-drop rule in pre-Civil-War America, in which “one drop of black blood” made you black, and if your mother was a slave, you were a slave, even if you were only (like the children of Sally Hemings) one-eighth black. The former Apartheid leaders of South Africa struggled with this concept so much that, in their pitiful final days of rulership, they had to define people from India as honorary whites. No more needs to be added to this, other than that if you have not read Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (a slave and a master, who were both one-eighth black, were switched in the nursery), you should.

Still, look around you, and you will find that race is a useful shorthand for identifying people. Even the bluest of liberals cannot avoid it. And, for me, seeing all the different races helps me to rejoice in human diversity, more so than I would if I (perhaps more accurately) saw each person as unique. On the trams of Strasbourg, I enjoyed seeing Muslims and Jews, each in distinctive garb, mixing with saffron-robed Buddhist priests.

But many people want to make each race a category of blame. The most obvious modern example of this is that millions of conservatives consider all Muslims to deserve blame for the terrorist actions of a small number of them. The solution to terrorism, they believe, is to keep all Muslims out of America. By which they mean, all people Arabic ethnicity. (I’m not sure what they would do with red-headed white Muslims from Turkey or the former Yugoslavia.)

But I’m here to tell you, from personal experience, how evil this is. I am of partial Cherokee ancestry. My sixth great grandmother was Nancy Ward, the famous peace activist of the Cherokee Nation prior to the Trail of Tears. Her cousin, Tsiyu Gansini, was the last holdout of Cherokee warriors, whose Chickamauga warriors did not surrender until 1794 on Lookout Mountain, Tennessee. Tsiyu Gansini and his warriors committed numerous atrocities, and Nancy Ward could not stop them. Nancy Ward said “My cry is all for peace,” while Tsiyu Gansini said, “We are not yet conquered.” Today we would call the Chickamauga warriors terrorists.

And yet the United States considered all Cherokees to be guilty of the Chickamauga terrorism. In 1830, Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, and all Cherokees, not just terrorists (of whom none remained by that time) were forced out of their homeland by the United States Army in 1838. Even though the Cherokees by that time had their own written language, newspaper, constitution, Supreme Court, and they lived in white-man houses and had white-man agriculture,

the United States still considered them savages and took their land. It was the category of “Cherokee” that allowed the government to hold all members of the category responsible for the terrorist acts of a few.

When I think about the really nice Muslims I have known, including the couple who struck up a really friendly conversation with us on the tram in Strasbourg, I know none of them approved of Islamist terrorism, any more than my ancestor Nancy Ward approved of the terrorist acts of her cousin, Tsiyu Gansini.

Mark Twain, Scientist?

Don’t forget the Oklahoma Evolution Road Trip! If you are interested, please try to register by May 3 (click here). See blog entries below for more information. One of the things we will do during evenings when we finish our day trips is to discuss what we have seen, and maybe to discuss science in general. Here are some thoughts I would like to share about science. Feel free to post comments about your insights into this topic.

Novels and short stories are experiments. At least the good ones are. The author creates a character and circumstances, then sets the experiment in motion to see what happens. In the best stories, these experiments test hypotheses. Therefore the writer is not in complete control of the outcome: the plot must follow internal rules of cause and effect, even if these rules are not the same as those on our Earth.

One of my favorite examples is Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). He believed strongly that upper class and lower class people were not different in their basic abilities and character. In particular, he despised slavery because the slaves were as fully human as the slave-owners—an idea controversial at the time even in the North. This is particularly true because a single drop of black blood made you a potential slave: an octaroon (one-eighth black) could justifiably be held in bondage, according to the scholars of the South.

Twain did not simply rail against the unfairness of slavery and class, but ran fictional experiments to test the relevant hypotheses. Most people have heard of The Prince and the Pauper, where a prince and a pauper switched places. Fewer people have heard of Pudd’nhead Wilson.

In Pudd’nhead Wilson, a quadroon slave mother was taking care of the master’s baby and her own octaroon baby. The boys were visually indistinguishable. So she switched them. Experiment begun. Her baby grew up to act like a typical slave-owner, and the master’s fully-white son like a typical slave.

Enter the local amateur scholar, Mr. Wilson, whose unusual ways prompted the locals to call him Pudd’nhead. He was trying out a new scientific technology—fingerprints. He fingerprinted the two babies before the mammy switched them. Later, his fingerprint records were the convincing evidence that proved what had happened. Experiment ended. The erstwhile slave became the new master, and for the former master was sold “down the river.” These last three words of the book, said one reviewer, would have made a better title. “Down the river” was toward plantations where work and life were harder, though not as hard as in the Caribbean where slaves seldom lived long enough to reproduce.

In addition to using fiction to test hypotheses, Twain was interested in science. Fingerprints, of course. But he also wrote an essay, “Was the world made for man?” which was a direct criticism of Alfred Russel Wallace’s spiritualistic interpretation of evolution.

Twain also performed a literary experiment in The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg. (I read this novel in an original edition with uncut pages that was sold for a few pennies at a garage sale.) In this novel, Twain tested the honesty of local businessmen, and found them all to be corrupt. One wonders whether this literary experiment was entirely realistic, whether a typical set of small town businessmen would act this way. It was from Twain’s later, cynical years. But maybe it was realistic; there are days on which I share Twain’s cynicism.

Both the scientific questions (“What is?”) and the fictional questions (“What if?”) can be approached through hypothesis-testing.