50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True

by Harrison, Guy P.

  I also read books. I wish more people appreciated the unique power of a book. Not because I happen to write books, but because I sincerely believe that books (most of them) are good for the world. One could make a case for the book being the most important and powerful invention of all time. Given the impact of the book on human history, it certainly has to make top ten, no doubt. Books are amazing little worlds that contain ideas and stories that never die, even when the authors do. Sadly, reading is not as valued or as common as some might assume. Did you know that once a third of American high school students graduate, they never read another book for the rest of their lives? Even worse, 42 percent of college graduates never read another book—ever. Perhaps most disheartening is the fact that more than three-fourths of American families did not buy or read a single book in all of 2007.5

  One of my favorite books is The Demon-Haunted World, by Carl Sagan. I first read it more than ten years ago but still flip through it occasionally. Whenever I read the words in that book I can “hear” Sagan speaking to me. Just by opening that book, he pays me a visit and shares some of his ideas, even though he died in 1996. If one is short on time and has only thirty minutes or so per day for reading, I suggest spending five of it doing a high-speed headline-skim of a couple of the most reputable news sites or newspapers, then use the remaining twenty-five minutes turning the pages of a good mindexpanding book or science magazine. High-quality nonfiction books and science magazines offer two things television news is unwilling or unable to provide much of these days: information presented in depth and a realistic perspective on the world.

  GO DEEPER…

  Books

  Baym, Geoffrey. From Cronkite to Colbert: The Evolution of Broadcast News. New York: Paradigm, 2009.

  Boorstin, Daniel J. Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York: Vintage, 1992.

  Hedges, Chris. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. New York: Nation Books, 2010.

  Postman, Neil, and Steve Powers. How to Watch TV News. New York: Penguin, 2008.

  Radford, Benjamin. Media Mythmakers: How Journalists, Activists, and Advertisers Mislead Us. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003.

  Shabo, Magedah E. Techniques of Propaganda and Persuasion. New York: Prestwick, 2008.

  Other Sources

  Archaeology.

  Cosmos.

  Discover.

  Focus.

  National Geographic.

  Nature.

  New Scientist.

  Popular Science.

  Science.

  Science Illustrated.

  Scientific American.

  Smithsonian Air and Space.

  The reality of human races is another commonsense “truth” destined to follow the flat Earth into oblivion.

  —Jared Diamond

  The lay concept of race does not correspond to the variation that exists in nature.

  —Joseph L. Graves Jr., The Emperor's New Clothes

  Race is a human invention.…We made it, we can unmake it.

  —Evelyn Hammonds

  Most people today believe with absolute confidence that humankind comes prepackaged as a collection of biologically sorted subgroups called “races.” These categories, according to the views of most people around the world, are natural, obvious, and undeniable. They also are widely believed to have profound implications for intelligence, physical ability, and even moral behavior. These beliefs are destructive, deadly, unscientific, and just plain wrong. There is no such thing as races, no naturally occurring biological categories of humans that match popular racial categories such as “black,” “white,” “Asian,” and so on. Race belief is one of the most important targets for skepticism because of the havoc it has wreaked throughout history and the great harm it continues to cause today.

  Few people ever think to doubt the concept of race because it's considered to be common sense. For example, anyone can look at a dark-skinned African, a light-skinned European, and a typical Chinese person and recognize immediately that they belong in different biological groups or “races,” right? If we can see races with our own eyes, then why question it? No one is going to confuse the African for the Asian, or the European for the African. They are different “kinds” of humans that fit into different biological categories. How can that be wrong? It's a nobrainer, right? Wrong; as we shall see in this chapter, it's very easy to dismantle that three-person lineup example and show why biological races are illogical, inconsistent, and nonexistent—except in our minds.

  Before we plunge in and explore some of the problems with race belief, however, it is important to be clear that this chapter is not about racism. Race belief does often lead to racism, of course, but this is not a lecture on morality, fairness, or how to make friends. Nothing in this chapter has anything to do with liberal versus conservative, evil versus good, or any form of political correctness. This chapter is concerned only with the reality of our biological diversity and the delusion of biological race categories. It also is important for readers to understand that rejecting the race concept is not a denial of the real biological diversity that exists, nor is it a rejection of the existence of “races” entirely. Biological races may not exist but cultural races certainly do. Yes, there really are “black people” and “white people” in America, for example. But these are cultural groups of our own creation. They are much more like clubs or organizations than subspecies based on origin and kinship. What we mistakenly see as nature's divisions are instead canyons of our own creation. This is good news, however, for if we invented biological races, then we can certainly decide to move on from them and begin to view ourselves in a more honest and realistic way.

  Aren't we different? Isn't biological diversity real? Don't people look differently and don't they have different colored skin, different facial features and hair types? Can't we often tell if someone is more or less related to other people? Of course; all that is true. But the key is that our biological diversity does not sensibly translate into our species being spilt into meaningful biological territories with firm borders around them. The more than one billion humans commonly referred to as “black people,” for example, are so genetically diverse that placing them all into one category, defined by kinship and distinct from other groups, is laughable in the light of scientific facts. Biological races do not exist because our species is too young, too closely related or blended—and the blending continues every moment of every day. This means we cannot intelligently divide ourselves up into anything like the traditional notions of racial groups such as “black,” “white” and “Asian.” It's like trying to draw lines in flowing water. It just doesn't work.

  After giving lectures about race and even writing a book on the subject, I have found that the most effective way to enable people to see why biological races are not real is to present them with simple thought experiments. Here are some that seem to work well:

  How many oceans are there? If you did well in middle school geography class, you probably answered “five”: Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Arctic, and Southern. But wait! That's not quite right. Five is the cultural answer, based on our twist of reality. The correct answer —nature's answer—is just one. Look at a globe if you don't believe me; we live on a one-ocean world. We made up five ocean names and attributed them to different regions of the same vast body of water. There may have been practical reasons for giving different names to different areas of water, but it doesn't give us an excuse to believe in the literal existence of five distinct oceans, as most people probably do. Any of this sound familiar?

  Bad boxes. Imagine that you are some sort of a giant god, and you have decided to organize the little people scurrying about around your feet by tossing them into boxes. Let's say you have five boxes and you decide to sort the people by their skin color, or if you like, some other physical trait such as hair or nose width. You carefully place them into their respective boxes, but immediately you see a problem. The boxes aren't very good.
They don't seem to have sides or tops and the people keep running back and forth to other boxes. To further complicate matters, many of the people you dropped into a specific box keep mating and having babies with people in different boxes. Soon you realize that your sorting is in vain. This is what biological race categories are like in the real world. They are boxes without sides or tops that have never done a good job of containing people and their genes.

  That three-person lineup in your head. Remember the darkskinned African, the Chinese person, and the light-skinned European I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter? In the minds of many people, a mental image of three such different-looking people standing side by side wins the case for race. But it shouldn't, and here's why.

  The human species cannot be fairly represented by a three-person lineup. It's a false and misleading example that fools us into thinking that we all fit neatly into a few distinct and obvious natural categories when in fact we do not. Consider what would happen if I presented you with a three-person lineup made up of an indigenous Fijian, an Ethiopian, and a Navajo Indian—all dressed in neutral clothes so no cultural or geographical clues were apparent. Most people would struggle to assign them to races. Race identification seems easy when we conveniently omit the billions of people who fit “in between” the members of that original three-person lineup.

  Consider how silly it would be to present a seven-foot-tall man next to a five-foot-tall man and declare: “Behold, proof that our species consists of a ‘tall' species and a ‘short' species.” We would laugh at that because we know immediately that there are a variety of heights in between the seven-footer and the five-footer. We should react the same way when we imagine a dark-skinned African standing next to lightskinned European or an Asian.

  A long, unbroken chain of humanity. If we somehow could see humankind, all seven billion of us, in one glance we would might recognize the reality of our borderless diversity immediately. We would see that there is no such thing as “obvious” or “commonsense” racial categories based on superficial traits such as skin color, hair texture, and facial features. Imagine if every human in the world were lined up, shoulder to shoulder, from darkest to lightest. You could walk that line for ten thousand years and you would never find a breakpoint, a natural border, where one race ends and another begins. If you were determined to create races, you would have to just arbitrarily create divisions were none exist, which is essentially how we ended up with races today. We drew borders around groups of people and then pretended that nature did it.

  How many races? If races are real and plain to see, then shouldn't we all be able to name them? So what are they? How many races are there? See, for all the talk, paperwork, and obsessing over race, there is no agreement on this most basic question. Ask ten random people to list “the races of humankind” and you are certain to get ten different lists. Why is this? For something that is supposed to be obvious and commonsense, race is awfully difficult to pin down. The reason for this is clear: races are make-believe. We could have from three races to one million races depending on whom you listen to, what criteria you decide to emphasize, and what criteria you decide to ignore.

  Race against time. As human-made categories and not natural biological categories, races are created and defined by the whim of cultures. The rules of race—written, rewritten, and often unwritten—have never been logical or consistent throughout history and never will be. They never can be because races are not based on solid science or lucid logic. And nothing is more flexible than fantasy.

  Let's imagine that we have a time machine and send a “white” Irishman back to the United States in 1820. Guess what? When he emerges at that time, he will still be Irish but he won't be “white” anymore. How can that be? It's because race rules change. Believe it or not, there was a time in US history when many Irish immigrants were viewed as nonwhite.

  Magic above the clouds. Did you know that a person's race can change today simply by flying? I know people in the Cayman Islands, for example, who do not identify themselves as “black” and their culture does not identify them as “black.” However, if they fly to the United States they somehow turn into “black” people upon landing. How does this amazing transformation occur at thirty-five thousand feet? Does something physically happen to their skin color, facial features, hair texture, DNA, blood, and ancestry? No, their race changes because race is a made-up game and different societies play the game with different rules.

  I saw this firsthand during my university days when I knew a lightskinned Haitian student who was “black” while attending school in the United States but then became “white” whenever she returned to her home country. This bizarre flip-flop of race could only happen because races are imaginary and not based on anything logical or scientific. Her race changed because Haiti reverses the “one-drop rule” as it is known in America. In the United States, some small observable African ancestry has traditionally meant a person is “black.” In Haiti, some small observable European ancestry traditionally means a person is “white.” Neither country can be said to be right and the other wrong in the way it determines race labels. It's just the way it's done, and it's a good example of how racial categories are constructed by culture rather than by nature.

  Genes versus races. For those who may think that the science of genetics will somehow validate the concept of race, think again. It certainly has not done so yet, and there is no good reason to think it ever will. If anything, it will continue to make it clear that the traditional race concept doesn't work. In 2010, a paper was published in Nature about the sequencing of sub-Saharan African genomes. One remarkable discovery to come out of that research was that the genetic distance between two bushmen who had lived their entire lives within walking distance of one other was greater than that between any one of them and a typical “white” European or Japanese Asian. Think about this: One of the South Africans and a random “white” European or Japanese Asian are more closely related than the two South Africans are to each other. Now, imagine if we made a police-style lineup with those two South African men, a “white” European, and a Japanese Asian. Which two would most people place into a race together? But while the two South Africans may look very similar on the outside, the biological reality beneath the surface tells a very different story.

  The truth before us is clear if we choose to recognize it. Our species simply does not accommodate naturally occurring race borders between vast groups of people. Cultures have created and artificially imposed them. The fact that so much death, cruelty, suffering, and social inefficiency has been caused or facilitated by this delusion demands that we finally accept the reality of who we are and abandon race belief.

  GO DEEPER…

  Books

  Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005.

  Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.

  Graves, Joseph L. The Race Myth: Why We Pretend Race Exists in America. New York: Plume, 2005.

  Harrison, Guy P. Race and Reality: What Everyone Should Know about Our Biological Diversity. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010.

  Olson, Steve. Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins. New York: Mariner Books, 2003.

  Other Sources

  “Race—The Power of an Illusion,” www.pbs.org/race.

  If you tell a Euro-American kid he can't play basketball because he cannot jump or an African American kid he can't swim because he can't float, you limit what they can become and further reinforce segregation. The message that genetically determined racial traits are responsible for athletic performances, as opposed to desire, coaching, and culture, reinforces racism. The effects of this racist ideology are felt far beyond the world of sports.

  —Joseph L. Graves, The Race Myth

  The games we play may seem like a trivial sideshow, but they are far from that in reality. Sports not only account for many billions of dollars in the world ec
onomy and consume countless waking hours, they also have a profound influence on how we perceive the biological diversity of our species. As we saw in the previous chapter, common racial groups such as “black,” “white,” “Hispanic,” and “Asian” are culturally created categories and do not hold up to scientific scrutiny as biological subsets of our species, which is what most people think they are. There are multiple reasons why belief in biological races continues to thrive even as many scientists reject it, but sports certainly is a major contributor to this misreading of our biological diversity. Even people who are not fans can't help but notice the barrage of suggestive images sports serve up to the world every day: once again, all the finalists in the men's Olympic 100-meter race are black; most college basketball and football coaches are white; white men own NFL teams and sit up in luxury boxes watching while their mostly black employees run around sweating and smashing into each other. Billions of people worldwide undoubtedly see confirmation of their biological race beliefs played out before them on the courts and playing fields of sports. But what they see confirms nothing of the sort.

  The intersection of race and sports is a tragic illusion that has worked to solidify the incorrect and disastrous belief that races are genetic prisons of destiny for us all. People have long tried to portray sports as a deep and accurate reflection of greater society. They see it as an honest manifestation of the way our species naturally sorts itself out. If one race produces the most champions in this sport or that, it is because success was written upon that race's DNA. It's a notion that comes in handy as reinforcement for traditional race belief. How can the existence of races be an illusion or a cultural creation when we see racial divisions and hierarchies rise to the surface on the sporting stage for all to see? The racial layering of sport results proves that the racial layering in society is natural and not the result of unjust history, immoral choices, evil actions, or unfair laws. No need for anyone to feel bad about anything or try to change anything. People of different races do some things better or worse than other races. All of this is wrong, of course, because the racial categories themselves make no sense. A black East African is likely to be more closely related to a white European than she is to a black South African. The rules of race—who gets assigned to which race—vary by culture today and they have varied over time. There is no logic or consistency to them. And, although race is believed to be all about kinship and ancestry, our popular race groups make a mockery of people's real kinship and ancestry. This alone makes it ridiculous to interpret the results of sports competitions through the lens of biological race.