On mainland Australia, European immigrants and their descendants viewed Aboriginal Australians and nonwhite, mostly Chinese, immigrants as inferior races. Toward the latter part of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, fears that the numbers of nonwhite immigrants were becoming too large resulted in what is historically known as the White Australia Policy, a series of laws and political movements aimed at promoting immigration of people recognized as “white” and limiting or excluding immigration of other groups of people. In one of the most famous declarations supporting the White Australia Policy, near the beginning of World War II, Australian prime minister John Curtin stated, “This country shall remain forever the home of the descendants of those people who came here in peace in order to establish in the South Seas an outpost of the British race.”12
A complex set of discrimination laws and social inequities ensued, including laws governing voting rights, land ownership, antimiscegenation, segregation, and child custody. Among the most infamous is known as the “Stolen Generations.” Children with mixed Australian Aboriginal and European ancestry were forcibly removed from their Aboriginal families and placed in institutions or adopted by white families under the assertion that they would lead better lives apart from their families. The practice persisted for a century (1869 through 1970) and affected thousands of children.
Australia's proximity to Japan and the Pacific battles of World War II made it the destination for thousands of Japanese refugees. Some married Australian citizens, and others wished to remain in Australia after the war. Protests over deportation efforts ultimately began to break down the White Australia Policy, resulting in revised laws, such as the Migration Act of 1958, and new policies removing race as a criterion for immigration.13 Although much has changed in Australia to overcome past racism, social and economic oppression remain as a legacy of historical racism.
We now turn our attention to North and South America, which were the most recent continents to be populated by humans. Toward the end of the last major ice age, when sea levels were still low, a broad land bridge known as Beringia connected Asia and North America (figure 7.4). Though Beringia's climate was cold, much of the coastline was free of ice, providing passage by foot for migrating people. The ancient ancestors of Native Americans entered North America across Beringia about fifteen thousand years ago. According to DNA analysis, they most probably were descendants of populations that resided in central Asia.14
Over time, as global temperatures rose and polar ice melted, sea levels climbed, and Beringia was inundated by a frigid and treacherous stretch of seawater. The newly formed Bering Strait separated the Asian and North American continents, effectively isolating human populations in the Americas for thousands of years.
European colonization of the Americas began at the close of the fifteenth century. Settlers from England, France, Sweden, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and, to a lesser extent, other parts of Europe arrived in large numbers over a relatively short period. The Spanish rapidly conquered the vast empires of the Inca, Maya, and Aztec, and the Portuguese established colonies in what is now Brazil. Along the northeast coast of what is now the United States, European (mostly British, Dutch, and German) settlers encountered tribes of Native Americans who lived as both agriculturalists and hunter-gatherers.
Figure 7.4. The approximate migration route for the ancestors of Native Americans toward the end of the last major ice age, about fifteen thousand years ago.
The stark juxtaposition of European settlers with culturally and genetically different native people that we've seen in the examples of South Africa and Australia was repeated in North America. Native Americans and European immigrants shared common ancestry dating to tens of thousands of years ago, when their ancestors belonged to the same population of people living in the Caucasus region near the Caspian and Black Seas. Their ancestral lines had separated more than thirty thousand years ago, geographically and reproductively, when the ancient ancestors of Europeans migrated westward and the ancient ancestors of Native Americans eastward. They shared common African as well as some postdiaspora variants. Newer variants that differed between them had arisen and accumulated independently since their ancestral separation. The Europeans perceived Native Americans as a separate and inferior race.
As in South Africa and Australia, infectious diseases devastated Native American populations in a series of outbreaks. Though most were inadvertent, at least one was intentional. In an infamous case of germ warfare, Lord Jeffrey Amherst, general commander of the British military during the French and Indian War, mandated that blankets exposed to smallpox victims be given to Native Americans during the conflict known as Pontiac's Rebellion. In Amherst's words from a letter to one of his officers, “You will do well to try to Innoculate the Indians by means of Blanketts, as well as to try every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race.”15
By the eighteenth century, massive transatlantic African slave importation supported the expansion of plantation agriculture in the Americas. Most African slaves were taken from the Atlantic coast of west Africa, extending into the central part of the continent. Because they came mostly from a limited region, the people imported as slaves represented a subset of the human genetic diversity in Africa, mostly from west African Bantu populations. They, too, shared common ancestry with the European and Native Americans, separated by more than sixty thousand years. African slaves constituted some of the largest numbers of immigrants to North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, numbering nearly four hundred thousand, and more than ten million for all of the Americas.16 Without freedom or human rights, their descendants lost most of their African cultures, languages, and religions, especially in North America, where they were forced to adopt those of their European American masters.
The westward expansion of European settlement in nineteenth-century North America rapidly accelerated with construction of the US Transcontinental Railroad, accompanied by a major influx of east Asian immigrants to the shores of California to work on the railroad and in mining, agriculture, and other forms of hard labor. Notions of white supremacy were so pervasive at the time that the large number of east Asian immigrants became known as the “yellow menace,” “yellow terror,” and “yellow peril.” National laws in the United States restricting or prohibiting immigration of people with Asian ancestry began with the Page Act of 1875 and continued with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the Geary Act of 1892, and the “Asiatic Barred Zone” of the Immigration Exclusion Act of 1917.17
By the end of the nineteenth century, the United States had sizable populations of people descended from African and European immigrants as well as smaller populations descended from east Asian immigrants. By then, Native Americans had been greatly reduced in number, and many were living on reservations. Although all people at the time were technically free and supposedly equal under the law, the vast majority remained segregated into their particular ethnic groups, with most of the wealth and power concentrated in the European American population.
The westward expansion of people with predominantly European ancestry entered regions that had been part of the Spanish conquest of North America, in a broad region encompassing what is now Texas, California, and the western states. Much of this region had previously been Mexican territory. Several states today retain their Spanish names, such as Colorado (colored), Nevada (snow covered), Montana (mountain), and Arizona (arid zone). Mating of Spanish colonists with Native Americans had been common, and their descendants generations later had settled throughout much of this part of North America. Today, most people with diverse ancestry that includes Native American and Spanish ancestry classify themselves as Hispanic or Latino.
Similar histories could be told for European colonialism nearly everywhere it happened. The perception of discrete races was the overall pattern because distinct populations of people were juxtaposed as a consequence of immigration. When viewed from a worldwide perspective, immigrants did
not come from distinct races. However, when viewed from the limited vantage of newly established immigrant colonies, slaves transported from their homelands, and native populations that originally occupied the regions, the presence of distinct races seemed obvious, particularly to colonizers whose preconceived notions of their inherent racial supremacy were embedded in their worldviews, their religious beliefs, and their traditions.
The legacy of this sort of racial categorization remains today. One of the most important points that emerges from that legacy is the distinction between race as a social construct and race as a supposed genetic construct. As we've seen, racial classification makes little sense when viewed in a worldwide genetic context. DNA analysis has confirmed in abundant detail what was partially known from historical and archaeological evidence, which is that complex and massive migration events over the past four thousand years have spread DNA variants in a complex and diverse way throughout most of the people of the world.18 The overwhelming majority of people on Earth have inherited a mix of variants tracing to major migration events such as these. As one anthropologist put it, “We're all mongrels, we've always been mixing,”19
Race as a set of social constructs, however, carries a very different meaning and importance than the notion of races as discrete genetic entities. The social constructs of race differ among nations as political categories because they are based more on the immigration histories of those nations than on worldwide genetic diversity. Recall the statement uttered in 1959 by the judge in the Loving v. Virginia antimiscegenation case cited in chapter 1: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents…. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”20 Such a statement reflects more the perception of race as influenced by US immigration history than the complex genetic histories of people in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas.
A good example of how racial classification is more social than genetic is the racial classification scheme of the US Census. The 2010 census first separated Hispanic classification from race by asking people to classify themselves as Hispanic or non-Hispanic. It then asked all respondents—regardless of their self-classification as Hispanic or non-Hispanic—to further classify themselves into one of the five following racial categories:
White – A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or north Africa.
Black or African American – A person having origins in any of the Black racial groups of Africa.
American Indian or Alaska Native – A person having origins in any of the original peoples of North and South America (including Central America) and who maintains tribal affiliation or community attachment.
Asian – A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander – A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, or other Pacific Islands.21
People who classified themselves into the American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander categories were further asked to subclassify themselves. American Indian or Alaska Native respondents were asked to name their tribal affiliation, Asian respondents were asked to name the country of their ancestral origin, and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander respondents were asked to name the island of their ancestral origin. No such subcategorization was requested for the White and Black categories.
This lack of subcategories for Black and White does not reflect a lack of genetic diversity; people who self-categorize as Black and White ethnic groups in the United States are genetically diverse. Subcategorization in these groups, however, is mostly impossible and has little meaning. Large proportions of people who self-classify into these groups cannot identify a specific country or a specific region for their ancestry, often because some of their immigrant ancestors entered the Americas many generations ago, and their lines of ancestry often trace to various countries. In other categories, however, a relatively large number of people are themselves immigrants or are the recent descendants of immigrants and can thus trace their ancestry to a particular location.
During the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, worldwide immigration from various parts of the world has vastly diversified the populations of many nations. Diversity in the United States, for instance, is far greater now than it was a century ago. And diversity continues to increase. Taboos against antimiscegenation have lost the prominence they once had, although they most certainly have not disappeared. The once-distinct lines of segregation have gradually started to blur.
Race as a social construct is real and meaningful. According to Pilar Ossorio, professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin and an expert on both social and biological aspects of race,
Race is deeply rooted in the consciousness of individuals and groups, and it structures our lives and our physical world in myriad ways. It is a strong predictor of where people live, what schools they attend, where and how their spirituality is practiced, what jobs they have, and the amount of income they will earn. Race is real because human beings continually create and recreate it through the process of racialization.22
However, race as a social construct is neither universal nor constant. It varies depending on historical, social, and political norms. For instance, apartheid laws in South Africa classified Bantu and Khoisan people into different categories (Black and Coloured, respectively), whereas the US Census defines all people “having origins in any of the Black racial groups of Africa” simply as Black. The social constructs of race can also change over time and across different contexts. As Ossorio explains,
There is no unitary definition of race, no definition that applies in all places, at all times, and for all purposes. Scholars who include race as a variable in their studies must operationalize the concept of race in a manner that meets the needs of their study, while acknowledging that such “working definitions” merely “fulfill the need for an analytical strategy, they do not reflect a fixed social or biological reality.”23
Though it may be tempting to promote the utopian ideal of a truly “colorblind” world where race has nothing to do with social, political, or economic status, such an ideal is unrealistic—at least, in today's world and in the foreseeable future. The legacy of past and current racism is powerful and overwhelming. Though enforced racial segregation is no longer legal in the United States, racial distinctions for neighborhoods remain evident in every major US city, and such distinctions are often correlated with economic status. The fact that public schools in the United States are governed and funded largely by geographic location ensures that racial inequality in basic education will persist in spite of efforts targeted at its mitigation. Inequality in employment, public services, healthcare, and many other aspects of society persist and are strongly correlated with racial classification, often as a remnant of past discrimination.
Recognizing how modern perceptions of race arose as artifacts of immigration history, rather than as any sort of definable genetic boundaries or biological basis for race, is essential for understanding what race is and what it is not. Shifting the perception of race away from the notion of a genetic construct and toward the reality of a social construct is critical for what will continue to be a long battle toward eventually defeating racism and purging its legacy.
The evidence we've discussed reveals how the human species has evolved since our African origin and how people ultimately spread to occupy the habitable world. The evidence in our DNA shows that genetically we all are strikingly similar to one another. The common chimpanzee, though its natural range covers just a small part of west-central Africa, is genetically more diverse among its populations than are human populations spread across the continents of the w
orld.1 As humans, we are all closely related—members of the same family, tracing our origins to a common homeland in Africa.
Because its focus is on science, this book has touched only briefly on the history of racism. A full exploration of that history chronicles some of the most unspeakable acts of mass torture and cruelty ever inflicted upon people. The atrocities of centuries-long racial persecution have for too long been sanitized from histories, and many people are unaware of this horrific side of human behavior during the past five centuries. The tide has turned, and a number of well-written, candid, and detailed accounts of the history of racism are now available as books, websites, and documentaries. They deserve a prominent place in historical accounts, complemented by scientific evidence of the type presented here. The history of racism must never be forgotten and should be a principal motivation for the ongoing battle to overcome its legacy.
That history includes a period when proponents of white supremacy used supposed science to promote their cause. A movement now called “scientific racism” was most influential during a period lasting from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth century, lingering to some degree even today. Part of its purpose was to preserve the view that nonwhite people were members of distinct races, separate and subordinate to the white race, even to the point where, according to some, nonwhite races did not merit inclusion within the human species. Hypotheses collectively known as polygenism posited separate biological origins of different races, an extreme and early version of the multiregional hypothesis of human origins. To some, each race was considered as a separate and distinct species, with only the white race classified as human. Often, proponents mixed Christian theology with their supposedly scientific speculations to claim that Adam and Eve were the original parents of only the white race, other so-called races having allegedly evolved from animals. Under such a scheme, nonwhite people were legally classified as property, just as domestic animals were regarded as property under the law.2 This belief was one of several used to justify slavery and to deny human rights, and it supported an economic empire of slavery and racial subjugation. Eugenic and antimiscegenation laws, promoted as science, outlasted slavery by a century and often longer, persisting even into the late twentieth century in some places. There are those who still believe that notions of racial purity are biologically and theologically sound, and therefore desirable, in spite of the fact that current genetic evidence has obliterated all justification for such notions.
Everyone Is African Page 16