RACE: A classification of humans beings into different categories on the basis of their biological characteristics. There have been a variety of schemes for race classification based on physical characteristics such as skin colour, head shape, eye colour and shape, nose size and shape etc.......
Online Dictionary of the Social Sciences--© Robert Drislane, Ph.D. and Gary Parkinson, Ph.D. The online version of this dictionary is a product of Athabasca University and ICAAP

Yet the historical pattern of geographic variation evident in modern humans has been around for only a very brief time. Humans have spread extensively over the past 50,000 to 100,000 years, much more so than in any prior period of human evolution......
Smithsonian FAQ on Race and Anthropology

The slavery exemplified by the West Indian plantations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw a new scale and intensity, and a new social disembedding of Africans - a degradation of the slave condition. The new racial nature of slavery was related to more general proto-capitalist processes of alienation and commodification, and the emergence in the eighteenth century of a new nationalist language of political legitimization in Europe, which accompanied the growth of industrial capitalism and bureaucratic government.
Dan Hicks : Ethnicity, Race and the Archaeology of the Atlantic Slave Trade

"Race" is a very peculiar concept. It is one of those things that everybody thinks they understand, but gets less clear the harder we look at it. We easily distinguish between "us" and "them", and we very often find ways to make that difference seem precise. We also ascribe qualities to that difference, and it usually turns out that "we" have more of the qualities we think of as "good". But none of this serves to characterize "race" in such a way that it will be as useful to "them" as it is to"us".

When the set of customs we call "science" became fashionable Carl von Linne divided living things into classifications that were reasonably self-consistent because they were based on observations. He divided the human species into subgroups based on visually observed characteristics (like skin color and height) and geographical distribution, but it was always clear to scientists that we were one species because we had no difficulty interbreeding. It has become customary to refer to these subgroups of our species as "races" although there has never been any research that showed significant genetic differences between the "races".

The difficulty was that the classification of "races" as subspecies did not fit comfortably with the idea of evolution by natural selection.

Why did the "races" evolve in a short time compared to normal evolutionary processes (millions of years to walk upright, thousands to develop "races")?
Why were the "races" localized while the human species spread wherever it could?
Why were there almost as many races as languages?

Scientists could diminish the importance of these questions by not asking them, but that just meant that they remained as open as festering sores. Out of that metaphorical pustulence sprang the disease of racism.

There were two problems that made the evolution of racial characteristics a difficult problem. One was the phenomenon of "Social Darwinism", the conversion of evolutionary ideas into a classist ideology which justified the upward-mobility of late 19th-century industrialists and the techniques of corporate capitalism as "survival of the fittest". This faded away once they became the establishment and didn't want others to be as upwardly-mobile as they had been, but there was still a remnant of the idea that the end-product of human evolution was a wealthy northern european (or european-american) so that people of color were considered "naturally" inferior. Since most evolutionary biologists were of european stock it was difficult to get past that conditioning.

The other problem was that the rapidity of the evolution of racial characteristics was more typical of the purposeful breeding of domestic animals than the results of random natural selection. Only the domesticated dog has as wide a range of appearance as homo sapiens sapiens. That provided a question that scientists were afraid to ask:

If racial characteristics have come about by some other process than natural selection, a process more like the deliberate selection that leads to "breeds" in cattle and dogs, who did the selecting?

The scientists were afraid that their inability to answer would lead others to propose that some God or extraterrestrial being selectively bred humans into "races", perhaps in an effort to create us as some kind of domesticated cattle.

That is the kind of question that scientists not only can't answer, they are afraid even to ask, for fear that religious groups with powerful political connections will eviscerate their budgets. When faced with creationists they insist on natural selection as an article of dogma, even though they know it doesn't work the way they say it does. The result is that the origins of "racial" characteristics in human beings are still a dark mystery to those who don't subscribe to racist dogmata, although it is clear that those who do are simply wrong.

In the late 1960s I was engaged in managing the logistics of a physics department while students were holding demonstrations insisting that the university administration stop the Vietnam war. Why they thought that was possible when the administration couldn't even run a university properly puzzled me so much that I determined to try to use the ideas of modern physics to look carefully at human behavior.

Unfortunately my use of mathematical arguments and physical analogies has evidently made that essay too difficult for the average social scientist to understand. However, almost a half-century later the U.N. has had a well-publicized conference on race and racism, with a follow-up in Barbados which ejected all delegates, media, staff and other guests who were melanin-deficient, so it is clear that the notion of "race" has become something that is of global concern. Accordingly, it is time for me to give a less technical account of how "racial" characteristics evolved and what role they play in racism.

2. Evolution of Racial Characteristics

The primary difference between us and the other primates is that we communicate by using strings of abstract mouth-noises. Even those other primates who have been able to learn to communicate on our terms have to do so with gestures so they cannot communicate and use tools or travel fast at the same time.

Neither do they appear to have the same capacity for vocabulary that we do. The opportunity to cooperate at very sophisticated levels given by a rich and fluid means of communication is our real evolutionary advantage. It enables us to use our opposed thumb for more than just holding a stick.

It is generally the case that species that have an evolutionary advantage in their physiology have to evolve behaviors that protect that advantage. Antelopes do not learn to climb trees, they learn to run fast in the open. Fieldmice don't flee an enemy by running out in the open, they duck into holes in the ground. Human beings had the advantage that they could communicate with abstract mouth-noises. That requires two things to be useful: humans had to work in a group so communication would offer an advantage and they had to be extremely conformist so that the whole working group used the same mouth-noises to mean the same thing.

Neither of these is inherent in primate behavior, as we can see by comparing chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans.

This kind of strong cooperation and conformity comes at a price. It comes naturally to bees and ants, most of whom are born as expendable clones. Human beings are born after a long gestation period and it is even longer, a matter of years, before an infant human being can make a significant contribution to the group economy. Unlike the cloned ants and bees who can throw away their lives for a miniscule advantage to the hive, human children have to survive to protect the tribal investment they represent. That means they have to be aware of themselves as individuals and be capable of acting to protect that self from danger. We have to survive as individuals as well as a member of a group.

This set up an inherent conflict that we all still reflect: we had to be conformist for the group to survive and we had to be individualist for the self to survive. This is unique among animal species and is what makes us so hard to understand. We are, if we feel that our individuality is at risk, capable of taking some action that will put the group at risk. In fact the larger the group, the stronger the pressure toward conformity and the more likely that some individuals will express themselves in nonconformist ways.

That is the reason that the number thirteen is considered unlucky: the thirteenth individual in the group makes it unstable. A jury of twelve will come to a consensus more often than not, while it is easy for a parliament to get gridlocked unless it has an executive committee to tell it what to do.

A hunter-gatherer tribe that gets larger than a dozen or so people will fission into two daughter tribes. (Note that in special circumstances and with obvious consequences "men", "women" and "children" can be considered different sorts of "people"; as can sub-groups with different totems, called "Clans". But tribes of people in the mesolithic-neolithic transition that are larger than about a dozen individuals need some such explanation.)

The analogy to a physical situation that has similar forces is a liquid drop or an atomic nucleus, both of which fission when they get too big. We can expect not only that the conformist tribe would fission when it got so big it had too many individuals pulling in different directions; but the daughter-tribes after the fission would see each other as non-conformist and therefore dangerous, and would move apart.

[This phenomenon, and the analogy to physical processes, is explained in considerably more detail in Einstein's God and the Science of Zen that can be found on the internet at http://eingod.karleklund.net.]

This fission would cause a rapid radial migration as the population increased; which would also maintain the population at about a square kilometer per person. In a relatively short time (on a geological scale) all of the tolerable ecological niches would have been filled, even the ones that had to be reached by dangerous sea voyages or long marches in uncomfortable places, like the journey's to Australia and America.

3. After the Diaspora

When the global population was saturated at a level suitable for hunting and gathering fission was no longer possible. A new scheme would have to be invented to maintain the group at a size that was big enough to survive but small enough not to have too many conflicts between people whose individual personalities tended in opposite directions.

There are two obvious method of population control for a group at the technological level of a hunter-gatherer tribe: expelling those who are too old to be functional or those who are seen to be undesirable at birth. Since the old represent the group's archive of experience, and infants represent a long term investment with no immediate return, the better choice from a group-survival viewpoint is infanticide of the undesireable.

Nowadays we prefer to control population by preventing conception and inducing premature expulsion from the womb, but a primitive technology doesn't understand conception and the available methods for inducing abortion are dangerous for the mother. Besides, those methods are not selective in their effect.

The preferred method would be to kill "monster-births" the way Oedipus ("Clubfoot") was, by not making any extraordinary efforts to sustain life, e.g., by abandoning the infant in the wilderness.

But which infants should be culled?

One can suspect, based on modern statistics, that the number of obvious "monster-births" (like spina biffeda cases) in an otherwise healthy tribe would not be high enough to maintain an optimum population. This meant that the applicable criteria would have to be more ordinary, as well as limited to characteristics that could be determined by visual inspection. In other words the tribe would kill all the infants that didn't "look normal" which means look like the rest of us.

Thus, for perfectly reasonable evolutionary reasons, the human species would have, first, distributed itself over the globe in a relatively short time and, second, when that expansion was essentially complete, it would have bred itself into those local similarities of appearance that we call "racial" characteristics. It would have bred varieties of domesticated animals in the same way, by killing newborns that were not of the desireable kind.

This scenario would be confirmed if the "races" within the human species did not differ greatly in those characteristics that could not be found in a visual examination by a hunter-gatherer tribesperson, like blood-types, intelligence, and the like; which is exactly the case. .

There are also obvious environmental effects: a northern people who didn't eat fish livers would tend to have a vitamin D deficiency if they had too much melanin in their skin, so they would tend to select in lighter-complected infants because in that environment they'd grow up with better bones. This kind of selective breeding gets results much more quickly than natural selection and it can change pattern in just a few generations, so it is easily possible to go from a naturally healthy dark complexion to a near-albino state in a few hundred years where natural selection might well take much longer.

[In the specific case of people living within 600 miles of the North and Baltic seas, stable isotope analysis of bones show that the population shifted to grain and away from seafood almost completely, so the vitamin D deficiency in those people with a normal amount of melanin would result in severe bone defects very rapidly. This would cause a strong selection for melanin-deficiency.]

Thus, aside from those slight differences that are associated with appearance, and such local adaptations as sicklecell disease in malarial areas, the differences between the "races" are superficial and easily explained.

Unfortunately while this explanation is completely consistent with the scientific view of "race" it will not be a popular explanation.

The notion that "race" evolved as an inherently superficial characteristic will not be popular among racists or minority politicians because it will seem to trivialize the efforts to prevent or attain "racial" equality.

At the same time the notion that we used infanticide as a population control method for 50,000 years or so will not be greeted warmly by either side of the abortion controversy.

But for better or worse this scenario is still the only explanation offered that could take place rapidly enough to fit the time available, could link "race" to language and geography in the way that it is linked and produce "racial" characteristics that are easily identified and yet completely superficial.

I have been looking for thirty years. Unfortunately this is such an uncomfortable "new paradigm" that we may, in our ignorance, have to continue to suffer the effects of racism for the indefinite future. That being the case we should at least understand how racism works.

4. Agriculture

Xenophobia was a survival trait for paleolithic humans during the expansion phase because as long as they had a portable hunter-gatherer economy it kept them moving at a population density that could be supported by that economy. Things didn't change until the technology changed except in particularly lush localities.

One of these was the temperate rain forest of the American Northwest. The indians there had such a luxurious supply of fish, nuts and berries and game that they could settle permanently. They had permanent chiefs rather than ad hoc war-leaders, and they had such a surplus that the richer tribes could gain status by giving presents to poorer ones in the practice called "potlatch". This continued to be a satisfactory method of maintaining a conformist lifestyle and paleolithic population density until the european trappers made beaver skins into a cash crop and potlatch degenerated into the destruction of cheap woollen blankets as a status symbol.

The invention of agriculture, however, was a permanent change in technology that required a permanent change in attitude. A farmer can grow more food than his family can eat. This meant that there was a surplus that could be redistributed; but it also meant that fissioning was no longer a viable method of keeping the group small enough to function on the basis of mutual conformity.

The solution to that problem was ideology, in particular an agricultural god or goddess. By replacing conformity to each other with compliance to a supernatural entity the number of people who constituted a stable society could increase by orders of magnitude. This allowed the priests who took the surplus as offerings to redistribute it to specialist craftspeople like potters and metalworkers and warriors.

This kind of infrastructure, of warriors and priests and craftsmen supported by farmers and held together by a central religion, was the pattern of urbanized society from 3000 BCE to 1500 CE. After 1500 the patterns of the post-Neolithic Era started changing. We are in that period of change, usually called the Protestant-Industrial Revolution, and it will probably continue for another few hundred years.

5. Stratification

Urbanized Western Civilization after 1500 has lost one of the defining factors of the post-Neolithic agricultural empire: a powerful central religion that acts as a social glue by defining everyone's role as a decision by a shared God. That kind of religion is too simplistic for post-1500 society in which money increasingly takes over from aristocratic birth as the prime status symbol. Religion becomes a matter of personal choice and the religions of rich and poor are no longer the same As Toynbee has pointed out, that is the point of the decline and fall of a post-neolithic society; but after 1500 it merely tells us that a new layer of the middle class is being upwardly mobile.

This new fluid infrastructure of the industrial revolution means that there is individual, as opposed to institutional, response to stratification. No matter what else we are we are human beings whose edge over the other primates is the ability to communicate by abstract mouth-noises; and, as we are reminded by the anecdote of the Tower of Babel, the trick to using abstract mouth-noises is that we have to be highly conformist so that we use the same noises to mean the same things. In other words if we are not conformist we lose our evolutionary edge.

At the same time, if we are part of a stratified society we can't be conformist to anyone except those in our own stratum. The way we handle this is to react to others in terms of the difference between our and their position in the strata.

If we imagine a society with an elite and a non-elite, we observe that the elite do characteristic things:

1. They avoid contact with the non-elite by locating themselves in what we now call "Golden Ghettos"

2. When in the presence of the non-elite they practice stereotyped behavior, as when the Victorian englishman "dressed for dinner" even in the jungle,

3. They adopt the ideology that the non-elite are a different kind of entity from the elite, an ideology that can be called "eliteism" but includes racism, classism, sexism, etc. depending what characteristic identifies the non-elite

1. They spend their time isolated from the elite in what are now called "ghettos"

2. When in the presence of the elite they practice stereotyped behavior like "dumb insolence" or "Uncle Tomism"

3 They adopt one of a number of ideologies that include:

3.a "Esoteric superiority" or the belief that they are superior to the nominal elite in some way that only they know about, as in the Jewish belief that they are "God's Chosen People".

3.b "Warrior hostility" or the belief that the elite are "the Enemy" and regard the non-elite as defeated warriors. Unfortunately the elite is more likely to think of the non-elite as animals. Examples of warrior hostility include the Black Panther political ideology, the Black Muslim theology, Palestinian antisemitism, etc.

This elitist syndrome is ubiquitous in our culture: we almost all experience it in the form of "Father (Mother, Teacher, Preacher, Elected Official) knows best". The reason that it has not been noticed by anthropologists and social scientists is that researchers never study societies of people who are in higher strata than themselves (unless they are dead) so they are always looking down at their subjects. We can all study the effects by looking at the way our bosses react to us and to their bosses, and the way we react to our bosses and our employees.

One of the interesting modern examples is that Medical Doctors try to convince their patients that "Doctor knows best" and are surprised by the hostility and lawsuits that occur when that is not, in fact, true. Then they find it is often too late to be a mere mortal when faced by a trial lawyer.

6. Eliminating Racism

The only certain way of eliminating racism is to eliminate social stratification.

When no one is more or less elite than anyone else there is no need for the elitist syndrome and racism will dissapear along with other eliteisms. Unfortunately it takes only a moment to create the perception of racism and a generation to erase it.

There is a problem even in a Utopia. If we assume that the world is operated to provide the necessities of life for everyone in a sustainable manner, the infrastructure will need to be operated in the most efficient possible manner. This will mean that everything that can be done by a machine, robot or computer will be. There will be a residue of things that can't be done that way, perhaps because they require creativity or artistic sensibility, and they will be done by a "working class" that will constitute an elite. The rest of the population, the "Leisure Class" will be maintained to provide a viable gene pool for the species.

In order that the stratification does not produce any "classism" the elite "Working Class" will have to be "equal-on-the-average": they will have to be perceived as having an onerous level of responsibility because of their position, they will not be provided with any special food, clothing or shelter that is not required by their work, and their position will be open to any candidate who is qualified. That way they will, like the Shaman and War Chief of the paleolithic tribe, be considered functionally nonconformist but as having "paid their dues".

In that Utopian infrastructure there is need for anything equivalent to racism between the strata. Short of that the notion of "race" will always appear as a consequence of stratification because "race" is determined by the most primitive kind of difference, a difference of appearance.

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