Our recent book, Racism, Not Race, tackles a big lie: The idea that human beings have biological races.
Biological races do not exist in humans. Why, then, do so many people in the United States and other parts of the world continue to believe in this myth?
For one thing, humans vary. That’s obvious to our eyes. We see variation in outward appearances, from hair colors to shoe sizes to skin color. Human variation around the world is wondrous and real.
But genetic research over the past 50 years has shown that human variation does not equal racial difference. In the 1970s, evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin found that the amount of genetic variation within any human “race” is greater than the variation among races. Interestingly, because our species spent so much of its time in Africa, that’s where the most genetic variation is to be found today. Researchers have shown the variation between two Africans is on average greater than the variation between an African and a European or Asian person.
Related on the SLP
Today, even though geneticists have now disproven this myth, biological race remains widely accepted as fact. Beverly Daniel Tatum, a president emerita of Spelman College, describes racial thinking as a type of ideological “smog”: We all breathe racial smog without noticing it.
