Would things change if we never ever say ‘race’ again?

When my then 6-year-old brown-skinned American cousin, Teresa, was being prepped up by her mom for bed, her mom accidentally put on too much white powder on her face. I was watching them when Teresa looked at her white-powdered cheeks and said, “Oh look I’m white, I now have more rights.” Her mom and I immediately looked at each other, bewildered at how a 6-year-old could already have a sense of “racial” bias that is based on the color of one’s skin.

There is a song in the Broadway musical “South Pacific” that has a line that goes “you’ve got to be taught to hate until you are 6 or 7 or 8.” It implied that hating people who are not like us is not innate and has got to be drummed in us by the first people around us – by our parents and members of our extended family. However, studies show that while “hate” may not be present in children the way adults know “hate”, “racial” bias gets children even younger than 6.

One study has found that at 9 months old, babies looked at the faces of those “races” that looked like their own longer than they did faces of other “races”. Compare that to babies 3-6 months old in the same study which did not show any. Another study showed that when uncertain, babies averaging 7 months old would rely on cues from faces that are of their same “race” than of a different “race”, even if both of the groups consist strangers.

I put “race” in quotation marks because in science, it just does not mean anything. There is nothing inside our most fundamental unit- our genes that could just come together and form genetic maps that can define and label you as “African”, “Malay”, “European” or “Asian”. Nada. Zilch. If you had your genes sequenced, one can never tell the details contained in your passport or birth certificate based on your genes. The accident of your birth is really a random rave party of genes that have been passed on across generations, across continents.

Race is a myth because each of us is jigsaw puzzle with 3 billion pairs that form a mosaic from various geographic origins. And to make matters even more enormously tricky, humans since time began would give anything to move and mate – everywhere and with everyone so pinning down race to skin color to a specific location is just intellectually hollow.

We invented “race” and throw it around in the news, billboards and other public communications because it was a convenient way to visually classify who is “us” and who is “them”. When we do that, we give in to how nature has wired us. It does not necessarily mean it is good.

There is nothing wrong with bias, per se. We all have it. It is how we can make quick decisions because nature does not want us getting stuck so it gave us brains that have evolved to classify. So babies classify faces according to the ones it is familiar with (more likely having the same skin as hers because skin color is so easy to detect). That forges social alliances and helps us to survive.

But no one stays a baby for long. Continued exposure to just what one is familiar with, well into adulthood could breed serious problems as to how we look at other people, which in turn will guide our actions towards one another. And we all know what happens when we see each other so differently to the extent that we just see the other side with one  blanket, uniform look like how we see immigrants or refugees. We do not see them as individuals with their own stories as you do your own self and the members of your own group.  

That is why when in 2007, James Watson, one of the Nobel prize-winning discoverers of the double-helix structure of DNA said that “All our social policies are based on the fact that their (blacks) intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”, he was scorned by the scientific community because that statement was a reflection of his horrible bias and not science. It became all the more laughably ironic, when his genes were examined and the scientists who probed them revealed that 16% of his genes had originated from those known to be of African descent.

I think that irony goes for all of us when we judge other people whom we think belong to another “race” less worthy than ours. Truth is, you are home to their genes too as much as yours is in them.

When the Genographic Project traced the genetic roots of all living humans today to an African mother ancestor,  you think we should have already kicked ourselves one final time for thinking that unless you were black, you had nothing to do with Africa. You may accept it or not, but evidence says so and that is the mighty thing about scientific evidence – you can go deny or ignore it but it will never go away.

More recently, another very important study is bringing us closer to consider “race” as an empty word.  It basically revealed that the genes that are responsible for skin pigmentation from having so few of it (white) to having lots of it (dark), are so enormously varied in African people and that these same variants are present in people who consider themselves European with light skin.

Even among the African sample, the range of their pigmentation run from as white as the skin of the typical East Asian to very dark. And the study says there is more to be uncovered yet. They also found that some of the oldest gene for light skin pigmentation, which could mean that our ancestors were really light skinned and just evolved darker skin to adapt to the harsh sun when they lost their hair.  This could destroy the often ill-meant joke that black skin equals “primitive”. In the light of this new finding, light skin could even be more primitive.

All of us start in our home environment, most likely with people who look like us. That is one of the most compelling reasons for going to school and for traveling– you will be exposed to people who do not think like you because they were not raised like you. You will also naturally be weaned from the biases of your own parents and your in-group and learn to think for yourself. That is how you can exploit the mosaic of genes each of us have been bestowed by nature across time. Each of us carries a part of each other, with NO exception.  This is how you can recover for our species the only valid concept of race there is: the human race. – Rappler.com