Bunch of Amateurs (25 page)

Does race exist? Of course it does. We see it every day. Guy steals a purse, and the cop asks, What did he look like? And we all easily say: He was a six-foot-tall black guy, or a five-and-a-half-foot-tall Asian man, or a white guy with long red hair. As a set of broad descriptions of how people look, race exists.

If you were to look at me, you would easily categorize me as Caucasian. I’m the ruddy sort that burns quickly, with reddish hair now shading into white. Most people hazarding a guess might say Scots-Irish, which is what I have always said. Just to be sure, I once submitted my DNA to see what the incontrovertible scientific evidence might show. The result was surprising: I carry the DNA marker found in great abundance among the Fulani Tribe of contemporary Nigeria.

Sure, maybe the marker is about as significant as my Charlemagne genes. On the other hand, that very Nigerian coast is the tribal location where many slaves were captured and held in the notorious slave castles until traders’ galleys could transport them to American ports. The main harbor that received more slaves than any other on the eastern seaboard was Charleston, South Carolina. My mother’s family has lived there nearly three hundred years. Maybe I have a Thomas Jefferson problem.

Since I had my blood work done, my nephew Chance Algar started poking around the distant family tree, and one Christmas he called me over to his computer. He showed me my great-great-grandfather—
the man for whom I am named—in the 1860 census. But that man does not turn up on the census roles in 1870. Presumably, he died for the Confederate cause. His widow, Mary, along with their four children moved back in with her parents. In 1870 this older couple is marked on the census as “colored,” as are the neighbors on their street. But Mary and her children are marked white, their designation in the previous census. In all likelihood, Mary
and
her parents were of mixed race. But Mary could pass for white. Had the census-taker penciled in a single letter “c” on that form, how different might be the genetic trajectory of my then-toddler great-grandfather. But there it is: the probable origin of my genetic marker. I am one-sixteenth African-American, or in the pseudo-scientific jargon of that time, a mustefino or a hexadecaroon.

Yet it’s no longer apparent in the way I now look. I am Caucasian as surely as my Fulani cousins are black: because race is a set of
visual
cues, mainly skin shade but also nose shape, eyelid folds, cheekbone prominence, etc. We hold these vague blueprints of race in our heads because, as primates, one of the great tools of consciousness we possess is observing patterns in nature. It’s no surprise that we’d train this talent on ourselves.

The notion of race as an unchanging constant through time is an accepted truth as old as the Bible. When Noah’s Flood receded, the three boys Japheth, Shem, and Ham went out into the world to engender, respectively, white people, Semites and all others. This doesn’t quite shake out into the latter notions of white, black, and yellow, but you get the idea. The terms are still with us. The early word “Shemitic” settled down to become “semitic.” And, among amateur chroniclers writing in the ponderous style of the town historian, it’s not hard to find references to the “Hamitic race” as a way of saying “black folks.” Japheth never became a common adjective, perhaps because of those unwieldy consonants. More likely, it’s because whites appointed themselves the Adamic task of naming the other races. It was not until the Age of Reason that scientists tried to figure
out empirically what race meant and how it came to be. The signal year was 1776 with the publication of a book,
On the Natural Variety of Mankind
, by German biologist Frederick Blumenbach.

In his day, Blumenbach’s theory had a certain symmetry that made it the very model of good science. These days, his theory seems insane. He argued that Native Americans were the transitional race that eventually led to Asians. (Don’t try to work out the geography of this, it will make your head explode.) And another group—which Blumenbach simply conjured from a faraway people, the “Malaysians”—evolved over time to become Africans. (Again, if you’re puzzling out the geography, watch your head.)

At the center of all this change was the white race, which was constant. Blumenbach believed darkness was a sign of change from the original. All of mankind had fallen from perfection, but the darker you were, the farther you had fallen. As a result, the best way to locate the original Garden of Eden, according to Blumenbach, was to follow the trail of human … beauty. The hotter the women, the hunkier the men, the closer you were to what was left of God’s first Paradise. Here’s Blumenbach, explaining the etymology of the new word he hoped to coin:

Blumenbach’s theory is totally forgotten today by everybody (except maybe Georgians) but this single word and the oceans of misconceptions that have sprung from it probably are owed to some one trip Blumenbach made to the area where a local girl gave him a lusty wink. The word itself
is
lovely. Say it:
Caucasian
. The word flows off the tongue like a stream trickling out of Eden. Its soothing and genteel murmur poses quite a patrician contrast to the field-labor grunts
of the hard
g
’s in Negroid and Mongoloid. Caucasian. When you say it, the exotic isolation of those mountains intimates a biblical narrative. You can almost see it when you say it: the early white forebears walking away from paradise to trek to Europe and begin the difficult task of creating Western Civilization.

Ever since Blumenbach launched this word two and a half centuries ago, the effort to pin down the exact and scientific meaning of race has never ceased and has never settled into any undisputed categories. Even today, the US Census is little more than an explosion of ethnic agony that arrives every ten years like constitutional clockwork.

The number of races has expanded and contracted wildly between Blumenbach and now, depending on the mood of the culture. The basic three have gone through scores of revisions, growing as high as Ernst Haeckel’s thirty-four different races in 1873 or Paul Topinard’s nineteen in 1885 or Stanley Garn’s nine in 1971. Today, we nervously ask if you’re white, African-American, Native American, Asian, Hispanic, or of Hawaiian or Pacific Islander descent.

But it wasn’t that long ago that the question would have turned upon races only our great-grandfathers would recognize. Let us mourn their passing: the Armenoids, the Assyroids, the Veddoids, the Orientalids, Australoids, the Dalo-Nordic, the Fälish, the Alpines, the Dinarics, the Fenno-Nordic, the Osteuropids, the Lapponoids, the Osterdals, the Cappadocians, the Danubians, the Ladogans, the Trondelagens, and the Pile Dwellers.

In the meantime, science has made its discoveries. The mystery of race has been solved. For the longest time, the answer was stymied by a contradiction. Surely skin tone had something to do with colder climates creating paler shades, but then why weren’t Siberians as pale as Swedes, and why were Eskimos as dark as equatorial islanders? The answer was announced, but it’s so tedious hardly anyone noticed.

Skin pigmentation changed to regulate the amount of Vitamin D
₃
manufactured by the sun just under the skin. This is the theory of Professor Nina Jablonski, a paleoanthropologist with the California
Academy of Sciences. So when the first dark inhabitants moved into Scandinavia, they confronted scant local resources—and almost no external sources for Vitamin D
₃
. Their kind quickly selected out for paler children whose light skin would manufacture enough Vitamin D
₃
to keep them healthy. Meanwhile, Eskimos arrived to the Arctic dark-skinned. The local cuisine of seal and whale is rich in Vitamin D
₃
, so the skin was never summoned into action. Evolution has one big rule: If there’s no pressure on the system to change, then it doesn’t bother. So Eskimos remained dark.

When we look at the different races, according to Jablonski’s theory, what we’re actually seeing is not “superiority” or “good people” or “race.” All that we are seeing, the
only
thing we are seeing when we look at skin color, according to the science, is a meandering trail of Vitamin D
₃
adaptation rates.

Science prefers to confirm its newest findings with the newest tools. Fingerprinting is no longer the gold standard of evidence now that DNA testing is the absolute solid proof of guilt or innocence. In anthropology, the cutting-edge techniques come with gleaming names—Optically Stimulated Luminescence, Electron Spin Resonance Dating, and Accelerator Mass Spectrometry. These are the devices that are confirming pre-Clovis dates in ways that make radiocarbon dating look like counting tree rings. By the time we figure out how they are flawed, of course, our prejudices will be so well muddled among the tentative facts that they will be as inextricable as ink from milk.

According to the revolutionaries heralding pre-Clovis, it hardly matters since so much other modern proof is appearing. New lab tests reveal that Native Americans apparently have a signature strand of very old DNA known as Haplogroup X. The only other large population on the earth carrying this genetic marker is Europeans. The suggestion is that there must have been intermarriage before Columbus, possibly before the last ice age. Moreover, now that the Iron Curtain has fallen, archaeologists have been able to do more digging in Siberia, where they expected to find Clovis points or something like them. But they haven’t. This absence, as well as the presence of Haplogroup X, has led some people to theorize that while Clovis man might have crossed over thirteen thousand years ago, at the end of the last ice age, he would have encountered someone already here—someone possessed of the X gene as well as the Clovis toolkit.

Who might these people have been and where might they have come from? One prominent theorist with an answer is America’s chief archaeologist at the Smithsonian Institution. A big bearded bear of a man, Dennis Stanford could pass as a Norse king from some other time. Stanford has struggled with the mystery of why Clovis points don’t show up in Siberia. He notes that they resemble the early work of Solutrean culture. The Solutreans were prehistoric people who lived in modern-day France and Spain some eighteen thousand years ago. They are perhaps most famous for being the possible artists who painted the horses of Lascaux and their own hands on the walls of the Altamira Cave. Stanford argues that their toolkit, which included stone points, looks like a predecessor to the Clovis style.

“There must be fifty or sixty points of comparison,” he has said.

He believes that these proto-Europeans must have been intelligent enough to make water craft. Hugging the coast of the glacial crescent of the northern Atlantic, they followed what is called the “kelp highway”—brimming with food—and sailed away to a new land.

Other scientists are providing even more evidence that seems to corroborate these general ideas. Several anthropologists have daringly
revived the argument that examining skull shapes can reveal ethnicity. Pioneered by Douglas Owsley, also now at the Smithsonian, and his partner Richard Jantz at the University of Tennessee, two scientists who have put together collections of measurements, described by
Newsweek
as a database of “2,000 or so profiles” that “consists of some 90 skull measurements, such as distance between the eyes, that indicate ancestry.” They have developed software that allows them to input a bone’s measurements and the output is “ethnicity.”

Among their fans and followers, there is talk of some of the peculiar skeletons found over the years. An ancient body, known as Wizards Beach Man, found at Pyramid Lake, Nevada, in 1978, was determined to be possibly of “Norse” extraction and to have “no close resemblance to modern Native Americans.” Another skeleton, known as Spirit Cave Man, was found in Nevada in 1940. His bones date to 7450
B.C
., and when his skull measurements were run through the database, out spat a finding of “Archaic Caucasoid.”