Race is a myth, but a very powerful one.

What if people suddenly discovered that their most basic assumption about race–that the world’s people can be divided biologically along racial lines–was false? And if race is a biological “myth,” where did the idea come from? […]

[R]ecent scientific evidence suggests that the idea of race is a biological myth. Anthropologists, biologists and geneticists have increasingly found that, biologically speaking, there is no such thing as “race” and that skin color really is only skin deep.

Yet race is deeply woven into the fabric of American life …

Much as I like to write about the current outrages of the Bush Presidency, or the global crisis of climate change that has been created by human emissions of greenhouse gases, or the threat of a wider war in the Middle East, I have long wanted to write on the issue of Race in America, and what it has meant to me in my life. For better or worse, the way Americans view the concept of race, and the actions they take with respect to their perceptions and beliefs about race, will be critical for our nation’s future.

Why Race Matters to Me

For me this is not just an intellectual exercise. I am half of what is still called in this politically correct era a “mixed race” or “interracial” marriage. My wife is the daughter of immigrants from Japan who came here after World War II. Our two children are thus considered at best as biracial or (to use an outdated term) Eurasian. At worst they are seen, by American white supremacists and extremist Japanese nationalists alike, as mongrels, racially impure and inferior. I do not define them in that way, using racial terms, but many of my fellow Americans do, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Thus, despite my origins in the white bread suburbs of Raleigh, North Carolina and, after the age of seven, of Denver Colorado, I have been forced to come to terms with my own ideas about race, and of equal importance, the ideas of those with whom I have shared my life in this country. I can’t say what follows will be the best explication of the issue of race in America, or that it will be particularly insightful, but we desperately need to resume a national dialogue in this country again regarding race and racism, like the one we had in the 1950’s and 1960’s, during the high water mark of the Civil Rights movement. This is my small contribution toward that goal.

Race and Color: An American Condition

Perhaps nowhere on earth does the concept of race have a stronger grip on a nation’s collective psyche, or played a more significant role its history, than in the United States of America. In much of the rest of the world, the term race is as often as not employed as an analogue for ethnicity or nationality. You still see Europeans who refer to the English, German, Italian, French or Jewish races, and many Japanese, Chinese and Korean people still hold views regarding their neighbors that refer to racial differences and rely upon racial stereotypes that outsiders find difficult to understand. Race is often simply an easy lexical shorthand for “those not like us” whether these others live in another country, another region or even another village.

But in America, race has always been defined primarily by color. White, Black, Brown, Red, Yellow. These colors make up the rainbow palette of racial identities in America, even among those who seek to eradicate racism and racial prejudice in this nation. For years the most popular term for use in “polite society” for African Americans in America was “colored people.” Even the name of the longest standing civil rights organization in America still bears that mark of Cain: The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or, as it is more commonly referred to, the NAACP. We are a nation of Kindergartners, still playing with our crayons, whenever the issue of Race comes up.

The Origin of Race in America

No one country or individual can be said to have invented the idea of race, and racial differences, but America, can perhaps claim pride of place in being the first nation to wholeheartedly accept the concept and exploit it like no one had before. The reason for that result was simple: The African Slave Trade and the inherent contradiction in the Declaration of Independence, that revolution against England and its King was justified because Americans were being denied their god-given, rights to liberty and equal treatment under the law.

The slave trade between Africa and America developed in large part serendipitously. Slavery had never completely gone out of fashion in Europe or the Middle East, even after the demise of the great empires which had enslaved conquered peoples as a matter of course. When Europeans originally attempted to exploit the riches of the “New World” slaves were employed as their first source of labor, and Native Americans became the Europeans first source of slaves.

Unfortunately, lacking the immunities to European infectious diseases, Native Americans died at too great a rate to employ effectively as slave labor for the large mining operations and plantations in the Caribbean, South American and North American colonies of England, France, Spain and Portugal. However, there was an already existing market in African slaves that had been developed by Islamic traders who marketed them to buyers in the Ottoman Empire. Within a short time European colonists also sought to acquire African slaves. Certain tribes in West Africa and Arab traders were more than willing to meet the new demands of the American colonists for this “commodity.”

Many these slaves died in transport to the Americas, and many more died under the often brutal working conditions which they were forced to endure, particularly in the Caribbean sugar plantations, but they died at a slower rate than the native populations. Thus, from a purely cost benefit analysis, they were worth the price paid by their owners. And thus the slave trade between Africa and America flourished.

However, a problem arose, when the Founding Fathers, those legendary men of such superior wisdom and vision chose (or had Thomas Jefferson choose for them) to base their claim for independence on the values of the Enlightenment. The principle value on which they staked their claim for political freedom was the concept of natural rights inherent in every man. A noble idea, and surely good propaganda, but how to reconcile that lofty rhetoric about equality and justice for all men with the sordid fact that many of these same rebel leaders were slave owners who profited from the labor of the people they held in bondage?

The answer came from an unlikely source: a German naturalist by the name of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach.

Blumenbach was born at Gotha, studied medicine at Jena, and graduated in 1775 with his MD thesis De generis humani varietate nativa (On the Natural Varieties of Mankind, University of Göttingen), which is considered one of the most influential works in the development of subsequent concepts of “human races.” […]

Blumenbach developed the original classification of human beings into first four and then later five, broad categories or races, which he labeled Caucasian, Mongolian, Negroid (or Ethiopian) , Malayan and American (i.e., Native Americans). Blumenbach himself originally felt that the Caucasian race was superior to all the other, lesser races. Africans in particular were the most inferior. On the basis of cranial examinations, he originally determined that the Negroid or Ethiopian race was the most closely related to monkeys. Late in his life he met an African woman with whom he became infatuated, and reversed his prior opinion of the inferiority of African peoples, but by then it was too late. His original idea had already taken hold in America where racial theories developed to justify the African slave trade.

It was Thomas Jefferson, himself, who was one of the first major proponents of African American racial inferiority in a treatise he published in 1781, Notes on the State of Virginia. His examination of the immorality of slavery (some day) is often remarked upon by Jeffersonian enthusiasts. Less well known today, however, was the argument he made that African slaves, by their very nature, were inherently inferior to white Americans, and undeserving of equal treatment:

“This unfortunate difference of color, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.” –Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia

Sadly, lesser intellects than his would employ this idea of the racial inferiority of the “Negro race” as a rationale the continuance of slavery in the Antebellum South, and thereafter as the basis for Jim Crow laws which were deemed constitutional under the odious “Separate but Equal” doctrine enunciated by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson.

Ever since Jefferson’s day we have been grappling with the inherent contradiction of a country founded on principles of individual liberty and equality before the law, and the less than equal treatment we have extended to non-white Americans. The creation of a theory of inherent racial differences among human populations has been the foundation for justifying that inequality of treatment.

In the early 1600’s, the English could watch a performance of one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies, Othello, and witness a Black man as a noble and successful leader of European soldiers. Until the Civil Rights movement, few in America would have agreed that those of the “African race” should ever be given such an opportunity. The reason: the intervening and insidious invention of a false and misleading idea, the idea of “human races.” If slavery was America’s original sin, than the concept of race, as developed by Americans, was America’s original excuse for that sin.

Today’s Conservative Illusion of Colorblindness

If Blumenbach and Jefferson went too far in their belief that race could and should explain apparent differences between the white and black races (differences all to the benefit of whites, and to the detriment of blacks), today we are faced with a group of influential and powerful interests who would have us believe that America has escaped the tragedy of its past racism.

This message of a “color blind” society, which is often promoted in the mainstream media, particularly by conservatives, states in its essentials that America has fundamentally changed as a result of the Civiul Rights movement, and that racism is no longer prevalent in our society. That is, they contend that race, the defining feature of our past, is no longer a concern for our present or our future, and that any problems minorities face can no longer be attributed to racism. Those who spread this narrative would have us believe that the miracle of the Civil Rights movement changed everything about how Americans now view the issue of race in this country. As they tell it, segregation is a relic of the past, and America is now a nation of tolerance and equal opportunity for all citizens. We should ignore race and actively promote a “color blind vision” for our country. In making this argument, they could not be more wrong:

African Americans with a college diploma find themselves unemployed almost twice as often as whites with the same education. Hispanics must get by on only about half of the individual income that Asian Americans and whites divvy up among the bills.

And when blacks and Latinos are hospitalized with a heart problem, they are less likely than European Americans to receive catheterization, be sent home with beta blockers, or even be advised to take aspirin to protect their health. […]

Scholars now are studying the cause and effect of racial stratification in more detail. New York University doctoral candidate Julie Sze, for example, is identifying the neighborhoods where medical waste incinerators most often are built, then examining both why those sites were chosen and how those decisions may contribute to health disparities such as higher rates of asthma among African Americans. Other research explores economic issues such as the ways housing segregation limits people’s job options. Sociologists Lawrence Bobo of Harvard University and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva of Texas A&M are studying hidden racial animosity, while others have investigated differences in the ways the same teachers treat students of different races.

Barlow, Duster and colleagues emphasize that whites may have no awareness of their privileged status even as they protect their interests. When parents successfully fight to protect funding for suburban high schools, for example, they enable those facilities to offer advanced placement classes and leadership opportunities that in turn help students win a spot in the best colleges. Urban educators rarely have such advocates, and thus are unable to offer the same level of academic advantages. But both parents and graduates of top-tier schools — most often white or Asian American — are likely to consider their achievements solely the result of the young peoples’ own hard work.

While whites will acknowledge that disparities in education or other realms exist, Barlow says, they are more likely to attribute these to a lack of ambition and effort on the part of minorities than to structural favoritism toward whites built into U.S. institutions for generations.

Not only covert or unconscious racism remains an issue for America, but overt racism is also still prevalent in America, as anyone familiar with the Republican Party’s efforts to repress the votes of African Americans and Latinos in the last four election cycles is well aware. Since the passage of the Civil Rights legislation pushed through Congress by the LBJ administration, there has been a steady, persistent effort from the right to roll back the gains that mere made during those years. Official, legalized discrimination, such as the Jim Crow laws, may no longer be on the books, but unofficial discrimination has been on the rise for decades, even as white Americans have congratulated themselves on their new found respect for, and tolerance of, non-white races. I know. I was one of those self congratulatory whites who in the seventies and eighties believed I had eliminated all racial prejudices and stereotypes from my consciousness.

I was wrong, of course.

Part II of this series, A Personal Journey, will be posted tomorrow.