The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 9: Race Realism

The Nazi Lies Podcast

Mike Isaacson: Race horses don’t even live in a society!

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Mike: Thanks for joining us for another episode of The Nazi Lies Podcast. You can get merch and access to early episodes by subscribing to our Patreon. Throw us a donation on our PayPal or CashApp, and we’ll toss you some merch as well.

Today, we’re trashing race realism–the idea that race is biologically real and bears upon behavior and intelligence. With me is Dr. Robert Anemone, who has his PhD from the University of Washington and is professor of biological anthropology and paleoanthropology at UNC Greensboro. His book, Race and Human Diversity: A Biocultural Approach, explores the intersections of race and biology, surveying anthropological and biological knowledge across history up to the present day. Thanks for joining us Dr. Anemone.

Robert Anemone: You're very welcome, Mike. Looking forward to it.

Mike: So one thing I liked about your book is that at the end of every chapter it has helpful discussion questions to explore the concepts further. So I decided that it wouldn’t make much sense for me to write my own questions when yours are right there. Is it okay if I ask you some questions from the book?

Robert: Sounds great.

Mike: Okay great! So the first one relates to the subtitle of your book. What do anthropologists mean when they talk about using a biocultural approach to some questions like the meaning of race?

Robert: Sure. Well, I've found in the literature on race in anthropology, sociology, that a lot of people approach it from one or the other of these sort of paradigms. And yet I really think that to understand race, you have to understand and look at the interaction between these two different paradigms; the biological, evolutionary, and the cultural or social. The biological or the evolutionary perspective recognises that human variation is a result of evolution, you know, that natural selection and the other forces of evolution like mutation and genetic drift have played a role in creating the diversity we see in Homo sapiens. However, that's not the whole story, because the cultural approach is really necessary. We recognise that racial classifications vary over time and space. Societies or cultures create the meanings and stereotypes that they associate with racial groups.

So in my book, I really tried to do two things.

I explore the biological nature of human diversity from an explicitly evolutionary perspective. For example I try to talk about things like why tropical populations tend to be darker skin than those living in the temperate zones. Or why genetic diseases like, for example, sickle cell anaemia are more common among some human populations than others.

But in addition to that sort of biological approach, I examine the historical, the economic, and the political ways in which societies sort of decide that, for example, differences in skin colour reflect deeper, innate inequalities between human populations or individuals.

So for me and for many anthropologists, really being able to bring together biological and social or cultural approaches is a more complete way to look at this very complex phenomenon that we call race or racial variation today.

Mike: This next one is a good one. In what ways does arbitrariness creep into any attempted racial classification, and how does this help clarify the difficulty that anthropologists have had in answering the question: How many races exist?

Robert: Well, it's very interesting that anthropology, which is a field that began in the 19th century with the stated goal of understanding human race and human variation, has never agreed-- We've never agreed on a simple question, how many races exist? Why is that sort of weird? Well, I think the reason is that it's basically impossible to create an objective and scientific classification of human races that everyone will agree on, because there's some really significant arbitrariness that creeps in at several different levels of the analysis.

The first place that arbitrary decisions come in is when we decide which trait we're going to base our racial classification on. I mean, skin colour is the obvious one, many people use that. But there are other ways to do it too. There's other variable traits, like, for example, another one that's been used a lot is, you know, blood group genetics. Some people use a combination of skin colour, hair colour, eye colour, body build.... There's all these different traits to choose, and there's no real rules for which one you should use. So people just sort of arbitrarily choose one and ignore the others.

Importantly, these different variables are not concordant. They don't evolve similarly. For example, Australian Aboriginals and African populations resemble each other in skin colour, but they're completely different with blood types. So, since the different traits that one might choose are discordant, any classification based on a different trait will end up looking very different. So that's the first level, deciding which trait to base your classification on.

The second level where arbitrariness rears its ugly head is that when we realise that most of these traits we're looking at are continuously variable. They vary along a normal distribution or bell curve. And we should know, if we know the most basic statistics, that you cannot really divide a continuously variable trade into a finite group of categories or groups. You can do it, but you can do it in any number of ways. You can do it arbitrarily. For example, skin colour varies continuously across different populations and within populations. Sicilians tend to be darker skin than Irish. But are they different enough to call them a different race or not? Well, it's kind of a judgement call, you know? It's arbitrary. I use the analogy a lot in the book between skin colour and stature to show how impossible it is to really reach objective answers to a question like this, how many races are there? The basic skin colour classifications try to divide the world into light and dark skinned populations.

Similar problems though, if you wanted to divide the world into tall and short races. How do you do that? I mean, height is continuously variable, where do you draw the distinctions? You know, how tall is tall? How tall do you have to be to be in this race or that race? In the book, I use the example; being tall is very different in the NBA than it is in the race track. Right? A tall jockey might be 5'7", and 5'7" in the NBA would be quite short. All these things are completely arbitrary. The simple answer is that when you have a continuously variable trait like skin colour, or gene frequencies or stature, you cannot objectively really divide that variation into finite groups in any one way. You can do it in a million different ways, but they're all equally arbitrary. Hence, I think, the 150 years of disagreement among anthropologists in deciding how many human races there are, it's just the wrong question to ask. It can't really be answered based on the continuously varied in nature the traits we're looking at.

Mike: I think your book asks a lot of the right questions, right? I guess this next one a lot of Nazis love to misunderstand. Which is, what does it mean to say that race in America is a social construction?

Robert: Yeah. I mean, it's a simple fact or statement that basically race means different things at different times in different places. And that the meanings that we associate with race are determined by social groups, typically by those in power, you know? So if we compare the contemporary United States and contemporary Brazil, completely different racial classifications, different terminology, different number of groups, very, very different. Or if we compare race in the United States of 1850 and the United States today.

If race was some objective thing, you wouldn't expect it to vary over time and space. But in fact, it completely varies over time and space. In each of these places or times, there live different experiences of people are very different. Right? The ideas that people carry around in their heads with them about what, for example, black people or Latin people are like, are different. The very names we use in classifying different races are different in all these settings. So we're just saying that basically, what we think about race is sort of decided by groups in power in different societies.

Now, this doesn't mean that race is not real, or that there are no biological differences between individuals, between groups, or that race is not important. It really just means that we, society's cultures, create the meanings associated with race. And again, I find a useful analogy here between race and kinship. What does it mean to be a brother or a cousin or an uncle? And this varies in different societies, both race and kinship are based on biological differences and similarities, right? And kinship is sort of based on the percentage of genes you share with people, right? A cousin shares a certain amount of genes with an individual. But the meanings that we associate with a cousin or an uncle, how you relate to a cousin or an uncle, can be very different in different societies.

You know, my students always groan when I tell them that Charles Darwin married his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, but I then tell them that first cousins were considered ideal marriage partners for upper class Victorian Englishmen. Not so much for contemporary Americans. So, kinship in the sense of who we marry and in general, how we relate to and behave towards our relatives, is also a cultural construction. Very similar to race, I think. There's some biology there, but then there's a lot of cultural notions, cultural ideas, stereotypes that go along with it, that sort of structure our behaviour and what we think about these people.

Mike: This next one you kind of alluded to earlier, and this is when I have difficulty explaining to people when I argue that race isn’t biology. Describe the clinal variation seen in the skin colour in the old world, and discuss how vitamin D skin cancer rickets and foley play a role in explaining this cline.

Robert: This is really one of the classic and one of the best documented stories of how natural selection has shaped human evolution. We've known really since 1960s that if we look at the map of sort of where Aboriginal traditional living peoples have lived in the old world, we see this gradual geographic variation in skin colour that when you're at the Equator or close to the equator, people who've lived there traditionally tend to be very dark skin, lots of melanin, right? That's the pigment in our skin, in our eyes, and our hair. And as you move closer to the poles, skin colour tends to lighten up. People have known this for a long time. And the traditional idea has always been that well, melanin protects against the harmful effects of, of solar radiation, protects against like skin cancer, and things of that sort. So therefore, it's adaptive to have dark skin in the tropics because there's so much ultraviolet radiation.

But when overall populations spread from the tropics to the temperate zones–of course, we evolved in the tropics with almost certainly evolved with dark skin colour, the first humans certainly had dark skin colour–but when their descendants moved to Northern and Southern climes away from the from the tropics and the equator, all of a sudden, the lower levels of ultraviolet radiation led to lightning and skin colour because they do have to worry about skin cancer and things of that sort. But if you had really dark skin and you live in like Scotland, it's hard to create enough vitamin D in your skin to avoid rickets and sort of soft bones, you know? Because the calcified tissues, you know, the bones and teeth require vitamin D. And we only really get vitamin D through solar radiation in our skin. There are very few things that humans eat other than oily fish that have too much vitamin D in them.

Mike: And you mentioned the exception, generally, with Inuit peoples and the skin colour changes.

Robert: Yeah. It's not a perfect thing, and people have moved around the world quite a bit. You know the Inuit are darker, but It's not a perfect correlation. I'm not sure if there's a great answer for some particular populations. But there's been a recent sort of addition to this whole thing, because the weak point in this whole theory was that; well, skin cancer tends to kill you when you're old, long after you've been able to reproduce. Natural selection doesn't work very well with things that kill you in your 50s or 60s or 70s, right?

But my colleague, Nina Jablonski, some years ago, looked at another piece of this puzzle and it's fully one of the B vitamins which is in our bloodstream. And it turns out that foley is damaged by high ultraviolet radiation in light skin. So, dark skin protects against skin cancer but also protects against the destruction of folate. And we also know now that low levels of folate in pregnant women lead to increased incidents of neural tube defects like spina bifida. And natural selection would work brilliantly against this. So if you have really light skin colour and you're living in the tropics, you would be at a serious disadvantage because you would have low levels of folate and your offspring would tend to be born at high frequencies with these very serious problems.

So natural selection seems to have really, you know, been the cause of the variation that we see in skin colour. And it's again, final variation just means it's variation over geographic space. So it gradually lightens as you move away from the equators towards the poles. It's kind of an interesting combination of things like vitamin D and its effect on bone growth and bone calcification, skin cancer, folate, and all these things leading to this variation of skin colour. Which then sort of becomes the basis of racial classifications.

But the interesting story about skin colour, of course, is not whether people with dark skin or light skin are superior, but how each of these two skin colours have kind of evolved in particular environments. And it's really a great example, one of our best examples, of how natural selection has shaped some of the variation that we see in modern humans. It's an evolutionary story, right? The cultural stuff sort of comes in later but originally, skin colour variation is all about natural selection. It's all about biological variation and how natural selection sort of shapes that in different environments.

Mike: Right. Going back to the classification question, one of the conceits of race realists and racists in general, is taken for granted that race is natural. But race has a history. So again, another question from the book. When, where, and under what circumstances did the concept of human races first appear in the Western world?

Robert: Race definitely has a history, and it is a relatively brief one at that. Historians have demonstrated that the notion of deep innate significant differences between human populations was not something that was present in the ancient world, say the Greeks and Romans. Certainly, they had slavery, but skin colour played no role in determining who was slave and who was master. Right?Slaves were not considered deeply inferior by nature. Slaves could purchase their freedom, they could be freed, and they could become Roman citizens. Slavery was typically the fate of those defeated in warfare.

It wasn't until really the Age of Discovery in the 15th and 16th centuries in Europe, that the notion of deep and innate inequalities between global populations was created, followed quickly by the notion of chattel slavery-- lifetime slavery in which people were not even considered humans based simply on skin colour.

At the time, the Europeans were heavily influenced by the Judeo-Christian notion that's called the Great chain of being. This idea that God's creation ranges from the simplest living things to the most complex, sort of on a chain, or a scale or a ladder. And then at the top, of course of the angels and God up above at the top. So the notion of hierarchy was really built into the European worldview at the time. And when Europeans met for the first time, the new African, Asian, Pacific Islander, American populations, they immediately try to fit them into their notion of the great chain of being Where did these new populations fit? Where did the dark skinned people fit in the great chain? And, you know, anthropologists talk a lot about ethnocentrism, this notion that, you know, one's own culture is somehow superior to others. It was clearly ethnocentrism that led European Caucasians to put themselves at the top of the great chain just below the angels, and put these new dark skinned populations lower closer to the apes-- lower on the great chain and therefore less than deserving of fully human or even humane treatment.

So we see that colonialism and imperialism are really closely tied to the origins of their racial worldview as they still are today. It's a definite history. It's a recent history, it's not something that's been with us forever, and it doesn't have to be with us forever. We can change these things, these ideas are, are not written in stone. They can be changed.

Mike: Yeah, that notion of the great chain of being. It still has echoes in fascist thought, too. It reflects not just a theory of kind of biological variation among different species, and races by extension, according to these people, but also between various classes of people. I mean, it kind of explains the the class structure of society or intends to

Robert: Sure. I think the common idea here is hierarchy. Certain classes, certain races, certain genders are higher, better, more worthwhile than others. Absolutely similar.

Mike: Okay, here's a thorny one to wrap up with. Why are many anthropologists skeptical of the proposition that IQ scores provide a reasonable measure of the innate intelligence of individuals and populations?

Robert: This is a very thorny issue, isn't it? It's probably one that is highly influenced by the political leanings of individuals who talk about it. But it certainly is true that anthropologists are skeptical of what IQ tests can tell us about innate differences in human intelligence. And I think there are many reasons for this, some historical. I mean, if we started historically, if we look at the history of IQ testing, we see that the early IQ tests that were developed in the first half of the 20th century, in the First World War and the Second, they were seriously flawed. Stephen Jay Gould has really best documented the cultural biases and the methodological problems in much of this research. So while I'm no expert in intelligence testing, I'm certain that modern tests are not crudely biassed against minorities like these early ones were.

But I still remain a skeptic of whether a single test can array individuals along the linear dimension of intelligence. The idea that an IQ score, a simple number, can be independent of their background, their privilege, and their schooling is is tough for me to swallow.

Any psychologist today following Howard Gardner advocate the notion of multiple intelligences that a single IQ score doesn't tell us much. We can learn much more by studying people's spatial intelligence, their mathematical intelligence, their social intelligence, kinesthetic, spatial... all these multiple intelligences.

So I think intelligence is a very complex thing. It's tough to reduce it to a single number on a single scale. And finally, there's a sort of a methodological reason that, or maybe a philosophical reason that many anthropologists are skeptical of this notion. And that is that most anthropologists probably consider themselves to be interactionists. We are opposed to pure genetic determinism and opposed to pure environmental determinism, right? So when we consider the development of complex human traits like intelligence, it makes great sense to us that both genes and environment play a serious role.

I mean, there's much evidence that environment does play an enormous role on adult intelligence. And while genetics certainly plays some role also, I think many anthropologists are convinced that the best interpretation is that adult intelligence is a multifaceted thing that is probably not reducible to a single IQ score, and that it is strongly influenced by both genetics and environment.

And intelligence itself, I mean, finally, a very difficult thing to define and a very difficult thing to measure. So I think the story is complex, the simple idea that everybody's intelligence is simply encoded in our genes is almost certainly incorrect. No one has found a gene for intelligence. Clearly, you can mess with genes and lead to mental problems. So genes play a role. But there's no simple story that there's a gene for intelligence and some populations have more copies of the good gene than others.

Mike: Yeah. The claims of eugenicists, ultimately, is that these genes are concordant with race, right? That somehow there is a co-determination genetically between race and IQ. And we don't have evidence for a genetic causation, well, a direct genetic traceable causation for either one, much less a co-determination. Right?

Robert: Yeah, absolutely not. Those eugenic notions come from a really outdated, sort of very simplistic Mendelian model–that there's a gene for skin colour, and there's a gene for intelligence. We know intelligence as a very complex genetic thing or probably hundreds of genes that influence one's adult intelligence, one's ability to learn... It's clearly not a simple Mendelian thing like, you know, pea plants with either the gene for tall plants or short plants. Those kinds of notions are just genetically very naive and really outdated.

Mike: All right. Well, Dr. Anemone, thank you so much for coming on The Nazi Lies Podcast and helping me trash race realism. Again, the book is Race and Human Diversity out from Routledge. You could follow Dr. Anemone on Twitter @paleobob. Thanks again.

Robert: Thank you very much, Mike. It was fun.

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