The odious United States fixation on "race", especially regarding the enormous chasm between groups designated as "white" and "black", has been the single most important social divider on the North American landscape, easily surpassing such weighty items like class and religion, which carry the day in most other countries.

The "black"/"white" schism (or what I will call the BWS as this narrative continues) has had its attackers for the better part of two hundred years, featuring the North American Civil War, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteen Amendments to the United States Constitution and the Modern Civil Rights era of demonstration and subsequent legislation.

Not to be outdone, social scientists weighed in on the debate in the early twentieth century. The brilliant North American sociologist Robert Ezra Park reminded us, for example, that race relations are not so much about persons of different physical appearances but persons who are aware of those differences. And Marvin Harris and Conrad Kottak in the mid-twentieth century coined the term hypodescent, which describes the infamous One Drop Rule regarding African ancestry in the United States.

Yet this North American BWS still exists, resisting legislation, social science analysis and even the collective outward goodwill of North Americans, most of whom say publicly that separation because of "race" is wrong and "racism" is wrong.

So now the physical scientists have entered the fight against the BWS, which is ironic, since scientific theorists have always been present through the years to, for example, justify Ante Bellum slavery (Dr. Nott), European nineteenth century imperialism (Dr. Chamberlain) or any other racism for which they have been chosen to "legitimize" (see Adolf Hitler). Recently, however, the American Anthropological Association has indicated that the genetic variation within the so-called caucasoid, negroid and mongoloid "races" is at least as great as the variation between them. Many scholars and activists have taken this announcement to herald a significant breakthrough in the fight against racism.

Naomi Zack's short book is written in this vein -- to use scientific reasoning to show that "race" as we know it is a social invention. In seven well-written and succinct chapters, she leads the reader to the only logical conclusion available: that biology has shown that what we call race is bogus and that there should be a "rethinking, undoing and redoing (of) those aspects of ordinary life and discourse, both oppressive and liberatory, which rely on assumptions that racial taxonomies and individual racial differences are real in ways that can be studied by biology" (Zack's own quote, page 113). Zack's use of the concept of "liberatory aspects of ordinary social life" as a buttress of the BWS is ingenious, I might add, because, in recent years, some of the most consistent opponents of dismantling the BWS have come from the ranks of minority group advocates, who see any dilution of the North American "race" concept as damaging to their numbers and power.

This points to the only real weakness I can see in Zack's book (which is unavoidable, given its focus and theme). Professor Zack is laying out a logical and scientific argument against the BWS and calling upon the reader to exercise good sense and propriety. Yet her book is not a representation of the first academics to use scholarship to show the illogic of U.S. "race". Harris and Kottak's analysis of hypodescent in 1963 showed to even those who balked at logic that North American "racial" rules virtually create "blacks" and "whites" in the U.S. However, these thoughts rarely left the University of Michigan Department of Anthropology and whomever was fortunate enough to read Patterns of Race in the Americas. Logic and good reason do not dictate the BWS in the United States. Social rules, social structure, marriage patterns and economic imperatives do that. Quite brilliantly, Naomi Zack has, using biology, followed up what the American Anthropological Association has initiated. One more leg of the malignant table upon which North American racism sits has been severely damaged. However, neither Zack nor Harris, Kottak or Park can change North American social structures, marriage patterns or social rules. That is the last leg of the table and Naomi Zack has provided the final isolation.

William Javier Nelson, Ph.D.

Please find previous Guest Editorials by William Javier Nelson at "Alphabetical listing of Editorialists & their writings"

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