How can you say there are no races, when people from Norway, Nigeria, and Japan look so different from one another? And how can you explain the existence of
racism, if races don't exist?
Some people have heard that scientists say the human species has no races, and because this seems to contradict their everyday experience they dismiss it as an example of political correctness. Not so--it is real science! But to understand what scientists are talking about, we need to distinguish between biological races--which don't exist-and social races. Social races are all too real and have a long and unfortunate history, but there is no genetic test for a person's social race, any more than there is a genetic test for religion or political affiliation or other social category.
Even though skin color and hair form are biologically based, grouping them into races is a social classification. For example, we could invent a race of people with large ears and small feet, and another race of people with small ears and large feet. These are also visible biological features, but it is easy to see that races created from such features are social rather than biological categories.
The human species began in Africa, and continued to evolve there for at least 100,000 years before the first people left for Eurasia. This means that, if you trace our American ancestry back far enough, we are all African Americans. It also means that the great majority of human genetic variability is in Africa. If the human species did have any biological races, they would all be in Africa. (To Americans, the very tall Maasai, and the Mbuti pygmies are both "black"-a social race-despite their obvious differences in appearance.) But we haven't been around long enough and in
separate enough groups to develop biological races. Humans are quite homogeneous genetically when compared to large territorial mammals like wolves.
What people look like varies gradually around the planet. The further apart two populations are, the more different they appear. If you go in different directions, the people appear different in different ways. The reason that Norwegians, Nigerians, and Japanese look so different from one another is that Norway, Nigeria, and Japan are so distant from one another--not because they represent pure forms of three races.
India, for example, is roughly midway among the three countries. It has over a billion people-greater than the entire population of the planet 200 years ago. A lot of people in India have black, straight hair like East Asians, dark skins like Africans, and European facial features. That's a lot of exceptions to the notion of biological races among humans, and a lot of evidence for the gradual change in what populations look like as they get more distant from one another.
The distinction between (non-existent) biological races and social races, also explains how there can be racism in a world with no races. Racism is a socially learned response to socially defined races.
Image Sources:
Maasai People (Kenya, 2005)
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maasai_tribe.jpg
African Pygmies and Prof. K. G. Murphy (1921)
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:African_Pigmies_CNE-v1-p58...
A schematic showing the spreading of humans in history (2009)
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Human_spreading_over_histo...
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