Recently over coffee, a retired anthropology professor whom I have known for ages proclaimed that race is a word that has no scientific substance. “It is a social construct,” he said, “without physical or biological significance. Everyone knows that.”
“What” I said, “are you going on about?”
“Race, don’t you know. It’s a word without knowledge-based meaning.”
“Don’t be daft,” I said, suspecting that he may be talking out the side of his mouth, a trait most social scientists share. “We use racial identifiers all the time, common as salt and pepper. Have you read a newspaper lately? You should stay current, my friend. Whether we use skin shade or cultural antecedents, or what have you, we sort people by their obvious, or not so obvious, attributes. That’s what we call race.”
“Yes, we do. Of course, those are all arbitrary markers that separate people who are biologically virtually identical. As the saying goes, ‘Eggs is eggs.’”
“Please, come now, we hoi polloi reject esoterica from eggheads who nest in ivory towers.”
“Well, you shouldn’t. No reason to be anti-intellectual, though that condition seems to be the unanimous custom among the majority of humanity. Simply put, I am saying is the recipe for making a human being is about the same for each and every one of us.”
“Then why,” I asked, realizing that he was serious, “do we make an issue out of it? In filling out printed forms, we often are confronted with those little boxes to self-identify ourselves. What are we? White, African American, Indigenous American, Asian American, Pacific Islander, what? The species Homo sapiens is always broken into categories, isn’t it? Those categories are what we consider race to be, don’t you know?”
“Yes but ponder, if you will, chicken eggs. We have grades of eggs, don’t we? Small, medium, large, extra-large, jumbo. We also have shell pigmentation differences: white, brown, green, speckled. And other distinctions: free range, conventional cage, enriched, and so on—but finally what we have is a clutch of chicken eggs. Extrapolating, you may regard human beings in the same way we categorize chicken eggs, if you will. That’s the human race in one basket—chicken eggs.”
“Okay.” Unable to pass up the opportunity, I added, “I thought you just making a yolk.”
“Not at all,” he said, straight-faced. “Of course, we look for distinctive differences among people even though there are no significant biological differences. Infinitesimal DNA marker differences, that’s about it.”
“So we are asked to define ourselves by using specious and baseless templates, are we? That cracks me up.”
“Yes and no,” he said, evermore straight-faced. “There are surface differences among people, true, but we are all the same basic construction. People like classifications. What’s the difference between a Catholic and a Protestant, eh? Even though the two may be siblings, they divide themselves by claiming a religion classification. We have been doing that for the span of history. Undeniably ethnic, language, and cultural differences make themselves known among people, but otherwise we are all one big human family. When you open an egg carton and check the goods for cracks, you may find that some of the eggs have shells with differing coloring shades. No big deal, right? You will still make an omelet from the lot.”
“Race has become a matter of superficial features, then? That scrambles my mind.”
My learned friend remained unbending, way too serious for my taste. “Semantics, isn’t it? My view is strictly scientific, a matter of biology. For most people, however, they respond the way Humpty Dumpty did when he said, ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean–-neither more nor less.’”
“Which brings to mind, underscoring your point,” I said, “when I spit into a phial and send it off to AncestryDNA, the results come back proving that my family’s DNA has been migrating and is associated with regions on a map. Apparently, my ancestors spent time all over the place, as assuredly yours did as well. The results simply showed where my ancestors called home but do not identify any particular racial category.”
“We are one race. Just accept that. Commonly, however, race is seen as skin color or shade, perhaps a language or diet context, plus a geographical placement—all pretty arbitrary, actually.”
“So why do we find the need to stage the human race and slice it up as if it were a pie chart—this bit White, this other slice Black, then a hunk of Yellow—since all pieces of the pie share the same ingredients?”
“That’s what we do. That’s who we are. We always look for cohorts, don’t we? We have an affinity with those hatchlings with whom we share the coop, so to speak. We want people to self-identify their social or ethnic category. Are you Roman Catholic or Protestant? Sikh or Hindi? Buddhist or Muslim? Homosexual or Heterosexual? White collar or blue collar? Middle or upper or lower class? Graduate school or undergraduate school or no school? Vegetarian or flesh-eater? Liberal or conservative? Dog people or cat people? Should we care? Well, we do. We enjoy sorting things even if those things need no sorting.”
My anthropologist friend mentioned that the Human Genome Project found 99.9 percent of genomes gathered from around the world were identical in all subjects. Put another way, the blueprints showing how to make a person are undifferentiated from one human to another. Hard to believe but the human family amounts to identical siblings, all one giant family. But there it is.
Eggs is eggs.