Continental Hotspot

The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea by Robert Wald Sussman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When it comes to race there are essentially three main streams of thought in Western countries:

1. Races are real biological groups in humanity with important differences making some groups better than others (racism). Believed by white nationalists, the KKK, nazi’s and similar people.

2. Races are real biological groups in humanity but there are no relevant differences between them that would make one group better than another (anti-racism & racialism). This is where most people nowadays are, particularly in America.

3. Races are a harmful social construct, essentially a made up division into groups based on arbitrary cultural differences and select biologically irrelevant surface features (anti-racialism). This is the modern scientific view of things, as evidenced by for example the American Anthropological Association’s Statement on Race. In this view dividing people into “white” and “black” based on the amount of melanin in their skin is just as silly as thinking people’s bloodgroups will determine their fortunes (as happens in Japan).

It is this third stance that this book argues for. Personally I find that most people don’t know this third view even exists. It is a great textbook that I cannot recommend enough.

It pairs well with more quantitative work by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza (Genes, Peoples and Languages; The History and Geography of Human Genes) which shows that all humans descend from human populations migrating out of Africa as early as 300kyr ago and consequently show remarkable genetic cohesion and uniformity compared to other species.

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If you want a further taste of what the content of this book is like check out this excerpt by the author: America’s virulent racists: The sick ideas and perverted “science” of the American Renaissance Foundation