Can Science Education Help to Cure Our Society's Racism Problem?
An interview with Dr. Joseph L. Graves Jr. and Dr. Alan H. Goodman.
Dr. Joseph L. Graves Jr. is a geneticist and evolutionary biologist, and Dr. Alan H. Goodman is a biological anthropologist. Dr. Graves and Dr. Goodman have an exciting new book on the topic of race—it’s a controversial topic, but it’s also a fascinating one, and it’s great that two well-respected experts have put together a book that answers for laypeople the questions that we all wonder about.
I was honored/thrilled to interview Dr. Graves and Dr. Goodman. See below my interview with them that I edited for flow, organized by topic, and added hyperlinks to.
See this praise that Ian Tattersall wrote for Graves’s and Goodman’s new book:
In Racism, Not Race, Graves and Goodman lay out comprehensively and accessibly why notions of race are social constructs that cannot be justified in biological terms. Packed with contemporary and historical references that place race in perspective, this is an authoritative clarification of an issue that is critically important for society but is widely misunderstood despite its ever more pressing ramifications. A valuable resource.
Here’s the book’s front cover and back cover—make sure to click on this image so that you can read everything:
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The Science
1) What are the most exciting projects that you’re currently working on?
Graves: For people to know what my exciting projects are, they really need to know what my research is—by training, I’m an evolutionary geneticist, and my research involves the genomics of adaptation. My main research tool is experimental evolution, and I’ve worked with Drosophila fruit flies over the course of my career. I’ve made contributions to experimental evolution and to the evolution of aging, and I’ve researched topics like how bacteria respond to metallic nanoparticles.
Right now I’m working on two different NSF grants, both about adaptation in bacteria—one is about two-component response systems that sense metals and message the organism to begin transcription of the appropriate proteins to deal with that substance, and the other is about the evolution of resistance in E. coli to both excess iron and to bacteriophages. And my book Principles and Applications of Antimicrobial Nanomaterials was published in August.
So that’s my lab stuff, but I’m also involved in scholarly work around biological and social conceptions of race. Alan and I have a new book called Racism, Not Race that answers frequently asked questions about race. And I’m also working on an autobiographical book A Voice in the Wilderness: A Pioneering Biologist Discusses Why Evolution Can Help Us Solve Our Biggest Problems about my own career in evolutionary biology—I’m the first African-American to have ever received a degree in evolutionary biology, and that book tells my story.
Goodman: I’m a biological anthropologist—first and foremost, I’m a skeletal biologist who studies bones and teeth, and I especially study the details of enamel development and enamel histology, and a lot of my work has looked at health and disease from prehistory up to the present. Everything I do has to do with the way that inequality, poverty, and racism impact human biology and “get under the skin”—teeth are a surprisingly good indicator of an individual’s history of nutrition, stress, and exposure to pollution.
I study lead exposure, and childhood undernutrition in Mexico, and so on. I’ve worked on the New York African Burial Ground. And I’ve worked on the impacts of Western diets, including Coca-colonization:
I’m interested in the intersections of biology and culture: How do we think about human biology when culture is the air we breathe? And like Dr. Graves, I feel like the most important thing for me to do at this stage in my career is to educate the public about race and racism and human variation—to that end, I co-direct the American Anthropological Association’s public education project on understanding race.
I’m pretty sure I have one more book in me that—a little bit like Dr. Graves’s—will tell people’s personal stories about race and racism that intersect with fundamental issues about human biology.
2) What are the main ideas in your new book Racism, Not Race?
Goodman: I want to be clear from the start that nothing that we say about race not being real has anything to do with denying human variation—human variation is real, and it’s patterned, and it’s wonderful to observe and study.
But the big issue is that race doesn’t describe or explain human biological variation—race is real, and it has deadly consequences, but it’s socially constructed.
We see racial inequalities, but they’re not due to biology and are instead due to the lived experience of race: implicit bias, everyday racism, overt racism, and so on.
Graves: Our book does a deep dive into the common misconceptions that people have about race, and we make extremely clear that there’s a difference between biological conceptions of race and the socially defined races that we know about from our culture. And in fact, we hang our book’s absolutely ironclad conclusion that anatomically modern humans don’t have biological races on the history of scientifically examining population variation within species—plenty of species do have biological races, but we just don’t happen to be one of those species.
Our book goes through a litany of all these misconceptions about whether socially defined races differ in various categories: aging, mortality, disease susceptibilities, athletics, musical ability, and the distinct forms of intelligence. We explain the important difference between biological conceptions of race and genetic ancestry, we deal with systemic structural racism, and we end the book with a really strong examination of what it would take to bring about an anti-racist society.
3) How would you respond to the sentiment that it’s important to be socially progressive but we don’t want to deny biology? For example, there’s a notion that some people want to deny biological sex.
Graves: I honestly don’t know anybody who denies biological sex—I know a lot of people who write about sex and gender, and they don’t say that. For example, Anne Fausto-Sterling never says that in Sexing the Body.
Goodman: She understands the genetics, she understands the biology, and she understands the differences between sex and gender.
But to respond to the idea here, there’s no parallel at all between denying race and denying sex.
Graves: And we don’t deny that biological races exist in other species—we simply say that biological races don’t exist in anatomically modern humans.
People in the humanities tend to confuse biological and social conceptions of race, since they only have socially defined races in mind and they don’t think about biological variation within humans or within other species. But we derive our analysis from understanding intra-species variation’s evolutionary roots; the process of adaptation; genetic drift; gene frequencies’ geographical structure; and algorithms like the ones in the computer program “structure”. And we recognize that these things don’t give us any unambiguous way to apportion the human species into biological races.
4) What about the view that one should take a “middle ground” view that race is biologically real but that racism is a hideous phenomenon?
Goodman: There’s no middle ground as to whether race is biologically real or not.
There’s an old pre-Darwinian typological view of human variation that tries to divide the world of human variation into three or four types. And then there’s a 75-year-old view that pretty much every credible scientist adopts that says that that pre-Darwinian view is absolutely not true. And you can go through a number of proofs to show that that pre-Darwinian view isn’t true—human variation isn’t explained by race, but rather by local evolution.
So there’s no middle ground—it’s like asking if there’s a middle ground between the view that the sun revolves around the Earth and the view that the Earth revolves around the sun. Or between the idea that the world is flat and the idea that the world is round.
Graves: The point of science as a method is to give us reliable and accurate information about the way nature works. And we based our book on the best existing science on biological variation within the human species.
5) Which of your writings on race should people read in addition to your new 2021 book?
Goodman: I wrote a 1997 Science Magazine essay about the misuse of race in forensics and biomedicine:
“Bred in the Bone” (1997)
I have a piece—about genetics and public health—in the American Journal of Public Health:
I also have a piece that came out last year on the blog SAPIENS:
“Race Is Real, But It’s Not Genetic” (13 March 2020)
And I have a previous book on race called Are We So Different?.
Graves: I’ve been writing about race since the early ’90s—from the moment my brain opened up I’ve been dealing with this topic, since I was a racially subordinated person in America and I had to think about race from a very early age. I think that I have over 40 peer-reviewed publications on the topic.
I’d recommend my books The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millenium and The Race Myth: Why We Pretend Race Exists in America, and then I’d recommend my following publications:
“Evolutionary Versus Racial Medicine: Why It Matters” (2011)
“Basketball” (2013)
“Great Is Their Sin: Biological Determinism in the Age of Genomics” (2015)
“Why the Nonexistence of Biological Races Does Not Mean the Nonexistence of Racism” (2015)
6) What do you think about Troublesome Science by Tattersall and DeSalle?
Graves: I’ve reviewed Troublesome Science, and I think it’s a very strong book.
7) What are the biggest misconceptions about race and what does the public need to know about race?
Goodman: A decade or two ago there was a situation with climate change where there was a scientific consensus that global warming was real and human-caused, but the public had yet to get the message. I think that there’s a situation like that today with race where there’s a strong scientific consensus—the number of valid scientists outside the consensus is fleetingly small—but the public education project is just starting.
The current state of education on this topic is 15 or 20 years away from where we are now on climate change, despite the fact that we’ve had the data on this topic for way longer than we’ve had the data that are relevant to climate change.
8) What particular pieces of evidence have moved the needle toward that consensus?
Goodman: Richard Lewontin’s 1972 paper “The Apportionment of Human Diversity” clearly showed that almost all variation occurred within so-called races and within continents, and that was absolutely a key paper in understanding human variation.
And I think people at that point said: “Well, it’s based on the samples, and those samples are scattershot, and when more data come out that pattern won’t show up.”
But it’s shown up repeatedly time after time after time with new groups and new genetic markers. And now we’re quite certain that the genetic variation on average between two Africans is greater than the genetic variation between somebody from Africa and somebody from Europe or Asia.
So these data are all widely available, and there are multiple confirmations that repeat the data, and it’s very hard for scientists to ignore that we now know what the structure of geographic variation is and that that structure is definitely non-racial.
Graves: And the problem goes much deeper because the whole notion of biological races in humans collapses and becomes entirely arbitrary as soon as you understand the evolutionary mechanisms that are responsible for intra-species variation.
Ernst Mayr pointed out in the 1970s that it’s entirely arbitrary where you set the bar for how much genetic variation you need to have in order to define a biological race.
Theodosius Dobzhansky—who was Lewontin’s PhD mentor—basically thought that biological races were determined by any significant polymorphism, but that definition would mean that every single species has 100s and 100s of biological races.
Lewontin wanted to examine the fundamental question of how much genetic variation there is within populations—he first measured variation in Drosophila pseudoobscura fruit flies, and then he looked at the human groups that anthropologists or naturalists or biologists had described as races. And he found that—in violation of the analysis of variance—intra-group variation was about seven times greater than inter-group variation.
Sewall Wright later analyzed intra-population variation at different levels—local populations, continentally based populations, and the total species—and he came up with a theoretical justification for how much population variation between these groups should account for the existence of a biological race.
But when people measured genetic variation with stronger tools—RFLP, WGS—they found that Lewontin’s original observation kept holding up and the variation fell dramatically below the bar that Wright had set.
And the people looked across the globe and found continuous changes in gene frequencies, not discrete genetic groups.
And then finally people deployed phylogenetic tools to see whether any of these groups were actually in any way unique with regard to gene flow, and that failed too.
So we failed to come up with a statistical tool to unambiguously group people into biological races. And even more telling was the fact that the statistical tools would never come up with the socially defined races—the tools would instead come up with maybe 19 races that weren’t even the ones that you would traditionally think of.
9) Which species actually do have biological races and what does it mean to have biological races?
Graves: Alan Templeton has shown that some large-bodied mammals with biology similar to ours have enough FST—based on Wright’s criteria—that you can say that they have biological races. The examples are things like Grant’s gazelles, wildebeests, and North American grey wolves. These species have fractionated habitats, and have subpopulations with large differentiation in local adaptation.
And these species have a lack of gene flow between the different habitats because human beings have cut off the ability of these large-bodied mammals to move back and forth and spread genes, but that never happened in our species from our very beginning in Sub-Saharan Africa 300,000 years ago—throughout our migration across the globe, we’ve always had very high levels of gene flow, which means that we’ve never developed enough local adaptation to differentiate our groups from one another such that our groups would be biological races.
10) Haven’t there been situations where human populations have been separated and reunited—isolated and then recombined?
Graves: Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues proposed an “isolation by distance” model—the idea was that human populations migrated around the globe and then got farther and farther away from one another and then gene flow declined and local adaptation happened. And this process did indeed occur, but they found that throughout this process there was never enough isolation to actually form biological races.
11) For example, there was a land bridge in Siberia that people crossed and that later disappeared—that’s one way isolation could occur.
Graves: We actually now think that people didn’t come to North America by land bridge and that people instead came by boat—the idea now is that people arrived in North America by boat, traveled south along the North American coast, settled in South America, and then began to migrate up into North America as the ice sheets receded.
12) I link in my interview with Tattersall to an interesting video where someone says that a logical division of humans into biological races would yield a highly non-traditional result—four or five biological races would be in Africa and then all non-Africans would be a single biological race.
Goodman: Africa is a large continent and it’s where humans first developed genetic variation, and so the greatest amount of genetic variation exists in Africa—all other genetic variation is essentially a subset of African genetic variation.
You only need a trickle of gene flow—continuous or periodic—to equilibrate populations, and that’s why so much genetic variation occurs within subgroups and not between them.
Graves: The algorithms in “structure” are written to look for structure—the way that you write these algorithms determines what you get.
And there are population genetic assumptions in the algorithm that don’t always hold up. The non-continuous sampling that you use to create the “structure” program’s diagrams makes it seem like there’s clustering where there isn’t. And the other problem is that the result—do you come up with the five traditional races? or do you instead come up with 17 groups?—depends on how many genetic markers you look at, and so it’s completely arbitrary.
13) If genetic variability isn’t a pathway to biological races, what about the notion that not all genes are equal?
Graves: Our book discusses the fact that there really isn’t a lot of strongly demonstrated local adaptation in humans to begin with—the examples of adaptation are things like skin color in the tropics, anti-malarial and anti-parasitic adaptations, lactase persistence, and hair form.
And the vast majority of the examples are single Mendelian traits. There are only two examples of local adaptation on a complex trait—one occurs in Northern Europeans and probably relates to sexual selection, and the other is the rainforest phenotype that occurs in both the African jungles and in the South American jungles.
So it’s genuinely nonsensical to think that you can cherry pick certain genes that are more important than others and somehow get to biological race that way.
Goodman: And even if we play the game and imagine that it’s true that there are special genes that confer intelligence or something, there’s no reason to think that these special genes would be limited to one continent or to one “race”.
Graves: And we can’t even play the game, since we have genome-wide association and no such genes have ever been detected, so it’s equivalent to saying: “Yeah, there are definitely UFOs out there.” We don’t find such genes when we use the methods of observation that we have in genomics.
And when it comes to the complex traits in question, non-genetic factors like environment explain 99% of the variation, and so these special genes could at most account for 1% of the variation.
My piece “In Defense of the ‘Orthodoxy’” responds to the evolutionary scenarios that one might come up with that might lead to genetically determined differences in intelligence between populations.
The first evolutionary scenario that one could come up with is direct selection for greater intelligence, but that doesn’t work because you’d have to come up with an environment where having greater intelligence wouldn’t be an advantage—they use the idea that winter in Europe required you to be smarter in order to survive, but Africans migrated across eight different climatic zones in the tropics and each of these zones had new plant types and new animal types and different geography, so somehow only winter is supposed to require you to be smarter. And the person I responded to didn’t even do the analysis properly, so based on his reasoning it should’ve been Africans who became more intelligent.
And the second evolutionary scenario that one could come up with is that greater intelligence resulted from pleiotropic genes, which means that genes were selected for something else and incidentally happened to make you more intelligent. But if that happens, it’s entirely random. And it’s been theoretically demonstrated over and over that that certainly can’t be maintained across generations.
So the people who try to claim that there’s a genetic basis for differential intelligence when it comes to humans can’t even present any credible evolutionary scenario by which this would happen.
Goodman: On the intelligence question, I think there’s a dangerous combination of two types of pseudoscience—first there’s a geneticization where you give to genetics a power that it doesn’t necessarily have, and then on top of that there’s a racialization where you assume that the relevant genes are somehow divisible among socially defined races. My 2000 article discusses this double leap of faith:
14) Which geographical variations among humans are even adaptive as opposed to being random? Skin color—which arises from a variety of different genetic pathways—has an adaptive basis, since darker skin is advantageous at lower latitudes and disadvantageous at higher latitudes. And yet there are apparently very few non-random variations.
Graves: Anti-malarial adaptation is adaptive where malaria exists. And another example is one of the genes that plays a role in predisposition to lung cancer.
So there are clearly cases of non-random adaptive local variation, but you have to go back to Dobzhansky for that to be your basis of biological race, and Dobzhansky doesn’t provide a very appealing classification scheme.
15) Frank Livingstone said: “There are no races, only clines.” What do you think about that?
Goodman: He said that in 1962. And almost 60 years later, I’d say he was spot on.
Almost every genetic trait or phenotype has a subtle clinal variation—it’s like a temperature map. And you can imagine taking a walk from Oslo down through Europe and through the Arabian Peninsula and into Africa, and you’ll see gradual variation, and you’ll see that most of that variation happens within the African continent.
Graves: Marco Polo actually walked from Europe to China, and in his writings he doesn’t discuss discrete changes in skin color.
And Ibn Battuta also walked all over the world, and he saw gradual changes in people’s skin color, and he didn’t discuss the idea that people were racially different from one another.
16) What do you think of this quip that Tattersall made to me about gene counting? Tattersall said this to me: “Beware of all this gene-counting. It produces the conclusion that human males are more closely-related to male chimpanzees than to female humans.”
Graves: It’s a good point—gene counting is misleading.
17) Tattersall also said this to me about whether you could come up with logical genetic groupings (all but one of which would be in Africa): “The genetic signal indicates population admixture at least as much as it indicates differentiation. Which makes the pie even harder to slice.”
Graves: Gene flow has definitely been the story of our species.
With any groupings that you come up with, you have to ask about the criteria that generated those groupings—there are all sorts of ways to come up with really neat-looking schemes and diagrams, but you have to ask whether the assumptions are valid and whether it makes sense to use the statistical tools in question.
But whether you divide things up into five genetic groupings or—like Stanford’s Marcus Feldman, who I respect—19 genetic groupings, it all makes our point that we’re looking at continuous genetic variation across the globe. So in fact, these groupings are arbitrary.
18) What necessary components do you need in order to demonstrate that biological race is real? You obviously have to demonstrate some genetic division among humans, but does that division have to be related in some way to geographical isolation?
Graves: Yes, it needs to be related to geographical isolation.
Goodman: People’s thinking about race actually differs slightly by country, but our general ideas about race have to do with colonization and European exploitation and slavery, and these 18th-century ideas don’t work and constantly fail and should be added to the scrapheap of dead scientific ideas.
Graves: My own view is that these social definitions of race only exist to serve social hierarchy. Here’s what Lewontin said on that topic:
The apparent homogeneity within races as compared to the “obvious” difference between them stems partly from the fact that our consciousness of racial differences is constantly being reinforced socially because racial distinctions serve economic and political ends, and partly because the very characters we use to distinguish races—skin color and texture, hair form, eye, nose, and lip shape—are those to which we are most keenly attuned for the purpose of distinguishing individuals.
19) The American Anthropological Association’s 1998 statement on race asserts that race was “invented during the 18th century to refer to those populations brought together in colonial America”—people would be surprised to learn that race wasn’t a thing prior to the 1700s.
Graves: Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta didn’t talk about race. And the Romans and Greeks and Egyptians didn’t talk about race—Aristotle and Plato discussed human differences, but it was never racialized.
Race started in the 18th century when the transatlantic slave trade crystallized—people and particularly Christians had to come up with some justification for why they were enslaving other human beings, and within Christian theology they couldn’t come up with anything, and so they had to dehumanize the people they were enslaving. See Terence Keel’s book Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science.
Goodman: By the Age of Colonization—what an outdated history textbook would call the “Age of Exploration”—it was necessary to invent race in order to justify racism, colonization, exploitation, slavery, and European inhumanity toward other groups. Race first became a legal entity in Virginia in the 1680s—later on, scientists tried to make race scientifically real.
Graves: You’ll notice that Linnaeus didn’t talk about variants of humans until the Systema Naturae’s 10th edition in 1758.
So it’s very striking to see that racism was invented, and then after that the concept of race followed.
20) What’s your take on Jerry Coyne’s comment about race? He wrote this in a 2012 blogpost:
I do think that human races exist in the sense that biologists apply the term to animals, though I don’t think the genetic differences between those races are profound, nor do I think there is a finite and easily delimitable number of human races.
Graves: He’s trained in the same discipline as me—based on the science that he knows, he should understand that any such schemes of dividing humans into biological races are entirely arbitrary.
And if you look at his comment there, he seems to agree that it’s arbitrary, so he’s making the exact same point that I make!
If you can’t delimit a unit, how do you know that it’s a unit? It’s like saying: “Yeah, there must be UFOs out there, even though we’ve never actually shown that they’re out there.”
You would never make a comment like that about anything to do with Drosophila—for some reason it’s acceptable to make a comment like that about humans.
Goodman: His comment makes no sense and isn’t based on facts or data.
21) Is the unit “species” an example where we can’t delimit the unit?
Graves: I study bacteria, and there’s no such thing as bacterial species because of horizontal gene transfer. And even with large-bodied organisms like Drosophila, there are all sorts of hybrids like simulans and melanogaster, so how do you decide if an organism is a simulans or a melanogaster?
22) How would you respond to David Reich’s 2018 piece “How to Talk About ‘Race’ and Genetics”?
Graves: See the response to him that I co-wrote:
“How Not To Talk About Race And Genetics” (30 March 2018)
Stereotypes
1) How would you address vulgar stereotypes? For example, people go to high school and notice that the Asian kids destroy everyone academically.
Graves: Genes don’t necessarily determine intellect—it’s also a question of culture and environment.
I’ll tell you an interesting story about stereotypes. I took a human genetics course at graduate school with a Japanese instructor who was very, very strict. And I noticed throughout the course that he was much harder on me than on anybody else in the class, so I thought: “Yeah, this is just another example of the anti-Black racism that I’ve experienced from various people of East Asian descent.”
But at the end of the class, he stopped me and pulled me aside. And he asked me: “Joe, why do you think I was so hard on you during this class?” And my response was: “I don’t know why.” And he said to me: “I did it because I know what kind of racism you’re going to face in this field. And I wanted to be sure that you were more prepared than anybody else.”
Then he told me the story of how his family had been interned at Manzanar, and the story of how everything had been taken from them, and the story of how much racism he’d had to endure in order to become the PhD that he was. And then he said that he’d be honored to serve on my PhD committee.
So stereotypes are all well and good, but there are real people who deal with real circumstances, and one box doesn’t fit everybody.
2) There are also vulgar stereotypes that you get from watching NBA basketball because you think to yourself: “There’s no white Lebron. There’s no white Shaq. There’s no white Zion.” Or you look at Usain Bolt and you try to imagine a white person running that fast. Or you look at the fact that 20% of Nobel Prizes have gone to extremely intelligent Jewish people. It’s obviously important to remember that one-in-a-billion talents like Albert Einstein or Shaq or Lebron or Zion don’t tell you anything at all about wider trends—the most that you can say based on such observations is that a disproportionate number of one-in-a-billion geniuses are Jewish and that a disproportionate number of one-in-a-billion athletic talents in a certain category are Black, and nothing can be extrapolated from that narrow observation.
Graves: I’ve written about 10 articles on the fallacies about athletics and race, and we have a whole chapter in our book on “Athletics, Bodies, and Abilities”.
The 2020 Olympics should’ve blown these stereotypes right out of the water—for example, look at the fact that Molly Seidel won the bronze medal in the women’s marathon.
In one piece I looked at which variables actually determine medal count at the Olympics. I found that the biggest factor was population size—bigger nations have more potential athletes to draw on, so it’s just simple statistics. And I found that the second most significant variable was GDP, which determines the extent to which you can grab these potential athletic superstars at a young age and train them.
As we discuss in our book, Finland is a big anomaly that produces outstanding Olympic athletes and has won far more Olympic medals than you’d predict from their population size. Jamaica also does much better than you’d predict, but there was a cultural decision in Jamaica to focus on sprinting. And Kenya dominates long-distance running, but that’s because Kenya is at a high altitude and that gives them an advantage because their lungs adapt to the high altitude.
Distance-running constantly improves because of better nutrition and better training, but I did a linear regression to determine which long-distance runner was the furthest off the regression line for their time period, and I found that based on that analysis the greatest 10,000-meter runner of all time was actually Finland’s Lasse Virén.
Goodman: It’s also important to note that East Africans are as genetically different from the enslaved West Africans—who interbred with Indigenous Jamaicans and with Europeans—as West Africans are from Southern Europeans.
Nigeria is the largest country in Africa, and look at Nigeria’s medal count—it’s pretty close to zero. That’s the effect of poverty and not having any tradition of focusing on any particular sport.
Some genes might make you a great sprinter or make you a great long-distance runner, but those genes aren’t somehow confined to one socially defined race or anything like that.
And if you went back to the 1920 and 1930s, it would be: “Oh my God! Those Finns! They’re unbelievable! They’re the world’s best runners!”
Graves: I looked at all the genes that the literature associates with greater athletic ability, and those genes’ FST values are very, very low—those genes are found all over the world.
In large populations a large number of people will have those genotypes, so the issue is whether you have the resources to be able to take people when they’re very young and give them the training they need. My cousin Chris Campbell was an Olympic athlete, and he never would’ve realized his athletic potential if he hadn’t gotten incredible training from a very young age.
There’s a stereotype that Black people dominate the NBA, but the NBA today really makes my point—the NBA is an international phenomenon now, and you have stars like Luka Dončić. And in my opinion, Elena Delle Donne is the greatest WNBA player ever. And even on the narrow issue of vertical leap, just look at volleyball where the players have 40-inch verticals and are rarely Black.
In my opinion, soccer is the sport with the greatest athletic demands, and so it’s interesting that the greatest soccer teams in history have had multi-ancestry compositions.
Goodman: You mention Jewish representation in the arts and sciences—it’s important to look at the way that Jewish culture has valued education, at the history of Jews being forced into certain professions due to exclusion, and at the fact that Jews didn’t always enjoy this representation.
Graves: The other thing is how you define “genius”, since there are many different talents and skills—Albert Einstein was very gifted at particular things, but we shouldn’t devalue intellectual and scholarly and moral contributions that don’t fit into some narrow culturally defined set of criteria. Was W. E. B. Du Bois a genius? Was Fredrick Douglass a genius? What about Harriet Tubman?
Moving the Needle on Racism
1) People shouldn’t be ignorant or confused about science—I hope that your new 2021 book will help to open the floodgates on this topic and that the public education system will soon reflect the science on this topic. But how do you know that educating people about the fact that race isn’t biologically real would even crack the top 10 things that would move the needle on racism? I haven’t gathered a bunch of racist Americans into a room and done a focus group or anything, but my instinct is that material like Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told and Rothstein’s The Color of Law would really move the needle on people’s racism.
Graves: To dismantle racism, you need to have a commitment to dismantling racist structures.
But the assumption that biological race is real drives racism in the US, and sociologists and historians of science have demonstrated that the vast majority of Americans believe in genetic essentialism when it comes to race—there’s a widespread view that people’s biology determines where people end up in the social hierarchy.
But of course we didn’t write our book so that the Aryan Nations and the Proud Boys would pick it up and read it from cover to cover and say: “Oh my gosh—all this time we’ve been wrong.”
Goodman: Education on this would do a lot to remove the racial smog that we all live in—one of the main components of that racial smog is the idea that race is biologically real.
Graves: This racial smog has been with us for 100s of years, but many people like this racial smog and are comfortable in this racial smog, and so you can consider our book the air filter.
2) How much would it move the needle on racism if everyone learned the science on this topic in school?
Graves: It’s a prerequisite for overcoming racism—a lot of people base their racism on a deeply held belief that there are biological races that differ in abilities and that these differences determine where people end up in our society.
There’s a lot of work to do—a recent national survey that I worked on found that the vast majority of our respondents had misconceptions about race, and a 2016 paper found that even medical students and medical residents had incredibly high rates of misconceptions about human biological variation: