Race is Not Just Skin Deep

By Ian Jobling • 7/3/08

A standard canard of race deniers is to cast scorn on the idea that biological races can be defined genetically. You will often hear the chattering class assert that racial differences are only skin deep and that commonsensical racial classifications, such as black, white, Asian, and so forth, do not designate meaningful genetic groups. As Kenan Malik said in a recent article in the Times (London):

Race has no scientific meaning because there is no such thing as a “natural” human population. Migration, intermarriage, war and conquest, forced assimilation, voluntary embrace of new or multiple identities (whether religious, cultural, national, ethnic or racial), social rules for defining populations such as the “one-drop rule” in America—these and many social other factors ensure that there are no such things as fixed natural populations.

Malik’s statement, however, is politically correct disinformation that has been refuted by geneticists. A substantial body of research has demonstrated that human beings are divided into genetically different population groups that correspond to commonsensical racial classifications.

Neil Risch’s chart of genetic clusters derived from population genetics studies.

In a 2002 article, Stanford genetics professor Neil Risch and his colleagues provided dozens of examples of population genetics studies that have affirmed the validity of commonsensical racial classifications. Risch concludes that the racial taxonomy in the chart to the right, which is taken from the article, best describes the overall clustering of human genetic differences: “Effectively, these population genetic studies have recapitulated the classical definition of races based on continental ancestry—namely African, Caucasian (Europe and Middle East), Asian, Pacific Islander (for example, Australian, New Guinean and Melanesian), and Native American.”

Risch acknowledges Malik’s point that in places races are mixed and difficult to categorize. However, this fact should not blind us to the fact that the overwhelming majority of humans can be classified straightforwardly as one racial group or another. The mere fact that categories have fuzzy boundaries does not invalidate them.

Populations that exist at the boundaries of these continental divisions are sometimes the most difficult to categorize simply. For example, east African groups, such as Ethiopians and Somalis, have great genetic resemblance to Caucasians and are clearly intermediate between sub-Saharan Africans and Caucasians. The existence of such intermediate groups should not, however, overshadow the fact that the greatest genetic structure that exists in the human population occurs at the racial level.

Risch also responds to the point that racial differences are only skin deep. He points out that none of the population genetic studies he cites as evidence for racial differences examined genes related to skin pigment. However one dices and slices the genome, no matter what criteria one chooses, the same racial differences always emerge:

none of the population genetic studies cited above…used skin pigment of the study subjects, or genetic loci related to skin pigment, as predictive variables. Yet the various racial groups were easily distinguishable on the basis of even a modest number of random genetic markers; furthermore, categorization is extremely resistant to variation according to the type of markers used (for example, RFLPs, microsatellites or SNPs).

Risch concludes that the “race-neutral” approach to medicine recommended by many pious academics would hinder our efforts to fight disease as racial classifications are an effective label of medically relevant genetic differences. Contra Malik then, race is essential to scientific research, not an irrelevant distraction.

Three years later, Risch provided a powerful demonstration of his thesis—a summary of the research is here; the journal article is here. Risch and his colleagues collected DNA samples as well as self-reported racial designations from 3,600 subjects in the US and Taiwan, who were white, black, Asian, and Hispanic. Without having looked at the racial designations, the researchers collected information about 326 DNA regions that vary among people and fed it to a computer program designed to come up with DNA groupings. The computer came up with four major groups, which, in all but five cases, corresponded to the subjects’ racial designations: there was one computer grouping for whites, another for Asians, and others for blacks and Hispanics. As Risch concluded, “This shows that people’s self-identified race/ethnicity is a nearly perfect indicator of their genetic background.”

Bottom line: race is real, despite the disinformation put about by newspaper charlatans. Deal with it!