Us and Them

Dividing the world up into us and them is clearly built into our genes. I suppose that when our ancestors were hunter gatherers it was crucial to draw that line between family and band, between band and others. I recently watched a movie (Freedom Writers) about a tough high school in Long Beach. Every kid knew who his ethnic homies were, and Blacks and Cambodians and Hispanics and Whites each had their tribe and territory - straying into the wrong territory would earn a beat down or death. A suburban high school might have its slightly less fierce jocks, geeks, goths and popular kids.

Family and close allies are not big enough to carry much weight in a complex society, so bigger groups often arise. They are social constructs, but we build such constructs so effortlessly that it has got to be built in. In many societies, one of those organizing principles is race, and few care about the details or reality of any biological underpinning.

Paul Krugman recently wrote a book demonstrating (if it still needed to be demonstrated) that the key political convulsion of the last 50 years in the US was the replacement of the Democratic Party by Republicans in the role of defenders of southern racism. After Kennedy and Johnson and their civil rights bills, the southern racists knew they had been abandoned by the Democratic party. Nixon and Reagan knew exactly how to court that racism in a slightly less obvious fashion. The N word was replaced by talk of "States Rights." Reagan made a carefully calculated speech on the theme in the same city where not so long previously civil rights workers had been murdered, and the murderers set free by Mississipi law.

In biology, races are portions of a species which don't interbreed because of some geographic or similar barrier which wind up with different gene frequencies but remain close enough to fruitfully interbreed. That description has fit portions of the human species from time to time, usually because of geographical factors.

When you put members of different races (in the biological sense) together, they can and do interbreed, with the result that the biological definition no longer applies. The social construct of race among people is something different, even though it's usually rooted in biological or ethnic differences. Most commonly, it's a tool used by one segment of a society to dominate another.

After the abolition of slavery in the Carribean and the US, race became the key token of status in many places. Since race is ostensibly about ancestry, the inevitable interbreeding is a direct challenge to it. For this reason, dominant groups erect legal, religious, and social bans on miscegenation. Attempts to defend endogamy can't work well, though, so these measures tend to be ineffective. So what is to be done with the resulting children? Usually, they get assigned to the dominated "race." In the Carribean, elaborated degrees of racial affinity were constructed: quadroons, octoroons and so on, each with its rank ordered place in society.

This phenomenon is hardly peculiar to the New World. Similar arrangements, I believe, have occurred on every continent. The artificial barriers to defend race are always porous, as I have mentioned, so gene flow takes place. In some cases, the concept of race survives even after almost all traces of difference between dominater and dominated have been extinguished.