One of Mother Nature’s Little Jokes

           One of Mother Nature’s Little Jokes

 

          Amongst humans, ‘race’ is an illusion. Except for obvious genes like skin color and bone structure, the genetic differences between the so-called races is less than the differences within the so-called races. Genetically, skin color is skin deep; it is not a good predictor of pretty much anything else.

          This should not come as much of a surprise, given the evolutionary time-scale of skin color. It takes only a few thousand years for deep tan Asians to become pasty white Inuit; or for palefaced Central Asian horse raiders to become swarthy Indians. Basically what we call race is a genetic tan.

          It’s not even a matter of color but of hue. As I noted in another essay (“Do White People Exist?”) the color of Caucasian skin is not even close to the color of clouds, paper, milk and cloth. A glass of milk the color of Patrick Buchanan would clearly be undrinkable. All humans, except possibly the rare albino, is in fact a shade of brown. To say one sees white people is to literally confess a hallucination.

          So race is an illusion, both genetically, and if you inspect the visual evidence objectively. And yet even infants react differently to people of different skin hue. Babies are born racist!

          Racism is genetic, even though race itself is not! Another one of Mother Nature’s little jokes.