I have to admit to being racially confused. I grew up in suburban Washington, D.C., in the late 1950s (well south of the Mason-Dixon Line) and remember racially segregated restaurants and motels. My deeply prejudiced parents and my environment should have produced a bigot, but one of my most beloved teachers was José Garcia, whose hometown was Austin, Texas. He was about as Hispanic as anyone can be, yet I saw him as white. I didn't see any racial difference between myself and a couple of Japanese kids in my class either. It was during my childhood that the District police, frustrated with the traditional driver's license racial designations of W, N, O, and I (White, Negro, Oriental, and American Indian) instituted photo driver's licenses so officers wouldn't have to figure out whether a mixed-heritage person actually belonged to this particular card. And yet, with my East-coast delicacy, it always seemed gauche to talk about race, especially with someone whose heritage was obviously different from my own.
All of this is a long preamble to point out point out why the title of this article attracted my attention. It also points out why I felt relieved that some of my gut-level thinking turns out to be true: there ARE legitimate differences between people groups; American Blacks ARE difficult to classify; simplistic categories such as skin color ARE pretty much irrelevant. And one more, implied at the end of the article: political correctness DOES muddy the waters when we are trying to answer medical questions that are related to race.
I'm an English teacher, not a medical researcher, so even though this article was written for the mass-market Scientific American, some of the technical stuff flew right over my head. After three readings, I'm not yet sure I have the whole business of the Alus nailed down. I'm not sure that matters. What does matter is that we can begin to talk to each other without panic.
I remember when The Bell Curve was published. It was denounced as a piece of bigotry, and then the subject seemed to simply drop. What should have happened instead was the kind of discussion we see in Bamshad and Olson's article. First a discussion of what we really mean when we apply racial labels, followed by a discussion of how mixed the globe (and especially the USA) has become, and finally an attempt to unravel causes and effects (in the case of The Bell Curve, causes for low performance on standardized tests). Perhaps incidence of sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, and diabetes is a little less threatening to discuss than racially determined intelligence level. At any rate, I'm glad for a clear-headed discussion of what race is really about.
