re #15: Would it perhaps be clearer to say that you can't draw an
absolute line between 'races' using genetics?
I'm not a scientist, but as I understand it, geneticists can actually determine anyone's racial mix surprisingly well using DNA, finding out what
percentage of ancestors anyone has of certain genetic types that are known to be African, Northern European, Asian, etc. Many people aren't purely a single type, especially in regions where there has been more mixing of cultures, but there are certainly people(s) in whom one type strongly predominates. So while it's true that there's no absolute distinction, it's also true that there are empirically observable differences.
I'm not saying this should have any influence on the language issue, which is just different in German and English.
But it's still interesting to see how issues of race and genetics can intersect in a more nuanced way, so that even if race is not an either/or, absolute category, it is still sometimes a valid descriptive category, though not necessarily a genetic one.
There was an interesting TV program on PBS last month hosted by Henry Louis Gates, a black Harvard professor who has been very vocal on racial issues. (I forget its title, but it should be somewhere on
http://www.pbs.org .) He collected a mixed group of celebrities and writers, some deservedly very famous like Meryl Streep and Yo-Yo Ma, others less well known, and arranged for genealogists and geneticists to research their family background.
To me the show was partly just frustrating, because the whole conceit involved Gates presenting the results of this research (done mostly by uncredited people offscreen) to these eminent people as if he had done it all himself, and taking a very patronizing tone toward them, as if he was telling them things they could never have learned without his help. He even told them when to turn the page in the photo album he had had made for them -- and when they had their own more extensive photo albums, he used his instead. He basically sets my teeth on edge.
But it was interesting that one episode involved precisely this kind of DNA testing, where you get a mix of capital letters like E, F, G, etc. (Sorry, I didn't catch the technical term for these geographic groups.) And as it turned out, all the black Americans on the show were actually only partly, sometimes a minority part, of African heritage. Gates himself is part white, though he identifies as black; and basically, there was no one on there blacker than he was. So it was kind of a faux premise. I would have kind of liked to see, oh, I don't know, Shaquille O'Neal or Forrest Whitaker or someone.
But at least for the US, that would probably have been a dead end for the genealogy portion of the program, because enslaved ancestors tend not to have been recorded in written history. In a sense, it's as if genealogy itself is a racial (racist?) category, a luxury available only to those who are white or part white.
For those of you to whom all this seems very different and foreign, one other aspect might be interesting: Even after Gates made this announcement, with a pie chart showing percentage northern European, percentage African, etc., the people who considered themselves part of a minority group still didn't change their mind, because it was already their identity. (One, Louise Erdrich, who is part Scandinavian but feels more Native American, even declined to have the DNA test done.) In a sense, they insist on the right to choose and cultivate their own racial identity now, in part to make up for their ancestors' having been denied that right.
A cynical reading might wonder to what extent this is also true among people of mixed descent who don't have as much at stake in one particular identity. Erdrich and Gates, for example, have made a lot of money and achieved a lot of prestige as, in a sense, spokespersons for their minority groups. Is this kind of identity politics in some sense also a class issue?
