Book Review

Why race is not the problem

Strange Fruit

Just before starting on Strange Fruit, the Indian-born British writer Kenan Malik's deconstruction of race, I finished quite a different book. It was John Buchan's Prester John, about a young Scotsman who undermines the attempts of  a charismatic black African king - formerly a Presbyterian clergyman - to throw off the burden of the white man in South Africa. It is, like much of Buchan, a rattling good read. It was also one of the most hair-raisingly racist books I have ever let fall from my nerveless hands. In the first chapter, one of the hero's friends complains that a black minister is preaching in his church: "The Bible says that the children of Ham were to be our servants. If I were the minister I wouldn't let a nigger in the pulpit." At the close, the hero reflects: "That is the difference between white and black, the gift of responsibility ... and so long as we know this and practise it, we will rule not in Africa alone but wherever there are dark men who live only for the day and their own bellies." He goes on to found an educational institute to train the natives in useful economic skills.

One of the merits of Malik's book is that it enables the reader to put these particular views into a specific context - that of a nineteenth-century ideology of race, which was particularly prevalent in the United States. The children-of-Ham idea that the races of the world derived separately from the offspring of Noah - with the subtext that one was subservient to the others - was articulated by, among others, Christian evangelical opponents of Darwinism in the US, among them John Bachman, a Southern clergyman and natural historian. As Malik says, "he justified slavery in biblical, not scientific terms; slavery was sanctioned by God because blacks were descendants of the ‘accursed' Ham, while Caucasians descended from the blessed Shem."

As for the notion that Africans are shy of responsibility and hard work, why, that is still being articulated, after a fashion, by J. Philippe Rushton, a British-born psychologist who has used the "life history" theory of evolutionary biologists to suggest that ethnicities are defined by whether they belong to the intelligent races (notably Orientals) that produce few offspring and care for them well or the less intelligent races (notably Africans) who produce many offspring and can't be bothered to look after them. Rot, of course, but rot conditioned by a particular historical understanding of biology and social science.

These and other views on race are here measured against both biological and social realities - and usually found wanting. Strange Fruit is actually three volumes in one. The first  is a lucid exposition of the biology of race, indeed an attempt to define race in some sort of genetic terms - a more difficult undertaking than we might imagine.

The author concludes that race is a social construct rather than a straightforward biological one - though this is not to say that it does not matter. As he observes, money is a social construct too, but it matters a very great deal. The second is an attempt to trace the cultural history of race - the interplay between scientific theory and social prejudice which goes to constitute our understanding of race. Here, Darwinism is shown to have been in part a malign influence - justifying theories of racial  difference that put white Europeans at the summit of  evolutionary development. The third is an exploration of the way in which race has been replaced by the category of "culture" in contemporary Western countries.

This turns into a passionate polemic on Malik's part against well-meaning attempts by Western liberals to see people, not as rational individuals, equal by nature but with contingent differences as the Enlightenment saw them, but as members of a culture whose particular sensitivities must be respected; and respected regardless of whether their beliefs make sense in scientific terms or whether they have a malign effect on individuals within that culture. As he makes clear, the paradoxical effect of exalting the "culture" of particular groups is actually to resurrect the concept of race in a different guise.

What is immediately apparent in terms of the genetics of race is quite how fluid racial categories are. Our race is a young one, only about 150,000 years old and the first people to leave our common African home did so around 60,000 years ago. Race, in terms of differences between populations, derived from the migrations in various directions that took place from that point. Genetic differences probably occurred not so much as the product of natural selection as of other evolutionary forces, genetic drift and the founder effect. In a small group, small genetic divergencies can assume a larger significance. And in the "founder effect" - whereby a small group of individuals leaves an original population to found another community - those differences can be much commoner in the new population.

Yet what is also apparent is the impossibility of categorising people as straightforwardly black or white, certainly in Britain and the US. The analysis of the make-up of Hispanic American populations in the US is enough to put paid to any idea of race simplicities. Yet, the author suggests that people's categorisation of themselves in terms of race may be pragmatically valuable. One of the few drawbacks of Strange Fruit is that the author's understanding of religion is limited. But as a corrective to the misconceptions and muddled thinking that characterise our discussion of race, this book is both brave and valuable.

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