Races among humans are artificial, perverse constructs generated by misapplying the taxonomic category subspecies or by arbitrary socio-political construction. The subspecies, as a biological category, was formalized by Carl Linnaeus, the 18th-Century “father” of taxonomy. Linnaeus and contemporary racist theorists popularized human subspeciation using morphology and “demeanour” to divide us into a handful of “races”. Homo sapiens europaeus was described as “white, sanguine, muscular”; Homo sapiens after as “black, phlegmatic, relaxed”.
 |
| Modern-day khoisan |
‘Racialism’ was probably employed by the earliest humans. Post-Linnaean racialism was further misused to identify a multitude of ‘racial’ groupings sharing a common language, religion, culture, class and/or national affiliation. Within the “First People”, the Southern African KhoiSan, the pastoral Khoi (khoi literally means “People”) regarded morphologically similar, hunter-gatherers as “San” (“Others”).
The ‘San’ (perhaps the earliest genetically-definable modern humans), in turn, have no collective name for themselves and are highly diverse linguistically and genetically – self-identifying as more than ten ‘nations’.
Worldwide, over 200 ‘races’ have been recognized. Within Haiti alone, local people employed more than 100 different racial terms. Also in modern-day Nigeria there are over 1200 dilects. In extreme instances, ‘races’ in power used their ‘superiority’ (and inferred threat) to ’justify’ their hyper-oppression and even genocide of the ‘others’.
Regardless of the number of races‘ recognized’, the primary purpose of human ‘taxonomy’ is to denigrate ‘others’. This is unjustifiable: biologically, culturally, educationally or socio-politically. Nature's biology: Since World War II, there has been widespread agreement that human races have no biological basis. Homo sapiens evolved once, in Africa about 200,000 years ago, and cannot be subdivided further. So, pioneer Pan-Africanist Robert Sobukwe hit the racial ‘nail’ on the head in 1959: “There is only one race to which we all belong, and that is the human race”.
Genetics: Humans all share the same set of genes. The DNA of any two human beings is 99.9% identical. In stark contrast, genetically distinct populations of our nearest living relative, the Chimpanzee Pan troglodytes – confined to Central Africa and sometimes less than a mile apart – are more genetically distinct than humans that live on different continents.
 |
| Map of Southern Africa |
For example, within KhoiSan-variation exceeds that among populations from throughout much of ‘non-Africa’, and many Brazilian “whites” have more African ancestry than some US “blacks”.
In short, we are all genomic ‘kissing cousins’.
If ‘genomists’ were forced to ‘discover’ geographically distinct groups from randomly-sampled humans, only a handful of African ones would emerge. The rest of non-African humanity would fall within one or other of these groups. In short, non-African modern humans are genetic ‘paleo-refugees’. The major human genomic groups are not Asians/Africans/Europeans/Native-Americans! Studies claiming the opposite (e.g. newsman Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History) and that societal differences reflect differential evolution in intelligence, impulsivity, manners, xenophobia, etc. are a “mountain of speculation teetering on a few pebbles”.
‘Racial genomists’ confirmed ‘racialization’ because they first separated the studied-humans by geography and ‘race’, avoiding individuals that don’t easily fall into these categories. Afterward, they searched for the few rapidly-evolving, adaptively neutral, bits of “junk DNA” that can discriminate amongst them.
 |
| Modern-day San Bushman |
Genetic Genealogy: This genomic capacity has been exploited by a growing, aggressively-advertised, genetic ‘ancestry’ industry. One can even get a ‘certificate’ indicating your ancestors’ geographical provenance and your geographic (read: racial) genetic makeup.
As far as I can understand, this makes some sense as a probabilistic, forensic scientific statement. But, the accuracy of the ‘diagnosis’ depends inter alia on the markers used and the scale of geographical coverage of the comparative material.
One thing is certain: this ‘genetic astrology’ is not legally actionable evidence of ‘racial’ or genealogical identity. For example, markers derived from one source (e.g. mitochondrial DNA) might place ‘roots’ in one area and suggest a certain ‘racial signature’, and those from Y-chromosomes others. A noteworthy example of human genetic ‘connectedness’ is the finding that millions of Americans may be descendants of the 4th century Irish King, Niall of the Nine Hostages.
During an Oprah Winfrey Show, eminent African-American Harvard historian and ardent ‘genome-genealogist’ Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. announced that he and an Irish-American police officer (who arrested him for trying to gain entry to his locked home) are among them!
Also based on this ‘diagnostic capacity’, some 21st-century ‘decolonist’ researchers, e.g. South Africa-based philosopher, Achille Mbembe, seem to advocate the biological rehabilitation of human races. Mbembe maintains that: “ongoing re-articulations of race and recoding of racism are developments in the life sciences, and in particular in genomics” and allow delineation of human races, making them “amenable to optimization by reverse engineering and reconfiguration”. This assertion is based on the above-mentioned blatant misuse of forensic genomics.
 |
| A painting of Caucasian-looking King Niall of the Nine Hostages? |
But, such physical and physiological variations tend to change clinally (geographically gradually), rather than abruptly and are generally inherited independently of one another. Furthermore, the clinal variation in one trait generally does not parallel that of others and those of genetic markers. In short, they are ‘discordant’; rendering any attempt to establish lines of division among human populations both arbitrary and subjective.
 |
| Niall of the Nine Hostages Family Tree |
Niall Noígíallach (Irish pronunciation: [ˈniːəl noɪˈɣiːələx], Old Irish "having nine hostages"), or in English, Niall of the Nine Hostages, was an Irish king, the ancestor of the Uí Néill dynasties that dominated the northern half of Ireland from the 6th to the 10th century. Irish annalistic and chronicle sources place his reign in the late 4th and early 5th centuries, although modern scholars, through critical study of the annals, date him about half a century later.
He is presumed by some to have been a real person, or at the very least semi-historical but most of the information about him that has come down to us is regarded as legendary. His lineage has possibly been traced using genealogical DNA testing. However, the conclusion that Niall is associated with the Y-chromosome SNP M222 has been called into question following further research. Notably, many O'Neills and McShanes (a surname associated with a line of O'Neill cadets) arise from an entirely different lineage.
 |
| The Celtic Gunderstrup Caldroun |
However, the early annals record the activities of his sons between 429 and 516, an implausibly long time-span for a single generation, leading scholars like Kathleen Hughes and Francis J. Byrne pp. 78–79 to conclude that the events of the latter half of the 5th century have been extended backward to accommodate as early a date as possible for the arrival of Saint Patrick, with the effect of pushing Niall back up to half a century.
 |
| St Patrick, patron saint of the Irish |
A legendary account of Niall's birth and early life is given in the possibly-11th-century tale Echtra mac nEchach Muimedóin ("The adventure of the sons of Eochaid Mugmedón").
In it, Eochaid Mugmedón, the High King of Ireland, has five sons, four, Brión, Ailill, Fiachrae and Fergus, by his first wife Mongfind, sister of the king of Munster, Crimthann mac Fidaig, and a fifth, Niall, by his second wife Cairenn Chasdub, daughter of Sachell Balb, king of the Saxons.
While Cairenn is pregnant with Niall, the jealous Mongfind forces her to do heavy work, hoping to make her miscarry. She gives birth as she is drawing water, but out of fear of Mongfind, she leaves the child on the ground, exposed to the birds. The baby is rescued and brought up by a poet called Torna. When Niall grows up he returns to Tara and rescues his mother from her labour.
Although it is anachronistic for Niall's mother to have been a Saxon, O'Rahilly argues that the name Cairenn is derived from the Latin name Carina, and that it is plausible that she might have been a Romano-Briton. pp. 216–217 Keating describes her not as a Saxon but as the "daughter of the king of Britain".
 |
| University of Natural Laws our Discussion Page on Facebook for this blog |
No comments:
Post a Comment