News

Deconstructing race as real

By Liz Carrasco
carrascl@mscd.edu

We play with myths as a way to romanticize the past and scare ourselves from the dark corners of our closets, said professor Joseph L. Graves Jr., who spoke to a crowd in the Tivoli Turnhalle Oct. 6.

He said we perpetuate a separatist racist environment where instead of using fact, science, and logic to explain our oneness, we use paranoia and unfortunately, the media, to continue these myths.

"People like me operate to dispel these myths through fact, and we are then marginalized, censored," Graves said. "We know their racial ideology is wrong, even Hitler in 1937 knew that there were no such things as races, he even went so far as to say, 'I know there are no races, but I will give it a new role.' He used racism to galvanize the Aryan nation."

Graves, Dean of University Studies, Professor of Biological Sciences in North Carolina A&T State University and author of "The Race Myth" and "The Emperor's New Clothes" spoke about how the concept of race as a biological construct is false.

In a lecture titled, "Dracula has Risen From the Grave: Genetic Reductionism and the Resurgence of Biological Determinism", Graves explained that he had changed the mission of his lecture after having read an article in the Vancouver Sun Oct. 1, that once again brought about the theories of race as a factual determent in human genetics.

The article by Andrew Duffy in the Sun explored studies done by Rushton J. Philippe and G. Vector Jensen in which the IQ gap became that of genetics or race.

Graves explained that this reporter is telling the Canadian public that because of a psychologist's point of view that the idea of races is correct.

"That in other words, Chinese people will be understated in basketball and black people in other areas because of genetics." Graves said.

Graves explained that racism has always been the pillar upon which this society is structured. He added that corporations such as Pioneer Funds and American Enterprise use these concepts to continue the race notions so as to continue crippling the progression of humankind.

Graves showed through his collection of data and facts that it is the adaptation to the environment that plays a key factor in the core of the intellect.

The belief system of races has followed humans through the centuries. Naturalists of the 18th century believed that there was only one species of humans. Biologist Charles Darwin himself could not disprove the fact that there was only one species of human beings according to Graves.

Then again in the 19th century, the idea of separate races resurfaced by using the theory that one could use physical features to define them.

"It does not reveal our evolutionary history. Genes that control skin color are not linked to those that determine skull shape and body proportions," Graves said.

"Natural characteristics as deemed by scientists are dependent on the area in which they are located. A panel of experts in the NY Times found no scientific basis for race bias in 1950. It was less a biological fact than a social one."

Graves referred to a study found in Science magazine in 2002 that used an algorithm called structure to examine the sequence of individuals from various populations and showed that they could all be clustered in a variety of ways. It all depended on who was giving the results and for what reasons.

Graves explained that due to the make up of the U.S., within the audience itself, anyone could have genes from Europe, Asia, Africa, or South America.

"Hitherto existing society is the history of individuals and group of males attempting to subordinate other males and females. Social dominance."

Graduate student Frank Rodman said that he was surprised by what he heard that day.

"There's a new resurfacing in pseudo-scientific form refuting with actual scientific knowledge," Rodman said.