Talking About Race

It's time for better language. We are bound up with bad historical practices.

By Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Andrew S. Curran

Dr. Gates is a professor at Harvard University. Dr. Curran is a professor at Wesleyan University. They edited the forthcoming book “Who’s Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter From the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race.”

Who could have guessed that a Black scholar who has spent so much of his professional life searching for his long-veiled African ancestry would finally find it — only to discover that he’s half a white man. That friend’s joke allowed him to make a point: There is no category for white in genetic analysis; half of his ancestry traces back to regions in Europe. We should never forget that whiteness, like Blackness, is just another social fiction.

The multitude of population clusters, regions and genetic groups reflected in DNA tests counters existing narratives that try to reduce the astonishing variety of the human community to the four or five socially constructed races of man about which prior generations of students learned in biology class.

Race is, to steal a line from Wordsworth, “too much with us.” Its history is too long, its presence and usage too common, for it to magically disappear anytime soon. While, biologically speaking, the idea of individual human races with different origins is as farcical as the medieval belief that elves cause hiccups, the social reality of race is undeniable. And genetics — or, for that matter, any science — has the potential to be misused, co-opted by racist ideologies and employed to bolster harmful narratives about racial purity or biological superiority.

The stories embedded in our genes beg to be told. They tell of ancestral diversity that stretches back thousands of years and ultimately underscores all that we — despite superficial physical differences — have in common.