The Sciences March/April 1997 [antikvár]

Initial Conditions EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK I'm a white guy. I live in an apah,tment building inhabited exclusively by whites, on a white block of New York City. Two blocks away my neighbors are black and Hispanic. My children go to the neighborhood public schools with Asian, black, Hispanic and white children from the neighborhood and beyond. These categories are, or ought to be, irrelevant to me; in fact, of course, they are an excruciating reality of daily life. Two years ago, on a sunny spring morning, I volunteered to help out with a fund-raising fair for my son's elementary school. There I hailed a black woman I hadn't seen since we had met the preceding fall. As we spoke, I could well remember the animated conversation we had had. But I drew a blank on her name. She was flirious. She accused me of racism: to me, obviously, all blacks looked alike. I was stunned by her attack. I forget names all the time. My self-image is one of tolerance and evenhandedness. I bristle at the use of race to save the trouble of dealing with a person as an individual. At the same time: eggshells. How confi-dendy can I reily assert that I am color-blind? How many of my unconscious acts betray an essentially racist core? Maybe Cynthia (not her real name) was right. At home, hours later, I called her: I do know who you are, I said, alluding to our pleasantries in the fall; I'm sorry I couldn't remember your name. But I too had a name—and it wasn't "white guy." Cynthia was surprised. She hadn't meant to upset me, though her hurt at my response was genuine. We agreed to remember each other. But since then our paths, intentionally or not, have not crossed. The trouble with race is its reach. It seems, at times, the very essence of the human genius to group and parse, to generalize and discriminate. But to be on the other side of those "discriminating" judgments is infuriating. How dare you assume, because I am white, that you can make stereotypic assumptions about me that can stand in for genuine personal acquaintance? And yet, you can make educated guesses. Have I had access to high-quality education? Am I likely to be impoverished? Do I bear the scars of discrimination? Would I hesitate to ask directions from the police? Look at my skin, and you probably already know the answers. How much light can science throw on this strange, twisted path to hatred and evil? Science can teach me to make another distinction: that, culturally, I may be white, but, biologically, I am closely related to Asians, to blacks, to Hispanics. Deep down, if what paleontology teaches is true, we are, all of us, out of Africa. And just how superficial is this patina of race? As Alan H. Goodman writes in "Bred in the Bone?" (page 20), I am probably biologically indistinguishable— once you get under my skin—from a member of any of those groups. So are you. Yet so strong is the need for culmral identity that the demand for biological pedigree, it seems, is not to be denied. Burkhard Bilger's "The Last Black Classicist" (page 16) tells of the struggle of Frank M. Snowdenjr., called out of retirement to defend his conviction about the enlightened racial attitudes of the ancients—and his resistance to the Afrocentrist impulse to claim the ancient Egyptians as its own. Does it matter? Would it have mattered if the Greeks had been black, the Africans white? Jared Diamond's "Continental Divides" (page 32) argues that it would. Restart the clock at the end of the last Ice Age, and shuffle those stone-age tribes in some new way among the continents. You would still fmd that the inhabitants of Europe and Asia—whatever their "race"—would have first developed metallurgy, first conquered their neighbors, first dominated world culture. We conclude our sampling of scientific perspectives on the puzzle of race with David Berreby's "Primary Colors" (page 38), an account of a troubling study of racial consciousness in young children. In the United States and in France, it seems, children as young as three regard race as the prime criterion for sorting children and adults into families. The author of the study, Lawrence A. Hirschfeld, is ready to attribute the behavior to a kind of mental module for sorting human kinds. Berreby— and I—are not so sure. As Hirschfeld concedes, yet-to-be-done cross-cultural studies are essential as experimental controls. And to me, at least, three years in either one of those cultures is plenty of time to pick up what "you've got to be taught." —Peter G. Brown 4 the sciences • March/April 1997