The Duality of Racism and Diversity

We have a problem with race in this country. The previous sentence is deliberately ambiguous. Some readers will assume that I think there are too many; that I’m racist. Of those who interpret it thus, most, thankfully, will think I’m despicable. Some few, regrettably, may applaud the sentiment. Others, reading the first line, may think, approvingly, that I’m appalled at people who recognize race at all, whether as an issue or a reality. “We are all one,” they say, implying that our prose should ignore ethnic distinctions.

We happily go to the fall Diwali festival of South Asian culture, or the Chinese New Year parade, but few of us like being forced to reveal our ethnic origins in job applications. So “multiculturalism” is fine, politically speaking, but racial distinctions are not. I don’t mind this duality; it’s how it is. We should celebrate diversity when we can, but keep it out of places where it could subvert equality.

As a scientist, however, I think that it is time to make our discussion of ethnic and cultural diversity more accurate. Wednesday’s reports on the Statistics Canada projections of ethnic diversity uses terminology that is woefully obsolete. I’m not talking about the fact that so many of us are mixtures, but about how we define our ethic origins. The graphs on page A3 encapsulate the conundrum. We think we know what is meant by “Black,” for example, but most of us are wrong, to which I will return in a moment.

We see the “Arab” category and, having just read Douglas Todd’s column on religion, might assume that it equates to “Muslims” since most Arabs are, in fact, Muslim. But my Persian barber, although she would like to have a mosque nearby, speaks Farsi and has little in common, culturally, with Arabs. Most Pakistanis are Muslim, too. Are they in the “Arab” category or “West Asian” (a new one for me)? If we recall the latest atrocities in Darfur, we may think that the camel-mounted raiders from the north of Sudan were Arab because the reporters invariably say so, but they are not. They only speak Arabic—mainly as a second language—because of the Muslim conquests around 1200 years ago. People of Chad, northern Sudan and Ethiopia speak endemic languages such as Nubian, in the Nilo-Saharan language group; Beja, in the Cushitic language groups; and Kordofanian languages. Nilo-Saharan languages predominate in the south. To the west, in Niger, Mali and southern Algeria, the nomad peoples, such as the Tuareg, speak Berber languages. To lump these people in with “Arabs” as is so often seen in newspaper articles, distorts our perspective.

Similarly, “Filipino” is listed on page A3, separately from their relatives elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Here is the problem with this terminology: The Philippines is a country with many languages and cultures, but its genetic and ethnic affiliations are much broader.

Recent genetic, linguistic, and archaeological discoveries have led to a new appreciation of how we came to be whom we are. Fundamentally, we are all Africans. All humans can trace their genetic heritage to eastern or southern Africa about 150,000 years ago. Our forebears spread throughout the southern and western parts of the continent. But then, about 90,000 years ago, climate change and consequent forest expansion isolated groups to the north and south. Over time, the northern group evolved new genetic types and cultures and spread throughout the continent, but they didn’t replace the original humans, who also evolved and diversified without mixing with the northerners. The southern groups maintained their isolation by adapting to extreme desert or deep jungle. We know their descendants today as the Bushmen, or Khoisan, and Pygmies. They have lighter skin and straighter hair than the northerners, among other differences. Later, one of the northern groups migrated out of Africa; these migrated and diversified further, eventually peopling the whole world.

Recently, on a photo safari in Botswana, as we talked about human diversity, our guide—a Motswana man who spoke Setswana in the Niger-Congo language group, which also includes the Bantu languages—seemed a little surprised and even sceptical when I mentioned that, genetically, he and I were more closely related to each other than either of us are to his wife, a Khoisan. That is what the recent genetic results mean: at the highest level of genetic diversity, there are two kinds of people in the world: the Khoisan/Pygmy group, and everyone else. At the highest level of unity, there is one kind: modern humans. In between is a multitude of genetic, cultural, and ethnic diversity at different degrees of separation. So what are we to make of designations like “Black” and “visible minority”? Visible to whom?
Fortunately, all is not lost. Language evolves along with genetic heritage, and culture tracks language, so it is actually possible to modify our terminology to celebrate both our diversity and our unity. We can start by eliminating confusing terms related to appearance, by reserving country designations for political discussions, and by using genetically and linguistically accurate terms for ethnic groups.