Critical race theory … Whoopi Goldberg suspended for comments about Jews and race … once again we are arguing about racism … welcome to the first in an eight part series on how we might understand “America’s original sin.” The series will be published on eight successive days. In Part 1 we will look at the concept of race — a concept that should unite us, as we will see, but instead has often been used to tear us apart.
The year was 1869 and Friedrich Miescher, a Swiss student of cell biology working at the University of Basel, made a discovery that would ultimately change our understanding of life itself. Working with pus extracted from surgical bandages, Miescher found an unknown substance containing both phosphorus and nitrogen in the nuclei of white blood cells. He called the substance nuclein.
Today, it is better known as deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA. Seventy-five years would pass — and a number of other prominent scientists would help advance our knowledge of this chemical compound — before we realized that Miescher had stumbled onto the master blueprint for all living things. And, unbeknownst to him, he had also given us the ability to say, once and for all, that racism is based on a lie.
Only one race matters … because only one race exists
Currently, there is a scientific consensus that Homo sapiens sapiens is the only surviving subspecies of Homo sapiens, those great apes which, collectively, constitute the human race. Testing has shown that 99.9% of our DNA is common to all humans — regardless of skin color. There are no other living subspecies or races (the term race, when applied to human beings, is generally a synonym for subspecies). Any other subspecies (and taxonomists disagree about how many existed) preceded Homo sapiens sapiens and are now extinct.
Africa is the birthplace of the human race, and there we find the greatest genetic diversity. Based on the numbers, the odds are that you would find more diversity between two, randomly selected dark-skinned, Sub-Saharan Africans than you would between randomly selected individuals from, say, the Central African Republic and Sweden. That may sound strange, but it is true.
To our eyes, skin color stands out as a major distinguishing feature among humans…
