If you're like me, you feel a bit unsettled when some form or other asks your race. That worsens to outright dismay when you see a list of options like "White British Heritage (Non EU)" or "Asian." The whole thing crystalises into a resolution to have absolutely nothing to do with such bollocks.
This is not a question of denying that horrors like this are real. But they'll never stop being real until we stop allowing people to use "black" or, let's say, "traveller" as a logical category with explanatory power. If explanation is what you want, try: "He stopped reading when his friends told him it was stupid." That gives you a way forward, something to work with. But: "He's a young black man" is just an excuse to give up, and we shouldn't use it.
But you have to put SOMETHING on that form. There's generally an option for "Other" with a write-in, but this fails because it because it admits the validity of the exercise, and it creates a risk of offending people who care about, who are even proud of, their "race identification". "Other - Human" seems like a weak joke or a failure to understand the question. "Pinky grey-green" is true, but is an even more extreme form of separatism than "white." And what you do put has to have a logic, a rationale, that will allow you to indignantly over-rule any zealous attempt to insert a conventional answer. You have to have truth on your side.
Thank heavens for science.
Biologically, a race, if it's anything, is a subdivision of a species where the individuals are identifiably different from members of other races of their species, and interbreeding between members of different races, while as fertile as any other intraspecies breeding, does not normally occur. That absence of interbreeding has to be real -- without it, you just have members of the species in mutually inaccessible conditions, and mutual inaccessibility means speciation or nothing.
This suggests that the human species, homo sapiens, has no races -- or perhaps we should say there is one. We have caste, cultural and geographical restrictions on mating, but I've never seen a shred of evidence that individuals won't have sex because of racial incompatibility. Just writing it down betrays the nonsense. And in fact, the genetic variation within the whole range of people living today is said to be less than that even within a single race of honeybees or herring gulls.
Is that a surprise? We perceive races as looking totally different, and that's the key. Human "races" are all about appearance, and our minds are hypersensitive to appearance. We can only see skin, faces and hair, and it's no coincidence that that's pretty much exactly where all the difference is. We all have the same spleens, brains and bones in our feet, and I think that's BECAUSE we can't see them. I suspect there has been an advantage in the past to looking the same as "us" and different from "them", and, left by itself over another few thousand generations it might result in proper biological races, but it's not race now. At a pinch, it's family, but even that doesn't really push the right semantic buttons. That's why those forms are so absurd and nasty. They boil down to asking what excuse we use to dislike other people.
So. One human race and an offensive form to fill in. What to do?
Over the last thirty years, careful analysis of genetic & archaeological evidence has told us a fascinating story. Living humans are all descended from a population that was resident in Africa a hundred thousand years ago. There were other human races at that time, in other parts of the old world, the Neanderthals and the Denisovians, and interbreeding did occur on a small scale when migrating groups encountered each other. But the other races have all gone now, eliminated by crime, competition or disaster. There's nothing left except us Africans.
Yes. What would the Neanderthals have called the people they met in Europe, or making their way up the Yellow river? What would the Flores hobbit people have called those same travellers island-hopping along Indonesia? If they'd known geography, there would have been just one possible name for those lanky hairless longheads: the Africans.
Each of us is descended from those people, the Africans. We are all African. And "African" is an option on most race forms, and if it isn't you can -- proudly -- write it in.
I put "African" on my census. I put "African" on service profiling forms. And when I get complaints, I explain, in as much detail as necessary, that this is the only possible answer, and it is the racial identity I identify for myself.
Which, after the thought and reflection appropriate to such a serious matter, it is.
