it was because he saw a potential corpse [Applause]
how could a society steeped in the
science of racial inferiority
reconcile itself to owen's four gold medals
by conceding innate athletic superiority
to african americans
while denying them so-called civilized capacities
in the words of american team coach dean
cromwell the negro athlete excelled
because he was closer to the primitive
it was not so long ago that his ability
to sprint and jump was a life and death
[Music]
the competition was grand
and we're very glad to come out on top
a flurry of debate between racial
scientists and those contesting their
assumptions greeted owens accomplishments
with the rise of the great negro
athletes in the 1930s it became this
question that there must be a reason
that they're great and that that reason
must reside in biology rather than in
culture or history or circumstance
[Music]
when the african-american anthropologist
and physician montagu cobb
is trying to explain why jesse owens was
such an outstanding track star he does
so by talking about his body he talks
about his feet he talks about his legs
his calves his chest capacity and he
comes to the conclusion of course that
you know you can't say that negroes have
some special characteristics that make
them more fit as runners
among the few who challenge racial
science cobb wrote
there is not one single physical feature
including skin color which all our negro
champions have in common which would
identify them as negro [Music]
but what marker would identify them as
noah as white [Music]
[Music]
gorgeous as black [Music]
[Music]
think about race and its universality
where is your measurement device
there is no way to measure race
we sometimes do it by skin color
other people may do it by hair texture
other people may have the dividing lines
what is black in the united states is
not what's black in brazil or what's
black in south africa
can't be a tone for previous failures at
the plate with that one my favorite
trivia question in baseball is which
italian-american player for the brooklyn
dodgers once hit 40 home runs in a
season no one ever gets it right because
the answer is roy campanella who is as
italian as he was black he had an
italian father and a black mother he's
always classified as black you see
american racial classification is
totally cultural whose tiger woods it
was colin powell colin powell's as irish
as he is african
being black it's been defined as just
looking dark enough that anyone can see
when i was a child one of the things my
father bought me was a set of time life
books on science
and a book on evolution had in it a skin
color scale that went from 1 to 36 and i
would spend hours putting my arm against
the scale in the book the picture in the
book trying to figure out
what number my color was
and i couldn't quite find myself on the scale
you can be either 19 or 20.
i wonder if it matters how tan you are
no 14.
i'd say that john and noah
both white by appearance
and jackie and i
both fit under the asian classification but
but
i guess the thing that surprised me was
with the skin color test you know what
should you technically call the entire group
group
i would never know that
all your skin colors are
so similar exactly like we match
should you call them all white or should
you call them
11 to 15
you know
wow maybe lighter than those
i'm white
i probably wouldn't trade my skin color
it's something that i've taken for
granted it's also a privilege i guess
there's no profit in denying it that um
that there is a certain advantage to
we all have the same 35 000 or so genes
but over time mutations cause variations
today some genes like those for skin
color come in different forms
in a few genes that control the colors
of melanin in our skin
different alleles different mutations
occurred that were positively selected
so that many of us with very light skin
lost the capacity to make dark melanin
dark melanin blocks out some ultraviolet
light and is found where sunlight is intense
intense
lighter melanin is found where sunlight
is less intense
scientists debate why this is
one hypothesis is that it happened because
because
sunlight is essential to have adequate
vitamin d
in northern latitudes with very little
light during the winter one needed every
bit of light that one could capture
in order to be able to have adequate
active vitamin d and
and
children in particular would need to have
have
would need to be able to absorb into
their skin enough light to have
vitamin d present to keep them healthy [Music]
[Music]
the best way to understand the genetic
differences that we find in human
populations is
that populations differ by distance
and it's a continuous change
from one group to another
and one way we can look at this is use
example of skin color
if we were to only look at people in the tropics
tropics
and people in norway we'd come to the
conclusion that there's a group of
people who have light skin that's a
group of people who have dark skin
but if we were to walk from
from
the tropics to norway
what we would see is a continuous change
in skin tone [Music]
and at no point along that trip would we
be able to say
oh this is the place in which we go from
the dark race
human biological variation is so complex
there are so many aspects of human
variation so there are many many ways to
begin to explain them
variation in some traits
like eye shape hair
hair
texture whether or not your tongue curls
involves very few genes
and even those genes haven't all been identified
variation in traits we regard as
socially important is much more complicated
complicated
differences in how our brains work
how we make art
genes may contribute to variation in
these traits
but to the extent they do there would be
a cascade of genes at work
interacting with each other and the
environment in relationships so
intricate and complex that science has
people are always talking about genes
for things the genes for athletic
ability the genes for making money the
genes for intelligence
you have to be very careful even when
there are genes that influence those
things to talk about it as genes for
them it's not so
clear what makes us different is both
those genetic differences that we have
between us and also the interaction of
that genome with
the environment and the environment is a
very very complicated thing so when i
sort of mean the environment writ large
everything from
the environment in the womb to
in the urban environment of the 1930s
jewish teams dominated american basketball
sons of immigrants theirs were the hoop
and they rush it up the floor and the
stars win and it was said that the
reason that they were so good at
basketball was because the the artful
dodger characteristic of the jewish
culture made them good at this sport
there are strong cultural aspects of
what sports individuals choose to play
it has to do with the interaction of
individual genetic background of
opportunity and training [Music]
[Music]
history shows us
that as opportunities change in society
different groups get drawn into sporting arenas
by 1992
america's olympic dream team was almost
ten years later
twenty percent of nba starters would be
foreign born
the top nba draft pick chinese
we can't come to any fast hard rule
about how
genetic ancestry
is going to influence the ability of an individual
individual
to perform an athletic event so i don't
think we're ever going to be able to isolate
isolate
if genes contribute to marcus's musical
talent there would be dozens
interacting with environment
[Applause]
those genes would be inherited
independently of the genes for eye shape
skin color and hair form which mark has
inherited through his korean
for race to be more than skin deep
one has to have concordance in other
words skin color needs to reflect
reflect
things that are deeper in the body under
but most of human variation is
non-concordant skin color or eye color
or hair color is not correlated with
height away
and they're definitely not correlated with
with
more complex traits like intelligence or athletic
athletic [Music]
who is the person you said was going to
the tools of modern genetics allow the
students to explore the idea of race and concordance
concordance
from the beginning they believed they
would be most similar genetically to
those whose racial ancestry they
believed they shared
who'd you say was going to be most
different no but he's not
they have now sequenced a small loop of
if we want a very fine scale
for assessing how similar we are to each
other person by person we can do that
by sequencing that small bit of
mitochondrial dna
mt dna is a second set of dna found in
the cell's mitochondria
it does not code for any traits and is
inherited only from our mother
now what will it tell us it will tell us
a whole lot about one of our ancestors
our mother's mother's mother's mother's mother
mother wow
wow
seems like everyone has a vlog the
student's empty dna appears as the
letters a c t and g
representing the four nucleotides that
define our dna
the students are sampling a small
sequence about 350 letters long
they find that most of it is identical
one to the other
a lot of differences with everybody
because i'm different i'm really
jameel thought he'd have the fewest mt
dna differences with gorgeous
but i was more like kiro than i was than gorgeous
gorgeous
she has like 12 differences and like
carol is he's like a white he's his
background yeah he's like from russia and
and
like we seem completely different but
it's less differences
but i mean it's hard to tell because we don't
don't
john thought he'd have the fewest
differences with kirill and with noah
in fact john discovered that he had the
same number of differences with carol as
he had with jackie
if human variation were to map along
racial lines people in one so-called
race would be more similar to each other
than to those in another so-called race
that's not what the students found in
their mt dna
what about other genetic differences and
you're different
the problem for evolutionists and
population geneticists was always
to try to actually characterize how much
genetic variation there was between
individuals and groups and i spent a lot
of time worrying about that like other
people in my profession
in the 1960s richard lewington decided
to find out just how much genetic
variation fell within and how much
between the groups we regard as races
a new technology enabled him to do
pioneering work
and that method which is called gel
electrophoresis a very fancy name
um we were able to use on any organism
at all if you could grind it up you
could do it
that included people and you have to
grind the whole person but you could
take a little bit of tissue or blood
over the years a lot of data were
gathered by
anthropologists and geneticists
looking at blood group genes and protein
genes and other kinds of genes from all
over the world i mean anthropologists
just went around taking blood out of
everybody uh
i i must say if i were a south american
indian i wouldn't let them take my blood but
but
but they did and so i thought well we've
got enough of these data let's see what
it tells us about the differences
between human groups
lewinton's findings were a milestone in
the study of race and biology
if you put it all together
and we've now got that for proteins for
blood groups and now
with dna sequencing we have it for dna
sequence differences it always comes out
the same 85
85
of all the variation among human beings
is between any two individuals within
any local population
between individuals within sweden or
within the chinese or the kukuyu or the icelanders
to put it another way
of the small amount of variation in our
jeans there is apt to be as much
difference between gorgeous and her
teammate christine
as there is between gorgeous and her
opponent kaelin [Music]
[Music]
any two individuals within any so-called
race may be as different from each other
as they are from any individual in
another so-called race
are the people who we call black more
like each other than they are
like people who we call white
genetically speaking
the answer is no there's as much or more
diversity and genetic difference within
any racial group as there is between
still we know that some genes are found
with greater frequency in some populations
populations
and geography is the better way to
explain that more than race or anything else
else
there can be accumulations of genes in
like the gene forms regulating skin color
and for some genetic diseases like
long assumed to be a racial trait
sickle cell disease is a debilitating
disorder caused by a gene form that
it's one of the misconceptions that
sickle cell disease is an
african-american or an african disease
sickle cell trait
is not uncommon in people from the in
people from the mediterranean region
in fact in some parts of greece up to 30
percent of people in the population may
sickle cell trait persists in certain
populations around the world because of
the relative resistance it confers to
malaria so people who've got sickle cell
trait are less likely to develop malaria
and when they do develop it they are
less likely to develop severe
where malaria was common the sickling
gene was selected
in arabia
south asia
central and western
but not southern africa and in the
mediterranean basin the home of jackie
thought to have originated only a few
thousand years ago
sickle cell is not a racial trait
it's the result of having ancestors who
race does not account for patterns of
genetic variation
our recency is a species and the way we
have moved and mated throughout our history
history does
does [Music]
about two million years ago
small groups of early hominids not
modern humans began a first migration
out of africa to the far reaches of the globe
globe
it was long thought and is still
believed by some that those first
lineages led to genetically distinct
it turns out that's not true
i think there's almost
almost
genetic proof now i wouldn't say the
issue is totally resolved that those
lineages just died out that neanderthals
in europe died that homo erectus in asia
died that there was a second migration
of our modern species homo sapiens and
that all modern humans are products of
the second migration
which is probably less than a hundred
thousand years old by the best current evidence
some of those movements may follow major
migrations as agricultural people came
into europe as people crossed the bering
strait and came into the americas
but other movements are much more subtle
they're smaller groups of individuals
that moved or their genes move from
place to place in time to time
we've had maybe a hundred thousand years
of having genes move out and mix and
a hundred thousand years may seem like a
long time but in evolutionary terms it
human populations have not been isolated
from each other long enough to evolve
into separate subspecies
there just hasn't been time
for the development of
much genetic variation except that which
regulates some very superficial features
like skin color and hair form for once
the old cliche is true under the skin we
really are
effectively the same and we get fooled
because some of the visual differences
the superficial traits we use to
construct race are recent variations
by the time they arose important and
complicated traits like speech
abstract thinking
even physical prowess had already evolved
as geneticists
we now have the opportunity
to investigate
using proper genomic analysis complex
human traits
athletic ability musical ability
intelligence all these wonderful traits
that we wish we understood better
and for which we'd very much like to know
know
if there are genes that are involved how
they interact how they play out
those traits are old
we spent most of our history as a
species together in africa in small
populations before anyone left
there's far more of us now
than those small original populations
each of us carries with us some very
recent variation it's some common shared
variation that goes way back in human history
history [Music]
[Music]
variations among us in those old traits
developed independent of and
non-concordant with variations in the
recent superficial traits we think of as racial
human variation does not map onto what
we call race
no matter how we might measure it
so now it's going to this gigantic database
database
of dna you're going to blast this
database with your dna sequence and it's
going to pull up anything that's
significantly similar
and now the final exercise of the dna
workshop offered the students further
evidence of the genetic variation within groups
groups
they compared their mitochondrial dna
sequences with an international database
so the first choice for you is urban
mitochondrial dna
there's one
two three gorgeous sequence was most
similar to that of a urban individual in nigeria
nigeria
and that's what you were saying that's
the closest person you match up now does
that necessarily mean you're urban
no no it just means that there's
somebody in this part whoever in this
part of the world has a very similar dna
sequence to you
and remember if we look at other people
within this urban group i expect to see
other forms of mitochondrial dna
so let's close and they did
her match was dramatically different
from another europeans whose dna
sequence was very different from still
other urbans
because modern humans first evolved in
africa there is even greater genetic
so
if there were a catastrophe which
destroyed the rest of the world's population
population
most of the genetic variability in the
world would still be present in
[Music]
genetic data can subvert racial
assumptions about our ancestry and so
i'm going to compare your dna sequence
to somebody from a study that was done
on the population uh in the balkans
look and see how many differences we see
one two
two differences
jackie's data search matched her with a
sequence from an individual in the balkans
balkans
so you're expecting something maybe more
japanese yes definitely more japanese
instead of balkan that's interesting at all
all
if i actually know my maternal lineage
like i know where it should end up doing
a surge like this should double check it
right what's your preconceived notion my
preconceived notion is um
we know back through my great great
great grandmother and she had lived in
eastern europe her whole life in the
australian empire okay in
a little town in ukraine okay as far as
i understand but remember this little
town here ukraine may have many
different mitochondrial dna sequences
within it
so let's go back
and we'll look at yours
and isolate from the balkans
not a major shock there
let's see how similar you are to that
person and we had always guessed that my
great grandmother had been this nice
little farm girl who had spent her whole
life in the ukraine
and so i was pretty sure that i should
be a pretty exact match to one of those
ethnic groups and i was interesting 100 match
match
so i'm going to compare you with someone
in iceland all right we also pulled up a
sequence from iceland
wow i see no differences yeah again this
huh and that one
so what does that tell you so are you
icelandic or are you baltimore what does
it tell us and we pulled up a third
sequence from somewhere in africa and i
was also a 100 match well that's percent match
match wow
wow
that's very significant
um and that's weird well
well
what did china use not that you're
closely related to this person made
possibly mitochondrially speaking and
that we're all very closely related so
that someone shocked me actually that
there were so many of these racial
groups that
shared it
i'm just a mud so to speak i've been
crossbred and interbred with lots of
different ethnic groups let's see if it
gets more interesting than we think i
think the way to think about things is
that we're all mongrels
we've always been mixing every single
today's genetic findings corroborate
richard levington's discoveries of 30
because of our history of moving mating
and mixing
most human variation especially that of
older complex traits can be found within
any population
most of it from a common source
in africa [Music]
we have now understood
genetic variation in human beings i'm
not saying our knowledge is fixed for
all time it never is but i think we have
seen just how shallow and superficial
the average differences are among human
races even though
in certain features like skin color and
hair form the visual differences are
fairly striking they're based on almost
nothing in terms of overall genetic variation
variation
racist biology simply doesn't work
but what is important is
is
that race is a very salient social and
historical concept a social and
just because race isn't something
biological that doesn't mean it's not
real there are a lot of things in our
society that are real and are not biological
biological
race as we understand it as a social construct
construct
has a lot to do with where somebody will
live what schools they will go to what
jobs they will get whether or not they
black white and brown are merely skin colors
colors [Music]
[Music]
but we attach to the meanings and
assumptions even laws that create
enduring social inequality [Music]
[Music]
when i'm walking the streets alone at
night coming home from parties and stuff
i never
get a sideways glance at people asking
what i'm doing there
if a woman is stumbling with her
shopping bags and i stop and say would
you like a hand i never get sort of a
glance with two meanings it's always oh nice
nice
white boy you can help
on my own campus
when i walk to classes
students often come up to me and ask me
if i'm the football coach or the
basketball coach and i tell them no i'm
a professor in the department of life sciences
sciences
it's easy to be white it's very easy to
be white it's never been easy for
africans or african americans here never
it's been a long long time you know
since the abolition of slavery you know
african american slavery and in this
country it doesn't matter it doesn't
no matter how they view themselves
the world sees jackie gorges and john as
separate races the social expectations
that await them are in many ways
[Music] [Applause]
[Applause]
with our expectation about gorgeous be
that she is a champion athlete or
valedictorian of her class [Music]
but since the days of jesse owens
our society has more readily
acknowledged and more avidly rewarded
if the playing field were level
the array of opportunities opened to
gorgeous and her teammates would not be
limited by assumptions society makes
about the nature of the genes they inherited
lots of things are inherited they don't
have anything to do with genes money is inherited
and money goes a long way
in increasing someone's capacity to do
off the track
the playing field is not level
the net worth of the average white
american family is eight times that of
race is a concept that was invented
to categorize the perceived biological
social and cultural differences between
and the
beauty of that ideology is
that it justifies
justifies
what is the greatest social
social agony
agony
of american life namely it justifies the
inequalities that exist in a society
race is a human invention
we created it
we have used it in ways that have been
in many many respects quite negative and
quite harmful
and we can think ourselves out of it we
the racialized society we live in has
been under construction for three centuries
how can we unmake race
unless we first confront its enormity as
a historical and social reality
and its emptiness
[Music]
if race doesn't exist in biology where
did the idea come from find out in the
next episode of race the power of an illusion
illusion
to learn more about rethinking race
visit pbs online at pbs.org
to order the video set of race the power
major funding for this program provided
by the ford foundation a resource for
innovative people and institutions worldwide
worldwide
and the corporation for public broadcasting
additional funding provided by these funders
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