The category of “race” has become so widespread and central to the discussion of many social and political issues that people simply take it for granted. But is there any biblical or even scientific basis for categorizing all of humanity into a small number of “races” based on physical features such as skin color? And what should we say about this idea?
What is a race?
The word “race” has been used in a variety of ways, but the modern conception of human “races” is a broad division of people into distinct identity groups based primarily on an arbitrary selection of visible physical features, most prominently skin color but also certain facial features, the texture of the hair, etc. Thus, our society considers people with particularly light skin to be part of the “white” race while people with distinctively dark skin are all lumped together as the “black” race. However, the standards for categorization become fuzzy when one begins to discuss the other modern “races.” A member of the Hispanic “race,” for example, may have virtually any skin color and is instead determined primarily by language and place of ancestry.
The number of and boundaries between the “races” also changes over time and place. FOR EXAMPLE, when I was younger, it was common for people to speak of the “Asian” race as consisting specifically of people from the far east who shared an arbitrary list of physical features, people such as the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cambodian, etc. Individuals from the Indian subcontinent (who were equally from Asia) were nevertheless labeled as a different “race” because they did not share all of the same features from that arbitrary list. Over time, this changed. Today, people consider Indians, Pakistanis, and others also to be a part of the “Asian race.” Thus, again, the number of human races and which people belong to which race is cultural assumption that can change over time.
At its core, however, the modern concept of “race” is the idea that all people who share certain physical features (regardless of their language, culture, or heritage) have a shared identity as distinct from other people who do not share those features. But is there any reason to assume this to be true or to divide people in this way?
The Bible and human divisions
At the most fundamental level, biblical Christianity is concerned with only a two-fold division of humanity: the old creation and the new (2 Corinthians 5:17), those who are in Adam and those who are in Christ (1 Corinthians 15:22), those who have thus far only been born of the flesh and those who have received the new birth from the Spirit (John 3:6). The Bible teaches us that all men everyone are sinners in need of salvation (Romans 3:23, 6:23). This is our shared identity from birth, regardless of skin color or place or origin. Christ then brings us:
“a renewal in which there is no distinction between Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and freeman, but Christ is all, and in all,” (Colossians 3:11).
In the way that matters most, if we are both in Christ, I am much closer to a Palestinian Arab, an Ethiopian, or a Native American than I am to someone who happens to look like me in skin tone or the shape of our noses. My identity is in Christ and His people are my people.
Still, scripture does not ignore or negate the existence of human diversity. From the first book of Genesis we read of humanity:
“separated into their lands, every one according to his language, according to their families, into their nations” (Genesis 10:5)
All the way to the final book, we still read of Christ redeeming people of every “tribe and tongue and people and nation” (Revelation 5:9). Scripture balances the ideas of our unity and diversity. We are united by blood as the descendants of one household in Eden, yet we have become numerous peoples within that broader human family:
“and He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation” (Acts 17:26)
Thus, the biblical authors certainly recognized that there are meaningful subdivisions of humanity. The Bible categorizes people on the concrete grounds of language, culture, national borders/local geography, and ties of family lineage and definite ancestry. But never, we should note, on the basis of shared skin color, hair texture, or something as broad as one’s entire continent of origin.
Abraham was the father of a multitude of nations (Genesis 17:5). The Israelites, Edomites, Ishmaelites, Midianites, and others came from this one family and would all have certainly been considered members of the same “race” today, but they were different nations. The Biblical category of “nation” is not a synonym for “race”. Israel alone is divided into twelve separate tribes. The descendants of Ishmael likewise had multiple tribes, (Genesis 25:16). Thus, “tribe” is even more precise and local than “nation” and is obviously a much smaller and more specific category than modern “race”. Language or “tongue” is clearly a category of what people speak, not what they look like. Scripture had no concern whatsoever with dividing up humanity by how light or dark they are.
The term “race” is used a few times in some translations, but the meaning is obviously quite different. For example, Jesus meets a woman of “the Syrophoenician race,” (Mark 7:26). Here, Phoenicians in Syria are a race, distinct even from fellow Phoenicians living in other locations, much less from other Semitic peoples of very similar appearance. This was not a broad category of sweeping generalizations about skin and facial features, it was a statement of precise local lineage, culture, and residence. Again, the Biblical authors had no conception of our modern concept of race. It doesn’t even seem to have entered their minds to divide people up in the arbitrary manner we do today, i.e., by things like skin color.
Race and science
Not only is the category of “race” not biblical, it is also contrary to science. As the American Association of Physical Anthropologists notes:
“Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation. It was never accurate in the past, and it remains inaccurate when referencing contemporary human populations. Humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters.”1
They go on to elaborate:
“Variation exists within and among populations across the planet, and groups of individuals can be differentiated by patterns of similarity and difference, but these patterns do not align with socially-defined racial groups (such as whites and blacks) or continentally-defined geographic clusters (such as Africans, Asians, and Europeans). What has been characterized as ‘race’ does not constitute discrete biological groups or evolutionarily independent lineages. Furthermore, while physical traits like skin color and hair texture are often emphasized in racial classification, and assumptions are often made about the pattern of genetic diversity relative to continental geography, neither follows racial lines. The distribution of biological variation in our species demonstrates that our socially-recognized races are not biological categories.”2
The American Anthropological Association similarly observes:
“skin color varies largely from light in the temperate areas in the north to dark in the tropical areas in the south; its intensity is not related to nose shape or hair texture. Dark skin may be associated with frizzy or kinky hair or curly or wavy or straight hair, all of which are found among different indigenous peoples in tropical regions. These facts render any attempt to establish lines of division among biological populations both arbitrary and subjective.”3
The Linguistic Society of America affirms these things as well, also pointing out (as we noted earlier) how even the definitions and boundaries of racial categories differ over time and across cultures:
“race is widely viewed by scholars in numerous disciplines as a social construct, rather than a biological fact. Racial identities, ideologies, and practices are expressed locally and vary widely, with models of race differing throughout history and across the world.” – Linguistic Society of America Statement on Race 4
National Geographic (which publishes articles such as “There’s No Scientific Basis for Race—It’s a Made-Up Label” and “Race is Not a Thing, According to Genetics,”) bluntly states that “In many ways, genetics makes a mockery of race.”5 They point out that, in many cases, people groups who are supposed to be part of the same “race” are actually genetically closer to people of other “races” than they are to one another. For example:
“If you take someone from Ethiopia and someone from the Sudan, they are more likely to be more genetically different from each other than either one of those people is to anyone else on the planet!”6
But, despite that, aren’t there at least some genes that all black people have that all white people don’t, and vice versa? However minor, isn’t there at least something biological shared uniquely by all the members of a given race that is not found outside the race? The short answer is, no. As biologist Svante Pääbo explains:
“What the study of complete genomes from different parts of the world has shown is that even between Africa and Europe, for example, there is not a single absolute genetic difference, meaning no single variant where all Africans have one variant and all Europeans another one, even when recent migration is disregarded.”7
And the false assumption of human “race” is not only incorrect, it is actually harmful, and not only on a social level but even in the realm of health and medicine. As one article in Scientific American noted:
“racial assumptions could also be particularly dangerous in a medical setting. ‘If you make clinical predictions based on somebody’s race, you’re going to be wrong a good chunk of the time,’ Yudell told Live Science. In the paper, he and his colleagues used the example of cystic fibrosis, which is underdiagnosed in people of African ancestry because it is thought of as a ‘white’ disease.”8
Again, there is no scientific basis nor positive usefulness to the modern idea of race. As the American Anthropological Association plainly says:
“Racial beliefs constitute myths about the diversity in the human species and about the abilities and behavior of people homogenized into ‘racial’ categories. The myths fused behavior and physical features together in the public mind, impeding our comprehension of both biological variations and cultural behavior, implying that both are genetically determined. Racial myths bear no relationship to the reality of human capabilities or behavior. Scientists today find that reliance on such folk beliefs about human differences in research has led to countless errors.”9
Robert Sussman summarized it well in Newsweek:
“Today the vast majority of those involved in research on human variation would agree that biological races do not exist among humans. Among those who study the subject, who use and accept modern scientific techniques and logic, this scientific fact is as valid and true as the fact that the earth is round and revolves around the sun.”10 (Robert Wald Sussman)
But what about racism?
The fact that race does not exist does not mean that racism does not exist. People who believe in or are influenced by the mythology of race do indeed treat one another differently based on these arbitrary racial categories. Even though people do not actually belong to separate “races,” that does not stop those who believe in race from hating one another based purely on superficial physical features like the shade of their skin, the shape of their facial features, or the texture of their hair. Racism is a real sin and is if anything all the viler because it is rooted entirely in a lie.
That said, we will not dispel the evil of racism with some kinder form of race mythology. Instead, we must abandon the entire foundational fiction on which racism rests. By recognizing and rejecting the modern myth of “race,” we take away the very categories that make racism possible. By replacing it with a biblical view of man, we can find, in Christ, a context wherein men and women of every ethnicity, language, culture, or physical appearance can be family to me without any demand that they look, act, or talk just like me. The great hope of the New Testament is “a great multitude which no one could count, from every nation and all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb,” (Revelation 7:9). This is a greater vision for mankind than racial mythology could ever give us, and this one is rooted firmly in truth.
References
| 1↑ | American Association of Physical Anthropologists statement on race and racism: https://physanth.org/about/position-statements/aapa-statement-race-and-racism-2019/ (Accessed 1/25/2022) |
|---|---|
| 2↑ | Ibid |
| 3↑, 9↑ | The American Anthropological Association statement on race: https://www.americananthro.org/ConnectWithAAA/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=2583 (Accessed 1/25/2022) |
| 4↑ | https://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/lsa-statement-race (Accessed 4/27/2021) |
| 5↑, 6↑ | https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/genetics-history-race-neanderthal-rutherford (Accessed 01-25-2022) |
| 7↑, 8↑ | https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-construct-scientists-argue/ (Accessed 01/25/2022) |
| 10↑ | https://www.newsweek.com/there-no-such-thing-race-283123 (Accessed 4/27/2021) |
