We Are All African North Americans, So Let’s Celebrate!
By Dr. James Winter
True or False: U.S. President Barrack Obama, who visits Canada February 19th, is the first African-American U.S. president.
If you answered "true," you would be agreeing with every single writer and commentator I’ve been able to find.
And, you would be wrong.
Obviously, it’s important to clear this matter up. And there’s no better time than African-Canadian history month to do so.
The truth of the matter is that Mr. Obama is not the first U.S. president whose family came from Africa: all of their families did. In fact, all of our families did. Some just came a little more recently, and took different routes.
This is not just my opinion: it’s the view held by virtually all of the leading geneticists and anthropologists working in the field today.
Charles Darwin, writing in The Descent of Man in 1871, was among the first to suggest that humans originated in Africa. The Out-Of-Africa theory rose to prominence about 25 years ago, as anthropologists argued from fossil evidence that Homo sapiens had an African origin. This was debated fiercely for about 15 years, but it has been resolved for about the past decade. The clincher has been the genetic evidence, human DNA, whether in men’s Y-chromosomes or the mitochondrial DNA of women. Using genetic ‘markers,’ or changes in DNA through time, researchers have traced human ancestry back to southern Africa, for both men and women.
Debate continues over when we left Africa, (probably around 60,000 years ago) and the routes we took to disperse around the globe. But even these questions are becoming resolved, for example by U.S. geneticist Spencer Wells, who turned his vast human migration study into a fascinating book and documentary film, Journey of Man, in 2002.
In 2008, an editorial in the academic journal Evolutionary Anthropology concluded that: "For years, polarized Multiregional and Out-of-Africa models for human origins were debated vigorously, but today there is substantial agreement among specialists. One area of broad consensus is that sub-Saharan Africa played a predominant role in the origins of modern humans….The importance of Africa is clear not only from genetics, but also from the fossil record."
Why is it important to know that we all have the same genetic history? Because of racist science, which held that humans consist of four distinct races–what in the animal world would be termed sub-species. The theory of different races has been used as grounds for discriminating against people of colour, accusations of inferiority, and assertions that intelligence is ‘racially’ determined. The ongoing racist science of professor Philippe Rushton from the University of Western Ontario is one example.
The modern belief in races originated in 15th and 16th century Europe, as a means of rationalizing European imperialism, colonization, and slavery. Differences in appearance were conveniently assumed to reflect moral and intellectual qualities. In the 17th and 18th centuries, scholars developed categories such as Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid. By the 19th century, scientists attempted to find biological evidence for different sub-species or races of people. For much of the 20th century, this claim was challenged by anthropologists and zoologists such as Edward O. Wilson.
By 1994 the American Anthropological Association concluded that "differentiating species into biologically defined "races" has proven meaningless and unscientific as a way of explaining variation (whether in intelligence or other traits)."
The genetic and fossil evidence of our common ancestry should bring an end to racism. Cosmetic differences between humans, such as skin colour, are merely a reflection of environmental and geographic factors such as climate: they are not genetically significant. Indeed, there is more genetic variation within so-called ‘races’ than there is between them.
White folks can think of President Obama as a distant cousin whose family came from the south, as we did, but stayed there longer. He is tanned. Thinking of him and others as belonging to a separate race is as ludicrous today as it is to think that there is no climate change, or that the earth is flat.
We need to break with our bigoted past and refrain from even using words like "race" and even "racism." These words have no factually-based meaning. In reality, there is no such thing as racism, only bigotry and hatred amongst human beings.
How can white supremacists continue to argue their race is superior, when it is the same? How is it possible to despise or demean someone because they belong to a different race, when they do not?
Governments and the mainstream media must take the lead on this, through education programs. As long as the media continue to use these terms, and to virtually ignore the scientific research, they will continue to propagate the fiction of separate races.
James Winter is a professor of media, communication and film at the University of Windsor. He is the author of several books, most recently Lies The Media Tell Us, published by Black Rose Books in Montreal, 2007.
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