CHAPTER EIGHT
A Book That Should Be Read by Everyone
SIBLINGS SHARE ON AVERAGE 50 PERCENT OF THEIR GENETIC information. Siblings reared together share much of their environment, such as socioeconomic status and culture. Birth order mediates shared environment, as do physical features such as general appearance and height. My brother and I were both generally good-looking, but I was taller. We were both athletic and intelligent. Most people would have said that Warren was a slightly better athlete than I was and that I was slightly more intellectual than he was. He was an outstanding baseball player (who later opted for tennis), and I was a chess player. Our minds worked differently in important ways. He was far more detail-oriented and practical than I was. This might have accounted for the fact that in college he earned an A in organic chemistry compared to my C+.
Early on in life, Warren showed more entrepreneurial spirit than I did. He consistently found ways to earn a few cents here and there doing odd jobs. His pioneering spirit was well illustrated by his decision to take up tennis. In 1968, Arthur Ashe became the first African American man to win a major tennis title (the US Open). We were all proud of his accomplishments, but my brother wanted more. At eleven years old, he bought a secondhand tennis racket and began to teach himself tennis by observation. He would walk a couple of miles from our home to Tamaques Park and practice volleys against the wall across from the tennis courts. Virtually everyone in Westfield who took tennis seriously was white and wealthy. That didn’t deter him. He spent hours of his free time working at tennis. By the time he was a sophomore in high school, some wealthy white folks could not help but notice his talent. He tried out for the Westfield High School (WHS) tennis team and made the squad. By this time he was also playing in US Tennis Association amateur tournaments and doing well. At one point, while still in high school, he was the fifth-ranked amateur singles player in New Jersey. Despite that, the coaches at WHS wouldn’t let him play singles in their matches. Westfield wasn’t ready for an African American tennis star.
Warren didn’t stop his pioneering with tennis. Once again, contingency played an important role. During my sophomore year at Oberlin College (1975), I took a weekend off to drive home to see my girlfriend. It wasn’t really my idea; my high school friend Mark Pinto, who was then a student at Michigan State University, had decided to drive home to see his folks. To get from East Lansing, Michigan, to Westfield, New Jersey, you don’t automatically pass through Oberlin, Ohio. Mark wanted company, so he swung through Oberlin and asked me if I wanted to make the drive with him. So the next thing I knew, we were in Mark’s AMC Gremlin (complete with a blue racing stripe) driving down I-80 on our way to New Jersey. Mark didn’t have a tape deck in his car, so we had to listen to AM radio all through the night. I was a big fan of the pop/soul performers KC and the Sunshine Band; however, that trip tried my love for the group. We must have heard their 1975 hit “Get Down Tonight” over twenty times!1 To this day, whenever I hear that song I remember the trip, especially running out of gas in rural New Jersey and hiking down Highway 31 trying to find an open gas station at three in the morning.
That weekend I had an opportunity to review my brother’s report card. He was a junior at the time. There were no college-preparatory courses on it. I called Mark and asked if we could delay our trip back to the Midwest until Monday afternoon. On Monday morning I went over to the high school and met with my brother’s guidance counselor. Westfield High still remembered me as one of its brightest students, so I simply asked the counselor why my brother was not enrolled in college prep courses. His response was something like “Your brother is not as smart as you were.” That was an answer I was unprepared to hear and quite simply was unwilling to tolerate. I demanded that he be switched immediately into college-preparatory classes. They realized I was serious, and I am sure that they didn’t want a scandal with racial overtones, so they made the switch. He excelled in his college-prep courses and was subsequently admitted to Rutgers University.
Warren was a year and a half younger than me, but he finished his medical degree before I finished my PhD. He earned both his undergraduate and medical degrees at Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey. It was Warren who got together the money I needed to pay the University of Michigan fees for copies of my transcripts so that I could enroll at Wayne State University to complete my PhD degree.
In 1987, we drove across the country together so he could take up his residency in California. I caught a flight home to New Jersey and was really surprised to find out that he had just bought a new Nissan hatchback sports car. Things were looking up for him. Warren was the first person in our extended family to earn a medical degree. Of course, this was a generation of firsts, and every time one of us broke through a Jim Crow ceiling it was as if we could hear the heavenly host congratulating us for what we had accomplished.
We had a great time together on that trip. The drive was as iconic as every movie involving a road trip I’d ever watched. First, there is simply the beauty of this nation. Ray Charles’s version of “America the Beautiful” always comes to mind when I revisit the drive in my mind’s eye. Warren had a tape deck, so there was no radio wasteland. We had R & B with us the entire way.
In Tennessee we received two tickets for exceeding the speed limit. We made unscheduled detours just because we recognized the name of a town (from a movie or a map we’d once seen). When the music wasn’t playing, we talked about what great futures we both had in store now that I was within months of receiving my PhD. Who would have thought that the Graves boys from Downer Street would achieve all we had to this point? We made the drive from Westfield, New Jersey, to Pasadena, California (2,152 miles) in just under two days. After our run-ins with the Tennessee troopers, we didn’t stop other than to get gas and switch drivers until we reached Pasadena.
Warren became the first African American board-certified radiologist in the state of California, and at that point the only African American graduate of WHS to receive board certification in any medical field. He died on March 6, 1998.2 His death changed me forever and played a major role in my decision to write my first book-length treatment of race.3
The Emperor’s New Clothes
Many have argued that The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium is the most important of my scholarly achievements. It is by far my most cited publication, with almost twice as many citations on Google Scholar as my most cited papers in fruit fly or bacterial research. My decision to write the book, like so many decisions one makes in life, was a mixture of serendipity and the personal tragedy I was experiencing at the time. My work addressing the claims surrounding race, genes, and intelligence in The Bell Curve had already convinced me that it was important to develop a course that exposed students to the history of biological determinism and its ongoing role in supporting racial hierarchy. Biological determinism is the notion that individuals’ biology (mainly their genes) is the primary determinant of where they end up in society. This idea underlies all theories of meritocracy. As I developed the course, I also began to realize that this message needed to reach a wider audience. This realization was in part stimulated by two panels I was asked to participate on at the annual meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) (the panels were Is Race a Legitimate Concept for Science?, in Atlanta, Georgia, 1995, and The Developing Brain: Genes, Environment, Behavior, in Baltimore, Maryland, 1996). At the first I shared the platform with several luminary scholars, including Jane Maienschien (Arizona State University) and C. Loring Brace (University of Michigan). Jane was a close colleague and is one of the most intellectually fearless of all the scholars I have known throughout my career. It was her idea to hold the panel. Brace was the great-grandson of the nineteenth-century philanthropist Charles Loring Brace, who founded the New York Children’s Aid Society, among other works. C. Loring Brace, along with Frank Livingstone, made important contributions to demonstrating that human physical change is continuous across the planet. Continuity of physical change is important because it means that using such change to define racial groups rapidly becomes a set of arbitrary delineations. A perfect example of this is skin color. It changes continuously from the tropics to the arctic zones. So when do we say that a particular reflectivity of skin separates groups? Clearly Nigerians have darker skin than Swedes, but what about North Africans and Sardinians?
Having the opportunity to be in Brace’s presence was humbling. He was a physical anthropologist who, at the University of Michigan, maintained one of the largest collections of human skeletons in the world. Brace would say that if you gave him a skeleton, he could use biometric tools to tell you exactly where it came from on the planet. However, this didn’t mean that physical traits could be used to create biological races.4 I didn’t know Brace when I was at Michigan, but through my conversations with him in Atlanta I learned of Ashley Montagu’s work and Montagu’s classic book Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, originally published in 1942. Montagu was born Israel Ehrenberg. He studied at the University of London and became a giant in anthropology. In addition to his work on race, he is best known for his intellectual assaults on a number of commonly held fallacies. In the 1950s he was one of the first people to recognize that the Piltdown Man fossil was a fraud. He wrote of the natural superiority of women and attacked the notion that humans are innately aggressive. He outlined the importance of touch for human development. Probably one of the most important things about him was his recognition that scholars had an important obligation to bring their findings to the public. He gave up his academic position to focus on writing popular works on the topics above.5
It was also at one of these meetings (probably the one in Baltimore) that a science editor (Helen Hsu) from Rutgers University Press approached me about writing a book about my ideas. It is a common practice for academic press editors to approach panelists whose talks they find interesting. The serendipity here was that Hsu had the foresight to see the potential of my project and to consider working with someone who had never written a book before. We discussed the course I was teaching, Genes, Race, and Society (GRS), and she felt it would be worth turning into a book. GRS studied the history of science, particularly of ideas associated with the origin and significance of human biological diversity, alongside the social events that were occurring in conjunction with the development of those ideas. The design of my course was influenced by a course I had experienced during my graduate years at the University of Michigan (see Chapter 1). John Vandermeer, probably the most influential of my former mentors in this regard, taught a course entitled Biology and Human Affairs. The course was for nonmajors and covered a variety of topics, including sexism, racism, and antigay bigotry. Student responses to the course were bimodal. It was adored by progressive students and dubbed “Commie-Bio” by reactionaries. I made a conscious decision with GRS to focus primarily on racism and to teach it via the lens of the African American experience—not because the racial oppression of other groups is less horrific, but simply because I understood and had lived in this society under anti-Black racism. Thus, my course was taught in both the Life Sciences and Ethnic Studies departments. A subsidiary goal of offering the course in both departments was to facilitate discussion between students (science and humanity majors) who often never spoke to each other on any topics of substance.
My approach to the topics to be included in The Emperor’s New Clothes was not completely unique. Such books have been written before. A very good example is Allan Chase’s book The Legacy of Malthus.6 This book, on the history of scientific racism, is a tour de force. However, Chase was a historian and had limited facility with the underlying science covered in his work. The book also covered scientific racism in its general context. The Emperor’s New Clothes, on the other hand, was designed to tie together events in the history of science and the way their applications directly affected African Americans. My capacity to achieve this was very much related to the time I spent out of the academy and reading voraciously about topics in African American history, sociology, economics, political science, and philosophy (see Chapter 4).
My personal tragedy associated with writing The Emperor’s New Clothes began on New Year’s Eve 1995. We were spending it in Redondo Beach, California, with my brother Warren, his wife Dee Dee, and many of our extended family members. My cousin Darlene’s husband Craig was an assistant coach of Northwestern University’s Wildcats and had bought us tickets to see the Rose Bowl. That night all my brother and I managed to do was get into one argument after another. Finally, it got to the point where I had had enough; my wife and I swept up our children, loaded them in our minivan, and headed back to Arizona (leaving the tickets to another family member). The next day he called me, apologized for his bad behavior, and told me he had less than a year to live.
Warren was dying of HIV/AIDS. He was not sure how he had contracted it, but he thought it could have happened during one of the many emergency-room shifts he took on during his residency. He told me what those shifts were like in underfunded and understaffed inner-city hospitals. One night a patient had been left on a stretcher in the emergency room. The patient was unattended, and no one seemed to know what was wrong. Warren quickly examined the patient, realized he was in bad shape, and ran all the labs needed to determine the correct course of treatment. That night there was insufficient staff on duty, so he had to run the samples around the hospital himself. He eventually saved the patient’s life, but that hospital situation was unfortunately all too typical in the emergency rooms of the hospitals he moonlighted for. He believed that during one of his shifts he had accidentally cut himself during a procedure, thereby exposing himself to HIV-tainted blood.
The news of his condition hit me hard. I did not react well, and the next few years were a struggle to balance my grief with the requirements of my professional life. As he was getting sicker, I sank deeper into depression. Up to this point, I had not sought personal counseling. I believed that under no circumstances could I reveal to the academic community the depths of emotional pain I was laboring under every day. Nor could I do so at home, as I was the father of young children. I went to work each day and gave no indication to those around me that anything was wrong. Partially, I felt that as the leader of an NIH training program I could not let on to my staff or student mentees that there was anything wrong with me. Imposter syndrome was still with me, almost like a chronic biological infection that was resistant to any antimicrobial treatment. I still deeply believed that the academy never forgave any weakness in African American men. Indeed, the more talented those men were, the more unforgiving the academy.
As Warren got sicker, I began to drink more. By most definitions of alcoholism, I was almost, even if not fully, there. I behaved like many of the African American men of my generation, unable to admit that they needed help. I also impacted the lives of my wife and children. I am not making excuses, but simply explaining that I was in a bad way. And it was not just my brother but also other members of my family (aunts and uncles) who were dying before their time. Nor, as my research for The Emperor’s New Clothes would demonstrate, was it only my family who were dying at differential rates.
This sad reality began to stimulate my thinking about the sources of health disparity. My own experience made it easy to understand why my mother was always so sick. I experienced the toxic atmosphere she was forced to endure. For years, she worked in the plastics-packaging plant. After a while, anyone working there would become nose blind to the fumes coming off the materials they packaged. In the summer before I started college, I worked in there loading plastic vials into the print machines. This was enough for a lifetime; it was a major motivation pushing me to finish my college degree. I promised myself I would never go back to working in a hellish place like that.
During my research for The Emperor’s New Clothes, I also asked myself why all my uncles (paternal and maternal) drank more than they should. Why was this behavior passed down to them from the previous generation? Of course, genetic determinists had a ready-made answer to this question: genetic predisposition for substance abuse. My knowledge of the complex genetics of behavior had already convinced me that simple genetic answers for alcoholism couldn’t be correct. Yet even at that time, pedigree analysis suggested that alcoholism was inherited in families. Modern genome-wide association studies calculate the genetic contribution to alcoholism at about 50 percent7—not surprising given that the same areas of the brain that control substance abuse (of all kinds) are also associated with pleasure seeking (of all kinds). Natural selection would clearly favor these genes if pleasure seeking had a strong association with reproductive success.8 In the case of the fatty- and sweet-food pleasure-seeking axis, there is strong evidence for such an association. In ancient environments those foods were scarce, and individuals who succeeded in procuring them would have had a caloric advantage over others, resulting in their greater reproductive success. This means that these genetic variants are found in all human populations at high frequency. Thus, the substance, sex, food, and gambling abuse we observe today results from evolutionary mismatch. Our Pleistocene brains are now being exposed to conditions that didn’t exist when the behaviors seeking these things improved an individual’s reproductive chances.9 Now, in a world where all these things exist in excess, formerly adaptive behaviors can easily be destructive.
However, 50 percent genetic also means 50 percent environmental. It was already clear to me what sorts of environmental conditions lead to a greater likelihood of substance abuse. Organisms (including people) that are socially subordinated are more likely to engage in substance abuse. By the early 1990s, experiments with rodents and primates had shown this conclusively. For example, an experiment using inbred (identical genetic background) Wistar rats showed that socially deprived individuals chose to consume 30 percent more alcohol and diazepam (a drug used to treat anxiety disorders and alcohol withdrawal) than nondeprived rats.10 Similar effects had been found in rhesus monkeys.11 Subsequent studies have shown a strong relationship between social dysfunction and alcohol (and other substance) abuse in humans. For example, the Stalinist government of the Soviet Union used to encourage alcohol use as method of social control.12 The collapse of the Soviet Union was associated with an increase in alcoholism among former Party bureaucrats.13 Among Swedes, a disintegrated social environment is a major predictor of alcoholism.14 In the United States, socially defined race and socioeconomic status is a major predictor of potential alcoholism.15 These facts also support another theory suggesting another evolutionary mechanism explaining substance abuse. This theory posits that very early on in our existence, humans learned to use plants for self-medication. The practice began in societies with relative social equality. It’s easy to see how, in a rigid social hierarchy, the practice of self-medication can rapidly become substance abuse.16
I also thought about the fact that one of the most underappreciated aspects of health disparity in a racialized society is the impact it has on the families of the sick and dying. I am absolutely convinced that my brother’s illness accelerated the death of my mother (who was his primary caregiver in his last year). In Chapter 11 of The Emperor’s New Clothes, I showed that the mortality rate disparity between African Americans and European Americans was highest in midlife. This was true throughout the portions of the twentieth century for which data are available. It was also probably true during the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries as well. The social and economic consequences of this are profound. Midlife (forty to fifty) is when most people are entering the height of their earning ability (in either blue- or white-collar jobs). In the United States, this is also when most people are beginning to pay off mortgages. The children of people in this age group are usually in their teens or early adulthood, a period when parental mentorship is extremely important. However, you cannot provide material support or mentorship to your children if you are dead. Thus, I have argued, this mortality disparity is a major contributing factor to the ongoing wealth gap (tenfold for European Americans over African Americans).17
The hardest part of this period in my life was taking my brother home to die in late 1997. This was before the advent of combination antiviral therapy. So for most people, HIV/AIDS infection was a death sentence. Early that year, Dee Dee had also died of HIV/AIDS. They had been married for about five years, and it was never clear whether they married knowing they were both HIV positive. However, learning they were both positive explained a lot of their earlier behavior, including the fact that they spent money as if they had a printing press in their basement.
Soon after his wife died, my brother began to suffer from AIDS-related dementia, a condition that occurs because, during the course of primary infection, HIV enters the brain via infected lymphocytes and monocytes. It has been shown that the basal ganglia and the frontal white matter are the earliest and most intensely affected brain regions. There is a positive correlation between the amount of virus and viral products (particularly the proteins gp120 and undgp41) in a patient and the extent of histopathologic changes in his or her brain.18 These viral products may also be related to the hypersexual behavior often associated with AIDS-related dementia.19 Of course, from the virus’s perspective, natural selection would highly favor altering the host’s behavior to increase its spread. However, it is not clear that this is what drives the hypersexuality often associated with AIDS-related dementia.
I took my brother home. We flew out of LAX. The difference between taking him to California to begin his life there and taking him back home to end his life was like the chasm between heaven and hell. Up to this point, I had only experienced the deaths of grandparents, aunts, and uncles. However, I didn’t have to watch them decline to death. In my college years, I would get a phone call from my mother telling me someone in the family had passed away. This was a very different thing. On this journey, I was sitting next to someone I had spent so much time with, played with, and fought with all my life. Now I was watching him pass into greater infirmity with every air mile closer to home. By a cruel irony, he was dying of the same disease that had killed his childhood hero, Arthur Ashe.
A year later, on the night before he died, I dreamed of him passing upward into a great light and of me begging him not to go. I woke up in a cold sweat, breathing hard. Just as I awakened from the dream, the phone rang. It was my sister Alice telling me it was time to come home. I got the earliest flight I could out of Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport and arrived at Newark Airport after seven in the evening. My sister picked me up, and we proceeded directly to the hospital. The setup of his hospital room showed that he was dying of encephalitis. During our last talk, he kept pointing to the corner of the room, as if someone was standing there. When visiting hours concluded, I said goodbye to him, saying, “Warren, I’ll see you in the morning.” His last words to me were “No, you won’t.” When we arrived at my parents’ house in Westfield, the phone rang. It was the hospital calling to inform us he was gone. The stories of people hanging on near death to see loved ones are known to be apocryphal; however, in this case I felt that is exactly what he did.
After my brother’s death, serendipity once again entered the backstory of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Going through his things stored in my parents’ basement I found a copy of Thomas Gossett’s book Race: The History of an Idea in America.20 It was among his undergraduate course books, so I could only surmise that he took a course concerning racial ideas at some time during his studies at Rutgers. His copy is still on my bookshelf, two feet from my left hand as I write this. His handwriting on the inside cover included his name and the words “control courses; yes; tennis; life!” From these words I take away that he understood the importance of maintaining control of his coursework in the premedical curriculum at Rutgers. By achieving that, he would also be successful in his sport (tennis) as well as in life in general.
When I opened the book for the first time and examined the table of contents, I was immediately mesmerized. I read it from cover to cover in a couple of days. Warren had underlined the copy extensively, which helped guide me in determining its most important ideas. Gossett was an English professor, but he wrote a penetrating analysis of the way race had become a social construct at the center of American social life. He examined topics such as the Teutonic origins of American race theory, social Darwinism, and Social Gospel theory. This work, Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, and Montagu’s Man’s Most Dangerous Myth became the anchors driving what would become Part I of The Emperor’s New Clothes—underscoring again the fact that all scholarship rests on the shoulders of those who came before. However, what my book provided that none of the others did was a narrative that was organically informed by the experiences of an African American intellectual whose life was shaped by the racial oppression of his society. Furthermore, I had developed an analysis of how the racism that was so deeply intertwined in the biological science of the sixteenth through twentieth centuries drove theories of the origin and significance of human biological variation. In other words, because I stood on their shoulders, I could see further.
In addition, I attempted to make The Emperor’s New Clothes a fully interdisciplinary treatment of the subject of race and racism. Interdisciplinary scholarship has been defined in a variety of ways, but I prefer to think of it as a way of addressing questions using the interaction of disciplines in such a way that the perspectives arrived at would have been impossible to find solely within any single discipline. I have always felt that the best interdisciplinary scholarship provides us with emergent properties, resulting from the disparate ways of different systems of thought working together. The Library of Congress characterized my book as a work of anthropology. In bookstores it is often sold in the sociology section. You will almost never see it characterized as a work of biology (even thought it was reviewed in the Journal of the American Medical Association [JAMA]). Of course, none of these disciplines alone can provide a complete answer to the way race concepts and racism have operated historically as well as in the modern world. The way my book has been categorized reminds me of the way Gil Scott-Heron’s music is categorized. He once lamented that to find his music, you had to go to the jazz section of the store and look under “miscellaneous.”21
I struggled to find a proper title for the book. Clearly a name based on the course Genes, Race, and Society wasn’t going to work. I have always been a fan of the old Hammer Films horror movies, including my favorite: Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968), starring Christopher Lee as Dracula and Rupert Davies as Monsignor Ernest Mueller. I viewed the race concept as very much akin to the undead, sucking the lifeblood from its victims and nearly impossible to kill. It also shared with the vampire the power to mesmerize its victims with untruths and promises of power so long as they obeyed its commands. I saw myself in the role of Mueller, but I just couldn’t make the title Racism Has Risen from the Grave work, so I settled on the Hans Christian Andersen story. Using the analogy of “the emperor’s new clothes” alerted the reader to the ridiculousness of the concept but, I felt, failed to fully communicate the horrors that resulted from believing in it.
The book was written in a flurry of activity after my brother’s death. The research supporting its chapters had been conducted as part of preparing my GRS course. The writing itself took place after ten at night. My typical days then involved teaching, spending time in my research laboratory, and taking care of the miscellaneous administrative work associated with the NIH training grants I directed. Because of the large number of students I mentored, it was simply impossible to get any writing done on campus. I always tried to leave campus in time to make it to the gym to get in at least an hour (or two) of basketball. At age forty-five I was still capable of holding my own on the court with Division I and semiprofessional basketball players. But I had lost several steps and at least two feet off my vertical jump, so now experience and physical strength had to make up for my lost athletic ability. When I arrived home, it was time to share in parental duties. After getting the kids to bed, it was time for Coca-Cola and Vivarin (or NoDoz)—whatever I had in the house to keep me writing into the early hours. I also found that I was learning to write in my sleep (actually not so much deep sleep, but in the zone between sleep and waking). Much of the chapter you are currently reading was conceived there.
This was my first book. Writing for lay audiences is not the same as writing for professional scientific journals. At first, I found myself writing the same way I lectured. That just wasn’t working. My editor at Rutgers helped me a great deal in turning my thoughts into something people could actually read. As my current literary agent would tell you, I still struggle with this. However, my experience as an instructor in the classroom did help me determine how to scaffold some very complex concepts into a narrative with enough tables and figures to get the idea across. The more complex ideas were dealt with in appendices. This is a method that I use to this day.
THE BOOK BEGAN BY INTRODUCING THE READER TO THE NECESSITY of overthrowing racial thinking. I characterized racial thinking as a “disordered way” of looking at human diversity. I also defined “racism” as different from bigotry. Everyone can be a bigot; bigotry is hating people for irrational reasons. However, racism requires social and political power, which means that only people who have such power can implement racist policies.
The book was divided into four parts: The Origin of the Race Concept, Darwin and the Survival of Scientific Racism, Applications and Misapplications of Darwinism, and Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium. As the book has now had considerable longevity, I can comment on my favorite parts and their effectiveness in altering the racial narrative. Part I discussed how the ancients understood the biological variation they observed in others. Like the authors before me, I was primarily concerned with the views of the Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans, as these cultures had contributed most to the principles that founded Western civilization. These ancients did not classify or hierarchically rank people in ways associated with modern racial thinking. The word or concept of “race” does not appear at all in the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament, written between about 1200 and 722 BCE) or in the New Testament (written between about 65 and 105 CE). This fact is quite significant, especially when one considers the location of events chronicled in the Old and New Testaments. The Old Testament occurred mainly in the Levantine region, anchored to the east by the Tigris-Euphrates river valley and to the west by Upper Egypt (located in the Nile Basin). There was clearly travel and trade between Upper and Lower Egypt and what is now Sudan and Ethiopia. Thus, physical differences such as skin color and hair type were very much known to the authors of the Old Testament. Similarly, the New Testament writings took place under the dominion of the Roman Empire, which greatly expanded the commerce and travel of the ancient Middle Eastern world. Rome ruled from Britannia to the north, northern Africa to the west, and the Pontus region to the east, and it was in contact with Sarmatia (modern eastern Europe) to the northeast and, via the Silk Road, with China in the far east. The Galilean region, where Jesus lived, was a center of commerce and travel and thus would have experienced travelers from a much wider world than the people of the Old Testament experienced. Few people realize that the first Gentile baptized in the book of Acts was an Ethiopian (Acts 8:26–40). In all probability, the Levant’s first observation of the blond hair and blue eye phenotype occurred in individuals traveling there from various parts of the Roman Empire. So it is a mistake to think that the Levantine, Greek, and Roman worlds were not exposed to people whose physical features were different from their own. But they never mentioned the race concept in their writings.
The lack of racial thinking in ancient texts is also true of the ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman cultures. The Greeks thought all living things (including people) were composites of the four elements air, fire, water, and earth. They were unclear as to how much of organisms’ characteristics were produced by inheritance or by environment. For the Greeks and Romans, the capacity of individuals to change culture also changed how those individuals were viewed. Non-Greeks were considered barbarians, but one could lose this designation simply by adopting Greek culture. Originally this was true in China as well; however, by the fourteenth century, it had given rise to primarily hereditarian theories of personal and group characteristics.22 For the Romans, the value of foreign persons was determined most by whether they were allies or opponents of the Empire.
This analysis in The Emperor’s New Clothes continues to be relevant to our culture. Specifically, failing to understand how the ancients understood and experienced human variation is critical to modern controversies about the “race” of ancient figures. Consider movies. Virtually every Hollywood portrayal of Cassiopeia and Andromeda shows them as persons of European descent (see, for example, Wrath of the Titans, 2012). Actually, their stories identify them as Ethiopian.23 (One cannot actually know if their stories meant the present-day borders of Ethiopia, as the Greeks used the term to describe any persons of sub-Saharan physical appearance.) On the other hand, Nilotic Afrocentrists have routinely claimed that Cleopatra VII was a dark-skinned Nubian. She was not. Her “racial” identity has come to the forefront of recent controversy over the casting of Gal Gadot in an upcoming movie about Cleopatra.24
The problem is that both of these examples show people projecting their nineteenth-century racial concepts onto ancient societies that simply did not operate that way. The simple fact is that we have no real way to determine what Cleopatra’s physical appearance was. Cleopatra VII was a descendant of Ptolemy I, who was a Macedonian general in Alexander the Great’s army. (Macedonia is located north of Greece on the Balkan Peninsula.) There were six or seven generations between Cleopatra and her known Macedonian ancestor, Ptolemy. The Egyptian papyri that chronicle the genealogy of the Ptolemies generally recorded the names of the fathers but not of the mothers.25 Ptolemy’s wife Berenice was Macedonian and their son was Ptolemy II. However, in the following generations of the dynasty, it is likely that the males married women of northern-Egyptian descent. The skin-color gradient from northern Egypt to Nubia has not changed much over recorded history.26 It varies from Mediterranean “olive-toned” complexions to the darker skin tones of Nubians. Indeed, while I was working on my master’s thesis research in Nubia (see Chapter 2), I was routinely taken for a native Nubian.
The genealogy of the Ptolemies is further complicated by their practice of marrying their siblings. If a Macedonian Ptolemy married an Egyptian woman, their son would have half-Macedonian and half-Egyptian ancestry. The principles of quantitative genetics would indicate that his skin tone would be somewhere between the skin tones of his parents. In the next generation, if that son married an Egyptian woman, their children would be 1/4 Macedonian and 3/4 Egyptian. Thus after six generations, Cleopatra VII would be 1/64 Macedonian and 63/64 Egyptian, and her skin tone would have been more like that of northern Egyptians than of Macedonians. However, due to sister/brother mating, the rate of the movement toward northern Egyptian skin complexion would be somewhere between 1/2 and 1/64. Depending on when the inbreeding started it would have remained closer to 1/2 ancestry. So without new papyri with details about the mothers of the Ptolemaic lineage (or a time machine), we really can’t be sure how much Macedonian descent Cleopatra VII retained. All we really know about her was that she was of average beauty and her success was associated more with her intelligence and social skills than with her physical beauty.27
What is clear, however, is that she didn’t have northern European or Nubian physical features. She wasn’t white or Black. The Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans never invented these socially defined races. Gal Gadot isn’t the best choice for a historically accurate Cleopatra VII not because of her skin tone but because Cleopatra just wasn’t as beautiful as this modern actress. So it seems that the controversy here is improperly focused. It is an issue not of racism but, rather, of sexism. It values Cleopatra VII for her supposed beauty rather than for her intellect and social skills (not that these traits are mutually exclusive).
Another crucial point I made in this part of The Emperor’s New Clothes was underappreciated by prior authors on this subject. Specifically, I explained that scientific racism was influenced by the fact that Western biology was dominated by religious ideas until well after the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. Therefore, the thinking of all naturalists, from Aristotle to Agassiz, concerning the nature of biological variation (including racial variation in humans) mostly occurred in the context of a supernatural special creation scheme. In the eighteenth century, biology was subsumed by natural theology. Darwin read William Paley’s 1802 book Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity upon his entry to Cambridge. Natural theology grew out of the mechanistic universe of Isaac Newton. For Newton, the universe was an orderly machine, run by the laws designed by the Christian god. Paley simply took that idea and applied it to living things. Thus, natural theology saw the operation of nature as the most powerful proof of the existence of a beneficent, omnipotent creator. The naturalists of the Enlightenment who thought about variation in all nature and race in humans were all Christians (or profoundly influenced by the Christian cultures they lived in)—men such as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Carl Linnaeus, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (a founder of anthropology), and the comte de Buffon in the eighteenth century, and Georges Cuvier, Samuel George Morton, Louis Agassiz, and John Bachman in the nineteenth. I made this point forcefully in my testimony before the Louisiana Senate concerning the claim that wrongly charged Charles Darwin with being the father of scientific racism (see Chapter 9). That idea is entirely wrong, as scientific racism and theology were originally joined at the hip. Terence Keel has written a powerful examination of this fact in his 2018 book Divine Variations.28
I am most proud of Part III of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Don’t get me wrong; I think the rest of the book is great as well, but Part III’s relevance is ongoing. It deals with the misapplications of evolutionary theory. The question of whether something is a misapplication of a theory is both scientific and value laden. Thus, any application of science has both a scientific and a moral dimension. Indeed, from the point of view of the fascists, eugenics was only a misapplication because they lost World War II. The scientific misapplications of eugenics resulted from the fact that the fascists’ primary goals were simply unachievable. Their first goal was to eradicate defective alleles (negative eugenics) from the germplasm of those belonging to what they considered the master races of humanity. This simply could not work: the mathematics of natural selection demonstrate that even hard selection against a single unit trait will always result in the trait persisting at low frequencies in large populations. Even if traits were eradicated in a given population, they would also always return due to mutation. So you would always be tasked with detecting and sterilizing individuals. Even worse for their idea was the simple fact that most of the traits they were attempting to eradicate did not have a simple genetic cause, so any selection against such traits would always be compromised by their multigenic and environmental causation. The fascists also failed at positive eugenics (encouraging greater breeding of favored genotypes) because intelligent, athletic, and socially affluent women really didn’t want to have bigger families.
The fascists failed even though they had the state power to make the attempt, in both the “democratic” and the fascist states. In the United States, eugenic sterilization was carried out via laws based on the Model Eugenical Sterilization Law (MESL), which resulted from the work of the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. The laboratory was headed by Charles Davenport, a respected geneticist and a colleague of Thomas Hunt Morgan (see Chapter 3). The ERO had strong financial support and political clout. It informed Congress on a number of eugenical issues that the ERO considered of great importance, such as the hereditary nature of diseases like pellagra. Of course, pellagra isn’t a heredity disease; it is actually caused by a deficiency of vitamin B3 (niacin) in the diet. The ERO knew that, but it lied to Congress anyway, testifying in the case of Carrie Buck and helping lead to her sterilization (and that of thousands more across the nation).
I ended The Emperor’s New Clothes with a conclusion outlining why and how we needed to move forward in our understanding of human biological variation and its disconnection with socially defined race. I attempted to write a book that was accessible to broadly trained college-educated audiences. Michael Rose’s commentary on the cover said the book “should be read by anybody who is a registered voter in the United States.” The initial reviews of the book were diametrically opposed, based on the disciplinary and political positions of the authors. For example, the reviews in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and the Quarterly Review of Biology gave the work high praise. The Quarterly’s reviewer said, “Graves is clear and blunt on racism in the United States, that is evident in studies of IQ and the alleged genetic basis of disease. So for many Americans this will not be a comfortable book to read, but it is not intended to be. It is a necessary and valuable part of their education.” On the other hand, the reviews in Heredity (a British journal devoted to genetics) and Intelligence (a psychometrician journal) were definitely negative. The Heredity reviewer complained that I was not seeking a dialogue with those in behavioral studies who supported the existence of biological races in humans. The reviewer in Intelligence complained about my characterizing Galton as a villain. I may have been ahead of my time in that regard, as University College London (UCL) in January 2021 apologized for its history of supporting eugenics and in doing so distanced itself from Galton’s legacy.29 The Heredity reviewer was definitely correct that I was not seeking a dialogue with psychometry on its past and ongoing racist theories and practices. The Intelligence reviewer must have thought it was morally okay to claim that dogs were more intelligent than some groups of people. The reviewer also made it clear that he supported and defended the notion of dysgenesis. However, the Intelligence reviewer was correct that in The Emperor’s New Clothes I really didn’t do a good job of giving the reader a comprehensive picture of the features of human genetic variation from a population-genetic perspective. In hindsight, I agree with that criticism of the book, and for that reason, in several of my papers going forward, I did a much better job of making the population-genetic case against the existence of biological races in the human species.30
While The Emperor’s New Clothes had great success in university courses (and still does, despite being dated), it failed to reach the general public. It never got me on The Oprah Winfrey Show (although many of my students pushed for it). However, race scholars consider the book a classic, and psychometricians view it in the same vein as Marx’s Communist Manifesto (company I am proud to be in!). Probably one of the most convincing pieces of evidence suggesting the book is highly respected by race scholars was Harvard University’s invitation to me to give the first lecture in its Race, Representation and Museums lecture series.31 The lecture was held in honor of the 150th anniversary of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in 2016 and was sponsored by the Departments of Anthropology and Human Evolutionary Biology and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Given that this was Harvard University, any scholar in the world could have been asked to kick off the lecture series, but they chose me. During the introduction, the chair of Human Biology, Daniel Lieberman, called The Emperor’s New Clothes “the best book about the history of scientific racism ever written.” That is very high praise, considering the company the book keeps. However, at least one person in the audience, Harvard geneticist David Reich, didn’t think so. He felt compelled to write about my lecture in his 2018 book Who We Are and How We Got Here.32 I discuss his mischaracterization of my ideas in Chapter 12.