On Race

People of all political and philosophical persuasions love to talk about race. But it seems that nobody knows what race actually is, and what it means for our world and the people that live in it. In this article we will be discussing race, what it is, how it works, and why it is important.

One of the two preliminary assumptions of Eurasianism is that race is real (the other is that Tradition is real, a topic I will save for another time). Hence race is very relevant in the Eurasianist school of thought.

But, many people today believe that race isn't real. They say it is a "social construct", and that it has no basis in scientific reality. And if you question this, even in a civil and intellectual, evidence-based and logical way, they will accuse you of "scientific racism", whatever that means. Their argument boils down to the notion that race was invented during the European colonial period for Whites to justify "racist" domination of non-White people, and to draw a divisive line between themselves, the "superior race" and their subjects, the "inferior races". They claim that our modern conception of race is inherited from this historic one, and thus represents vestiges of an old "White supremacist system". Biologically speaking, they believe that there are no real differences between the populations we ascribe to one race or another, other than surface-level cosmetic ones, such as skin color, hair color, facial morphology, and the like. Their argument can be summed up in one sentence, there is only one race, the human race.

The main flaw in this argument is that it is completely ignorant of what race actually is, of what we mean when we say the word race. Their treatment of race is semantically very specific, even though race in its present usage is a somewhat imprecise term. At any rate, if we are to have any meaningful dialog, we need a precise definition of the term. That definition should, hopefully, overlap enough with people's everyday understanding of race to be able to explain why it is real, and why it is important.

What is race, then? Race, as a concept, is the natural variation of human types and morphology, the mechanism of which is descent with modification. Indeed, in a biological sense, race is very closely related to the concept of species, although a race is not a species, because members of different races are able to mate and produce fertile offspring. Races are smaller than species, thus we can say that races are equivalent to subspecies, akin to different breeds of dog or cat. Races are basically independent branches of evolution which are younger than the species itself, and are paving the way for the eventual formation of new species in the future via divergent evolution. If you believe in evolution, then you cannot deny that there are human subspecies, unless you also believe that all other creatures have subspecies but somehow man alone does not. It is not too great of a semantic leap from subspecies to races. White, Black, Asian, these can effectively be considered subspecies. In that sense, race is a valid concept.

This biological definition is valuable, but I elect to take it a step further, to arrive at what can be called the essential definition of race. According to such, a race is defined as an ancestral individual or group in addition to all of his/their descendants that ever have been or will be born. This definition of race is much more useful than the subspecies definition, because it allows us to treat groups of related people which are smaller than subspecies. In fact, according to this radical definition of race, a race may consist of as few as three people: a man, his wife and their son. Any group, no matter the size, that shares sanguinary bonds may be called a race. Race thus overlaps with related words such as tribe or what the Romans called gens. In treating race as a concept, as I mentioned above, we are treating the natural variation of human types, we are treating lineages. A lineage can be as small as a household, and may range in size from thence to a clan, a tribe, a nation and further on to families of related nations, finally arriving at what is conventionally called a race today, which is to say a major subdivision or subspecies of the human gens. The concept of race is relevant at all of these levels. Thus all these terms, family, clan, tribe, nation, "race" are all races, and behave according to the same mechanism: descent with modification.

Part of the modern confusion around what race is arises from ignorance of scale. Those who say race doesn't exist will point out the fact that ancient people had no conception of "race", which they mean to say, ancient people had no conception of larger races or subspecies. Romans, Greeks, Egyptians had no conception of White or Black, the way we do today, they say, and here they are actually correct. However, that does not mean they had no conception of race. They simply could not perceive something as large as a White or Black race, because their view of the world was very limited geographically. Though they could talk at length about the differences between a Roman and a Greek, or an Arab and a Jew, and even about how a Roman was likely closer related to a Greek, than a Roman to a Jew, or a Greek to an Arab. They understood how lineages and descent with modification worked, but because their science was not as advanced, they could not comprehend something as large as an entire subspecies of humanity, as the modern race denialists with centuries of ethnography at hand are demanding of them.

Indeed, when Europeans saw a Black or an Asian for the first time, certainly they would have understood immediately that the difference between themselves and this kind of person was even further than between themselves and other European or Near Eastern races. Thus their racial field of vision expanded. Eventually, science got better, and proper studies of relations between human groups could determine the reality: who was related to whom, and by what degree? Today it has been almost completely demystified thanks to DNA science.

The natural variation of human types and morphology definitely is real. Race denialists' refusal to call that race is simply a semantic trap. Point this out to them, and they might then tell you that they do not deny the concept thus described, but that they deny there are any meaningful differences between races. "We are all one big human family," they will say. In their version of reality, the differences between races are purely aesthetic, and amount to nothing more than skin or hair color, that the underlying "individual" is exactly the same as that of all other humans. They also like to point out numbers like, "99.9% of human DNA is the same across all races". This is an infantile argument. Humans share 98.8% of their DNA with chimpanzees, and 60% with bananas. So a White and a Black may be 99.9% the same, but so what? A White and a chimpanzee are 98.8% the same; it's not about how similar 99.9% makes us, but about how different that 0.1% makes us. Just look how different humans are from chimps, even though the genetic differences amount to only a couple percentage points. And the differences between humans and chimps are far more than merely aesthetic.

That brings us to the next point: the differences between races are significant. The with modification part of descent with modification is what's important here. Human traits evolve and change over time, as populations move into different environments, separate themselves from other groups, and intermix with other groups still. We find natural variation not only of genes that determine skin color or average height, but also genes that effect internal physiology and brain function. Genes that make some people smarter, some stronger, others faster or better at digesting certain substances or more prone to certain diseases. It's just evolution and natural selection.

Of course, when you tell a race denialist that the differences between races are real and significant, they will automatically assume that means you think you and your people are superior to everyone else. You must be a "racial supremacist". I'm sure it has been said a million times, but I will say it here again. Just because we admit there are differences between races, and that these differences are significant, does not mean we think one race is better than the rest. That is like saying, which is better, a tiger, a lion, a bear or an eagle. Each one is different, has its own strengths and weakness, and has its own biological niche. A bear is stronger than an eagle, but a bear also can't fly. The same is true of human biodiversity. I'm not going to say anything more about this, because doing so would be coming up with a hundred different ways to say the same thing.

One final point to be made about race is that race is a complicated thing. Races are not neat categories with solidly defined boundaries. Once again, with modification is key. The main reason for this is that all human reproduction results in hybridization, obviously, because both a man and a woman are necessary for reproduction. The implication of this is that human lineages are not like the branches of a tree, emanating from a single source and only splitting from there. Rather, they are constantly both splitting and crisscrossing with other branches. Thus any given race most likely has several different ancestral groups, unless it has been isolated for a very long time. Of course, viewing human races like a tree is still somewhat valuable, as it illustrates the origins and historical development of a dominant part of that race's character. Still, the picture it offers is only fragmentary, as it ignores many potential substrates which contributed to the racial character along the way. A proper understanding of a race should take all of these into account.

A great example of this is the origins of the Japanese people, which even today remains somewhat of an anthropological mystery. What is known is that in ancient times, the Japanese archipelago was inhabited by a people later called the Jomon. Now the Jomon are not what we would conventionally call Asian; they had different cranial structures and much more body and facial hair. Then, around 2000 years ago there was a migration from the Korean peninsula of a people called the Yayoi, who were of a completely different racial character, much more conventionally Asian, like Koreans, with potential ties to a Transeurasiatic or Altaic race. These two races coalesced in ancient Japan and the modern Japanese people are their descendants. There is even evidence that a third ethnic substrate contributed to the formation of Japan, which was Austronesian in character, Austronesians being the dominant Asian subgroup that inhabits the islands of Southeast Asia and Polynesia. This evidence comes in the form of numerous Japanese words which appear to be loans from the Austronesian language, as well as striking similarities between certain episodes of Japanese and Austronesian mythologies. In the final analysis, this shows that while the Japanese are undoubtedly Asian, they simultaneously have ties to people who were not Asian.

In this article we went over the basics of race. We also should have sufficiently dealt with the arguments commonly used by race denialists. The three main points about race we want to emphasize here, are that race is real, the differences between races are significant, and race is complicated. These three will be revisited time and time again throughout the Eurasianist school of thought, especially the third one.