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The Emperor's New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium

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As the title suggests, The Emperor's New Clothes lays bare the fallacy of race as a meaningful biological concept in human society. Despite the inability for science to justify race classifications in the human species, Graves explains how racists have historically abused the scientific method to promote their own agendas, such as unfounded claims for intelligence differences among the so-called races. This book provides a deeply moving account of the abuses of the race concept throughout the ages. In these pages we read about the dire consequences when a handful of researchers (intentionally or unintentionally) claim that their results prove certain members of society should be held low; thus, the book spins a cautionary tale regarding the critical need for diversity in research science. The work provides an enjoyable (yet stirring) introduction to the subject suitable for a lay audience. In addition, as evidenced by his Notes and Bibliography sections, Graves has thoroughly and meticulously researched his topic and he provides us with an invaluable list of resources for further exploration. Thus, this book is highly recommended for both the casual reader as well as the experienced scholar.

A book that concludes with the declaration that biological races do not exist and that the concept of Race . . . was socially constructed arising from the colonization of the New World and the importation of slaves, mainly from western Africa? (p. 193) merits a salute right off the bat. Of course anyone can just say such things, and a public bombarded by claims and counter-claims might be tempted to dismiss such statements as simply manifestations of ?political correctness.? In this instance, however, the author, Joseph L. Graves, Jr., is a lab geneticist, and he has made his case based upon solid science and not on feel-good social motivations. Of course, the social circumstances cannot be ignored, and in this case, the author, who identifies himself as ?an African-American intellectual? (p. 2), can speak from personal experience. The intentions are declared in the first page with the words, ? Specifically, my goal is to show the reader that there is no biological basis for separation of human beings into races and that the idea of race is a relatively recent social and political construction? (p. 1). It is race itself and the grip it has on the public mind that he is presenting as the emperor without clothes. If races are social constructs and not manifestations of biological reality, how did the universal acceptance of their existence ever come about? The structure of the book is an exploration of the development and application of that perspective from the Greeks to the present day. It gets off to a somewhat rocky start. Aristotle is credited with authorship of the Systema Naturae and the idea that living creatures are hierarchically organized in a scala naturae. In fact that title was used by Linnaeus in the 18th century. Aristotle?s Historia Animalium may have qualified him as the ?Father of the Biological Sciences,? but in it he did not arrange the creatures described in a logical hierarchy of differential worth. It was the Enlightenment application of Aristotelian logic that actually accomplished the construction of that ?Great Chain of Being,? and Linnaeus did embody that approach. After that somewhat bumpy beginning, the book gets better and better as it goes on. It really comes into its own with the discussion of the establishment of eugenics in the 19th century. In Chapter 6, Pseudoscience and the Founding of Eugenics, he characterizes its founder, Sir Francis Galton, as ?an intellectual mediocrity, a sham, and a villain? (p. 100), and he backs this up with a demonstration of why that was the case. This is worth the price of the book in the first place. In chapter 7, Graves makes the case that the leader of the American eugenics movement, Charles B. Davenport, director of the Eugenics Records Office at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, had engaged in ?one of the largest medical frauds of the twentieth century: the pellagra cover-up? (p. 121). The next chapter, Eugenics, Race, and Fascism, is subtitled ?The Road to Auschwitz Went Through Cold Spring Harbor.? After the subsidence of eugenic enthusiasm following the realization of its applications in Nazi Germany, Graves traces its resurgence in chapters 9 and 10. In the latter, ?The Race and IQ Fallacy,? he declares that ?No one better typifies the return to scientific racist ideology in the period after World War II than eugenicist Arthur Jensen? (p. 159), Professor emeritus of Educational Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Jensen, most recently in The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability (1998), takes race to be a self-defined entity and assumes the existence of racial differences in mental ability as his ?default position.? This constitutes his null hypothesis although there is nothing null about it. It is a racialist assumption by definition. Graves goes on to discuss the misunderstanding and misuse of the concept of heritability by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray in The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in America (1994). Joe Graves is a laboratory scientist which is both a strength and a weakness in the book. His scientific grasp and up-to-date sources puts his presentation on a rock-solid basis. On the other side of the coin, many of his most important points are backed up in the kind of crabbed and minimalist writing that is de rigeur in scientific journals, ultimately being rendered in symbolic form as equations. This is no problem for the scientifically literate, but it will be less satisfying for the general public who could well stand to benefit from the case that is being made. The text is only 200 pages long, and could easily have been fleshed out for the general reader. As Graves shows when the occasion demands, he is quite capable of rendering things in perfectly fluent prose. One could only wish that he had kept that up throughout. Even with this caveat, however, The Emperor?s New Clothes is a fine start for thinking about race at the dawn of a new millennium.

C. Loring Brace University of Michigan

It is rare to find such a cogent and readable book on a scientific topic of such importance, and even rarer to find an uncompromisingly scientific book that lay people can understand, enjoy, and put to important use in their lives. Written by an experimental evolutionary biologist with impeccable credentials both as a scholar and teacher, this is an interdisciplinary book with broad implications in many scholarly fields: public policy, social science, history, literary criticism, psychology, and ethics. Even more crucially, it has urgent implications for the everyday lives of everyone--and this includes all of us, whatever our backgrounds--whose feelings and beliefs, self-knowledge and self-ignorance, actions and sensibilities have been shaped consciously and unconsciously by ideas of "race." It is safe to assume that almost no lay person who reads this book has an inkling of what genetic biologists in general think of the concept of "race," and Graves provides a lucid explanation, together with an invaluable history of changing "scientific" views of the subject. At once scholarly and readable, scientific and impassioned, meticulously documented and aimed explicitly at social transformation, this is a book of monumental importance.

Because my own field is literary criticism, I would like to add a comment on the usefulness of this book for literary scholars. While the field of critical race theory has become increasingly important to the study of literature, and the work of Takaki, Gossett, Gates, and many other critics/historians provides crucial background for understanding race as social construction, Graves' book is the only one I know of that addresses these broad issues from the point of view of genetic biology, in terms that can be understood by non-scientists. An innovative and experienced teacher of non-majors in an interdisciplinary course on genes, race, and society, Graves is well versed in history and literature as well as in the problematics of discussing race-as-social-construction with students totally unfamiliar with the concept. This book is full of charts, anecdotes, graphs, terse, quotable examples, and clear explanations of scientific data; thus it is invaluable for teachers as well as being an important scientific resource for those of us whose scholarship focuses on issues of race in literary history. No literary scholar should miss this book.

This is a valuable book. It deals with three main areas: (1) the development of the concept of race before Darwin; 2) the rise of "scientific" racism; and (3) a demolishing of the idea of a biological basis for the existence of race. Graves does a good job in outlining the changing rationales for the existence of distinct races, and, more perniciously, the ranking of races into superior and inferior ones. Before the 15th century the concept of race was quite nebulous. Most people did not travel widely or see others who differed substantially from themselves. Although, people have always thought of their own group as "better" than others-- in the past this was a more parochial comparison (town vs town; nation vs nation, etc. The beginning of the Age of Exploration brought the existence of people with quite different physical appearances into the public conscience. This, coupled with the desire of Europeans to conquer and subjugate these newly encountered people, led to the idea of different human races and their inequality. Prior to Darwin, the rationale was creationist based on some supernatural design, or based on presumed taxonomic characteristics (Johann Blumenbach, Georges Buffon).

Darwin's revolution demolished the rationale for races, but this took a long time to come about. The problem is that even if a correct theory is present, the theory must be properly applied. In the case of human races, Edward Spencer's misapplication of Darwin profoundly influenced Anglo-American thinking. His erroneous "survival of the fittest" paradigm made it easy for self-fulfilling analyses of the level of development in different parts of the world, in the 19th century, to be reified as scientific proof of the superiority of the white race. (If the survey had been taken in the 11th or 12th century, the Chinese and the Arabs would have been the highest ranked : ). Graves does a thorough job of exposing the racism and shoddy research of people like Joseph Comte Gobineau and Francis Galton. These approaches led to the eugenics movement, the sterilization in the United States of thousands of people classified (often erroneously) as mentally retarded, and ultimately to the Nazi Holocaust in t he name of racial purity.

The finest part of the book is the last section, in which Graves, a molecular biologist and geneticist, demonstrates his up-to-date command of the scientific literature. In it he rebuts claims by Gobineau's and Galton's successors- Arthus Jensen, Phillippe Rushton, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein. In his book, *Descent of Man...* Darwin pointed out that the concept of different races was in trouble because taxonomists could not agree on how many races there were and what characteristics should be used. As Graves points out, "Detailed analysis of the existing morphological variation within and between these racial categories has forced modern physical anthropologists to conclude that no consistent race designations can be constructed, thus validating Darwin's original suggestion." Both the American Society of Physical Anthropologists and the American Anthropological Association have issued official statements that the concept of biologically different races is false.

Morphological characteristics such as skin color, hair texture, and nasal height are not only superficial, but also subject to environmental influences such as solar intensity and level of humidity in the air. So that people with very different genetic characteristics, like Nigerians and New Guineans, will have black skin and frizzy hair. The advent of sequencing of DNA made a much more fundamental approach possible. The results are in-- there are no biological races. Some 84% of the genetic variability of humans is found between individuals belonging to the same nation or tribe and only 6% of the genetic variability can be attributed to the different "races." That is, two Watusis may be more different genetically between themselves than from a Swede. Even these differences are relatively small. The entire human race is remarkably homogeneous. Two gorillas in West Africa are more genetically diverse than the entire human race. Graves' message is that we are truly brothers under the skin and the Race Emperor is truly naked.

Graves' book, "The Emperor's New Clothes," is outstanding. Graves describes the history of racist thinking and prejudice from the ancient world to the Middle Ages and up to colonial America and the present day. Graves then addresses two of the biggest myths and misconceptions regarding race: diseases and intelligence.

I find it funny how so many racist, Jensen-influenced reviewers accuse Graves of being a fraud and dismissing his work as a ploy of "political correctness." The racist, Bell Curve thinking regarding intelligence, for example, is so contradictory that even those who subscribe to its premise are too blind to see it. For example, Jensen and his followers maintain that Asians are the smartest "race," followed by Jews, then whites, and then blacks. Additionally, Bell Curve advocates will lump Latinos into the same category as blacks regarding intelligence. Now here is the real contradiction. Mexicans, for example, have a geographic ancestry that is by and large a blend of European (Spanish) and East Asian (those who crossed the Bering Straight and settled into Mesoamerica). By the Bell Curve's own logic, Mexicans (as a blend of European and Asian) would fall between these two groups in the hierarchy of intelligence. Mexicans would be slightly less intelligent than Asians, but of a greater intelligence than Europeans/whites/Caucasians. When Bell Curve advocates and Jensen supporters acknowlege the superior intelligence of Central Americans (induced from their very own arguments), I will start to take them a bit more serious...but I'm not going to hold my breath on this one.

Back to "The Emperor's New Clothes." My favorite part of this book is actually the chapter where Graves discusses the notions of inequality and prejudice in the ancient world. The author discusses the way in which people have abused and taken the Holy Bible out of context to promote racist ideologies, which actually have no basis in actual Biblical scripture. The author goes on to discuss how the ancient Romans admired Egyptians and Ethiopians, once the locations of great civilizations, but regarded the people of modern-day Ireland, Britain, and Germany as "primitives," "savages," "brutes," "barbarians," and inferior peoples for having never achieved any worthwhile accomplishments. Later, this same essential logic was used by the Spanish, French, English, and Dutch to brand Africans, Australians, and indigenous Americans as inferior. As we can see, ideas about racism grow out of extreme ethnocentric viewpoints.

If you lack a background in biological sciences or genetics, Graves's chapters on intelligence and disease may be a little difficult to comprehend. Other than that, the book is a fairly easy and enjoyable read, even for those without extensive backgrounds in science. My biggest critique with this book is that Graves chooses to focus on notions of race strictly within the North American world. It would have been nice to see some data and analysis on concepts of race and racial categories around the world, such as Asia and Latin America. The concept of race in Latin America is vastly different from that of North America, yet few Americans (white or black) are aware of this.

I believe that this book is one of the best books ever written. It's content has the highest potential in changing how we, as a society view "race." This book intelligently goes into detail in defining just what race is and what it is not. It gives a vast amount of research and data in clearly portraying how multiple "races" got started and it leads the reader in the direction of knowing how to not necessarily change the world's views on racism, but more importantly, how to change our own. It shows how society views itself and how much of the whole picture we've been too oblivious to even see. In truth, we see too much; we can't even get past the color of one another's skin. This book teaches that it's okay to see a phenotype as long as we learn not to associate a sterotype with the so called "races" of our society. Lastly, this book taught me that there's no such thing as "race" because in fact we are all of the HUMAN race, therefore one in the same, not so different as some tend to think.

In a work of scholarship and passion, Dr. Graves demolishes misconception after misconception concerning the biology and politics of race. The present-day human species is not a miscellany of distinct types but a single evolutionary entity, united but diverse. So much bloodshed and futility have been based on the erroneous, if not poisonous, concept of human races. "The Emperor's New Clothes" is the key that can unlock the mental prison of racism.

Contrary to the aimless rant of a previous viewer who accused the author of The Emperor's New Clothes of special pleading (Whatever that means), Joseph Graves presents a calm, highly rational and well researched refutation of two centuries of theories propounding the inferiority of people of African descent. I won't pretend to understand the very technical arguments he puts forth to reinforce his very factual claims, but I do have a grasp of the history of scientific racism and its origins. Joseph Graves does a tremendous service to the lay reader by combining hard science with a clear, socio-historical presentation and anylsis of his topic. The format of the history segment is chronological, enabling the reader to get a sense of how the fallacies of racial differentials, underpinned by warped science progressed and adapted through the decades even when discredited. Its a shame really that a book like this has to be written;a bigger shame that those who cling to ideas of the inferiority of any group in the human species makes this scholarly endeaver a necessity. But, as Graves points out, in regard to the American context, many people still believe that there are innate racial differences. Hence, out of these assumptions spring the stereotypes that are often damaging to the group so stigmatized. One thing Graves did not delve into, which I wish he had, was how dominant groups in other societies maintained control over disadvantaged, disenfranchised populations. By showing, for example how Japan's Korean minority has been the object of much of the same derision suffered by African Americans would have gone even further in bolstering the author's historical side of his argument. It would show that a group, racial, ethnic,religious, etc, wishing to stay at the top of a social hierarchy will concoct negative propaganda about lower echelon groups to maintain its position. No matter how adherents to the concept of black inferiority may argue its scientific validity, the fact remains that the architects of this thinking, as Joseph Graves has shown, were supported by an establishment bent on maintaining its power and position over dark skinned people. Of course dark skinned people were not the only victims. Whites who did not fit into the Anglo-Saxon mold also fell under the lash of this spurious science. Like the fairy tale emperer, this book does an excellent job of exposing the lies of scientific racism. The public should be saturated with more literature of this kind. It would, hopefully, bring greater enlightenment to individuals lingering in the darkness of erroneous racial ideas.

As a Cancer reseacher I'm constantly bombarded with questions concerning the significance of race and cancer incidences and survival. We have repeatedly shown that based on patients treated on prospective randomized trials, when the quality of care is comparable, race is no longer an important factor. This book explains in a clear way why based on historical misconceptions, so many people think that race may be important . It also explains why it is not likely to be. There are numerous implications resulting from this conclusion. The most important is "judge a person by the content of their character not their race". This should be required reading for all cancer researchers!

As a medical scientist at Duke University, I would like to commend Dr. Graves on a superb overview of genetic differences between human populations from different parts of the world. This book makes a very clear statement of what is now mainstream science, though unfortunately it may be difficult to understand for readers without sufficient scientific background. What makes this book especially remarkable is its expert weaving of a tale involving the history of research in this area with the parallel history of social concepts of race. Given the importance of its topic in the world today, this book should be more widely publicized.