ABSTRACT
There is a vast historical, philosophical, political, sociological and anthropological literature on ‘Race’, one of the most sensitive issues currently perturbing our culture (notoriously, in Psychology, in the ‘Race and IQ’ debate). Here we consider only Psychology’s involvements, the present chapter being essentially a distillation of some of the major points covered in G. Richards (1997), which provides a more detailed and comprehensive account. Though (unlike ‘racism’) ‘race’ is not a psychological concept, it has always been seen as having a psychological dimension. Psychology, we will see, has both promoted and opposed racism. Before pursuing this I should make my position clear: I do not believe the notion of innate psychological racial differences is meaningful. Current genetic understanding of human diversity is roughly as follows: there is a single human ‘gene pool’ containing numerous alleles for each genetically determined trait. Within this, sub-pools may, for mainly geographic reasons, become relatively isolated from the remainder for longer or shorter periods. These are less genetically diverse than the total pool, containing only a sample of the total number of alleles. During isolation some new mutations may occur adding unique alleles to a group’s repertoire – but these will never be universal within it. Circumstances may exert their own selection pressures on the frequency of distribution (e.g. hairiness genes may be favoured in cold climates) thereby rendering them more, or less, frequent than elsewhere. The upshot is that isolated groups may acquire a distinctive typical physical appearance (although not all group members will conform to this). If, however, we map the frequency of different alleles globally we find they vary enormously. Blood groups provide one pattern, hair-type another, earwax-type a third and so on – in other words, the world population is carved up differently for different genes. This must presumably also apply to any genes determining psychological traits (if such there be) – there is no reason to assume they would correlate with those physical traits traditionally used to identify ‘races’. Moreover, we never encounter genetic traits which are both unique to and universal within a particular group, while no group is ever 100 per cent isolated – there is always some genetic exchange with outside, and the level of this has increased dramatically over the last half-century or so. Gene-pool composition constantly shifts in any case, both by chance and as conditions of life change.
