Istwa Nou

A 2017 study by Baker, Rotimi and Shriner in Scientific Reports demonstrated that human ancestry correlates with language rather than with race, and that race is not an objective genomic classifier. Linguists and anthropologists had been saying this for most of a century. What the genomics did was close the last exit, because the racial categories inherited from the nineteenth century had been kept alive on the argument that biology might eventually vindicate them. It did not. I put this at the far end of a Haitian timeline for a specific reason. Haiti's 1805 constitution declared all citizens black regardless of complexion, which was a political act with no biological claim behind it and it was correct. The country made race a legal category it defined for itself, two hundred and twelve years before a genome paper confirmed there was nothing underneath the category to argue with.

Jennifer L. Baker, Charles N. Rotimi and Daniel Shriner published a study in Scientific Reports in 2017 examining how human genetic variation is distributed. They found that ancestry corresponds to the languages people speak and that race works badly as a way of classifying genomes. Linguists and anthropologists had reached that conclusion by their own routes decades earlier, and the genetic data now agrees with them. The result carries most weight in Africa, which holds more human genetic diversity than any other part of the world. Speakers of Nilo-Saharan languages across the Sudan belt, Cushitic speakers in the Horn, Niger-Congo speakers through West and Central Africa and Khoisan speakers in the south are each varied within themselves and overlap heavily with one another. Sorting them into races produces categories with no biological content. What holds any of these groupings together is history: migration, settlement, marriage and the exchange of goods and words, all of which move genes along the same paths that carry language.