Written by Darrell B. Harrison |
Wednesday, January 3, 2024
When viewed through the lens of theological anthropology, we would do well to understand that there are no such categories as “black” people or “white” people (Galatians 3:28). They are merely cultural distinctions that serve only to foster and perpetuate animosity between various groups of God’s image-bearers.
Regarding the situation at Harvard University involving allegations of plagiarism by its 30th president, Dr. Claudine Gay, and the subsequent calls for her to resign from that position, what is fundamentally at the root of that institutional kerfuffle is society’s acceptance of the faulty notion that there is such a thing as human “races.”
The legacy of the 19th-century eugenicist and evolutionist Dr. Samuel George Morton, widely regarded as the “father” of scientific racism and a staunch proponent of polygenesis, the idea that each human “race” was a separate act of creation, continues to cast a long and precarious shadow over today’s culture more than 170 years after his death.
Morton’s poly (many) genesis (origin) stands in stark contrast to what Scripture teaches, namely, that humanity originated from one act of creation (monogenesis), not many acts (e.g. Gen 1:27; Acts 17:26).
But let’s take the Bible out of it for a moment.
Science itself acknowledges that there is no biological or scientific basis for human “races,” a fact to which Harvard’s own website attests: “Contemporary scientific consensus agrees that race has no biological basis, but scientific racism still exists. While it’s now more subtle than craniometry, its long history demonstrates the influence social ideas about race can have on supposedly unbiased research.”[1] Conversely, the late Dr. Robert Wald Sussman, in his book “The Myth of Race,” said,
What many people do not realize is that this racial structure is not based on reality. Anthropologists have shown for many years now that there is no biological reality to human race. There are no major complex behaviors that directly correlate with what might be considered human “racial” characteristics. There is no inherent relationship between intelligence, law-abidingness, or economic practices and “race,” just as there is no relationship between nose size, height, blood group, or skin color and any set of complex human behaviors. However, over the past 500 years, we have been taught by an informal, mutually reinforcing consortium of intellectuals, politicians, statesmen, business and economic leaders, and their books, that human racial biology is real and that certain races are biologically better than others. The biologically deterministic, racist worldview…has been tested and disproven consistently and yet its proponents have remained resistant to all empirical scientific evidence for more than 500 years.