Racism v. Racialism?

Of course, racism is bad. To prejudge or limit others based on what one perceives to be their race(s) undermines their self-determination—affronts their human dignity. And the fact that an individual may derive a significant chunk of his or her identity from a chosen racial identity is fine and good—so long as that's a choice (although racism sometimes finds egress through such articulations).

But what about an idea of race based on something less culturally constructed? Even if we can’t transcend language, some statements seem more empirically-based, yes? Science strives—asymptotically, admittedly—for fact, and biology speaks to us about genes and natural selection. Humanity is a species, which means we’re all basically the same. But within every species is genetic variation.

Physical anthropologists used to classify humans into three basic races—then five, then seven or nine, then twelve or fifteen, then twenty-two… Then they gave up. Since observed variations in “racial” characteristics aren’t discrete, drawing hard-and-fast lines doesn’t seem to have a biological basis.

But if we think of race in terms of geographical-genetic nodes, it might still make scientific sense. Humans didn’t always move around quite as much quite as quickly, and more-or-less isolated populations had time to adapt genetically to particular environments, even if, at their geographical edges, they flowed genetically into other human populations.

Racialism is the idea that particular, primal human populations developed particular adaptations to particular environments. Unfortunately, it suggests the politically incorrect possibility that those different populations may have had particular strengths and weaknesses, relative to other human populations.

We are too close to this problem to study it effectively; due to a cultural-observer effect, the historical unpacking of racialism has typically trailed off into racism. And that’s a darn shame, if we want to know our whole story.