Published by Brad on 3 November 2009 | Have your say

Is it better not to judge races?

- A response to Channel 4’s “Is it better to be mixed race?”

By Malcolm Evans, Research Co-ordinator, Multiple Heritage Project.

Channel 4 ran an interesting documentary last night, “Is it better to be mixed race?”

The gist of the programme was about genetic hybrid vigour – how a broad mix of genes tends to create healthier and longer living people.

This is hardly a revelation. We have long known about the advantages of a broad gene pool and, indeed, evolutionary psychologists would ground the primal incest taboo in that very same knowledge.

The novelty in the Channel 4 programme was in its linking of the healthiness of genetic cross-fertilisation with the extremely rapid growth of the UK’s mixed race population.

Whilst positive treatment of our racial reality is to be much welcomed, there are to our mind two strong caveats to all of this.

The first was the programme’s inability to sketch out more thoroughly what it means to be mixed race. Given the population ebbs and flows, invasions, exoduses and influxes down the millennia, as soon as one in fact dwells on existing hybridity, the very notion of “mixed race” as a purely biological construct collapses. We are all mixed race on this account.

And hence the argument moves on to the ineluctable truth that race must be a social construction beyond the material colour differences of skin.

Hence the programme was somewhat caught between the commonsensical announcement of long-understood biological realities and something of a failure to grasp the ongoing psychological and sociological connotations of mixed race in its UK lived experiences.

The second issue emerges from the first. Again, whilst we welcome any attempt to bring the mixed debate mainstream, we remain unconvinced that the best weapon to defeat the grotesque arguments of racial supremacists is through an inversion of their own eugenics. Whenever we start selecting any racial type as “good”, we are on very dangerous ground – for every “good” there is a “bad” and for every claim there is a counter-claim.

We would prefer a little more subtlety through a more gentle nod to material difference but a much firmer embrace of ultimate human community.

After all, aren’t all comparisons ultimately invidious, particularly when we get down to the level of DNA, which remains perhaps the most dangerously contested political battleground of all?

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