Dominion (79 page)

“Hey,” Manny said to Ollie. “Next time we do this I get to push
you
against the wall, okay?”

“You weren’t that bad, Manny. There’s hope for you as a professional wrestler. Mad Dog Manuel. Has a ring to it.” Ollie’s voice suddenly went panicky and high pitched—“Mookie did it. Mookie shot up the house. It was Mookie.” The men laughed. Clarence wondered what Mookie was thinking in the next room.

“So did he talk? What did he say?” Manny asked them.

“He coughed it up all right. Gangster Cool paid him to lie. Shadow was there. Shadow probably knows more, maybe a lot more. Even though nothing Mookie said is admissible, under the circumstances, hopefully it’ll move us down the road to what we need.”

“He really spilled all that? Boy, that went fast,” Manny said, with a look of admiration for Ollie.

“The key was when I told him I’d have Clarence drive him home.” Ollie laughed. “I think Mookie would have confessed to the Kennedy assassination to stay away from Clarence. You should have been a cop, Abernathy. Talk about a thousand-yard stare. When it comes to good cop/bad cop, you’re a natural.”

Clarence dragged himself into the Civic Auditorium to an afternoon symposium titled “Race and Ethnicity: New Perspectives.” He wished he was playing tennis. But the longer he listened to the lecturer, the more intrigued he became. After the question and answer session, he sat down for the prearranged interview in a pressroom behind the stage.

Dr. Lytle leaned back and drank his orange juice, while Clarence looked back over his notes, selecting some key follow-up questions. Then he turned on the tape recorder with the round conference mike on the table between them.

“Enjoyed your lecture, Dr. Lytle. To be honest, my editor kind of forced me to be here. I wasn’t really interested.”

“Really? Why not?”

“Maybe because they’ve put me on the ‘race beat.’ As a columnist, I’m not used to being assigned things. I’m pretty independent. But to tell you the truth, I’ve thought about race all my life, and it doesn’t seem to have done any good. Sometimes I just don’t want to think about it any more.”

“I understand. But for everyone who thinks about race all the time there are those who never do. Maybe if those who never think about it would, those who think about it all the time could relax and think about something else. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. Okay, Dr. Lytle, let me get your bio straight. You’re a geneticist, right? And an anthropologist? Ph.D.s in
both
fields?”

“Yes,” he laughed. “When you put it that way it sounds crazy to me too.”

“Maybe we should start by defining race.”

“Well,” Dr. Lytle said, “race is slippery, much more fluid than people think. We label it by the superficial stuff—skin color, hair texture, shape of eyes and nose and lips. Even then we don’t get it right. People are called ‘black’ in the U.S. because they have one or more black ancestors. But the same people living in Brazil would be called ‘white’ because they have one or more white ancestors. Some light-skinned blacks are mistaken for Italians; some Turks look like Argentineans.”

“I had a cousin so light skinned he could pose as white,” Clarence said. “Now nobody mistook him for Norwegian, but he looked southern European, maybe Greek. He went away to college, and when he got home everybody asked if he’d been hassled by whites. He said, ‘Nope. I fit right in, made a lot of friends.’ My brother Harley pressed him on it, and finally he admitted, ‘I just never told anyone I was black.’ Next term somebody saw a picture of his daddy and the masquerade was over. Suddenly his relationships changed.”

“Right. Race is largely a social construct,” Dr. Lytle said. “We don’t like uncertainty. We want things clearly defined—black and white. Historically, the emphasis on racial distinctions is a way of labeling a group by its enemies. It’s like a basketball scrimmage where one team wears red and the other blue. If you and I are the same color, we’re on each other’s side. Of course, that’s totally superficial because in terms of what matters, I’ll have much more in common with some on the other side than some on mine.”

“So, are you saying race is a human invention?”

“Not race per se. But the assumptions we attach to race, yes, these are mostly our inventions. They’re a mixture of prejudice, superstition, and myth. It’s a lever to wield power. To elevate ‘our kind,’ we denigrate ‘their kind.’ But ultimately it’s very subjective. It’s like gold—it’s only valuable as long as people think it is. Race only matters if you think it does.”

“But obviously there’s an objective scientific basis for race.”

“Much less than you’d think. Take Latinos. People talk as if they’re a race or an ethnic group. They’re neither. They’re a disparate collection of nationalities descended from Europeans, African slaves, and American Indians. And you know what race East Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis are?”

“Well … they’re their own race, aren’t they?”

“No. They’re Caucasians.” He saw Clarence’s skeptical look. “Really. That’s their official racial category.”

“I grew up thinking there were only two races,” Clarence said. “Black and white.”

“Me too,” Dr. Lytle said. “Never thought about American Indians, Asians, Pacific Islanders, Eskimos, Arabs, you name it. In fact, Native American is an absurd category to many Native Americans. Cheyenne and Apache and Navajo consider themselves as different from each other as blacks and whites are. And for Japanese and Koreans and Chinese to be thrown in together as ‘Orientals’ is insulting to them. They see obvious differences between themselves and the others. They often have strong biases against each other. The truth is, genetically we’re a huge mix. It isn’t just that America’s a melting pot. It’s that almost every American is his own melting pot. Gene research shows there’s more genetic variability among the members of any one race than between the different races as a whole.”

“You said that in your lecture. What exactly do you mean?”

“I mean any Caucasian will be genetically more similar to many Africans than to many Caucasians.”

“I don’t get it. How’s that possible?”

“Richard Lewontin, a population biologist, analyzed seventeen genetic markers in 168 populations, from Austrians to Thais to Apaches. He discovered only 6.3 percent of all genetic differences between human beings related in any way to their race. He found there’s more genetic difference within one race than there is between that race and any another. So if I ran tests on you and another black man we chose randomly from the street, and I analyzed both your twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, I’d find your genes have less in common with his than both of you have with a large number of randomly chosen white people.”

“That sounds impossible. I can hardly believe it.”

“But it’s true. It’s like horses—you don’t separate them genetically by brown, black, and white, do you? Two white horses are as likely to have different genetics as a white and a black horse. Human genetic differences for the most part run completely independently of race. That’s why ‘race’ isn’t really an objective standard.”

“But you can identify certain racial characteristics, right? I mean, black people have higher blood pressure, don’t they?”

“The incidence of high blood pressure among American blacks is twice as high as among whites, that’s true. But it isn’t genetic. Black Africans have some of the lowest hypertension rates in the world. As for the whole
Bell Curve
controversy, the interesting thing is the genes that determine mental processes are entirely different than those that determine race. So there can’t possibly be any scientific predictions about intellect based on race. The only predictors are sociological, not scientific.”

“Okay, here’s a question—what color were the first human beings?”

“Well, I didn’t get into that today. But as a geneticist I can give you a definitive answer.” He paused for effect. “They were black.”

“I’ve heard that. But how can you be so sure?”

“Well,” Dr. Lytle said, “both genetics and experience show us that dark-skinned people can and often do produce fair-complexioned offspring. However, it’s genetically
impossible
for fair-complexioned persons to produce dark-skinned offspring. In other words, two black people, as dark as yourself, can have a quite light-skinned child, and not just because of white ancestry. On the other hand, two full-blooded Swedes can
never
produce a dark-skinned child. It just can’t happen. Light skin can only account for light skin, whereas dark skin can account for both dark and light. Therefore, the original human beings could only be dark skinned. Of course, this fits with all the evidence of ancient people in Africa. The oldest bones, weapons, tools, utensils, and civilizations are in Africa, not in the Middle East, Asia, or Europe.”

“Where do you think the human race began?”

“The biblical text mentions Eden in the east, with a river that broke into four other rivers. First, the Gihon and the Pishon. These were African rivers. The Pishon is said to wind through the land of Havilah, which the historian Pliny said was in East Africa. The Gihon is said to wind through the entire land of Cush, or Ethiopia. Then, the Tigris and the Euphrates in Mesopotamia. So we’ve got four rivers in relation to Eden—two African, two Mesopotamian. That’s southern Mesopotamia or northern Africa. Historically, the one was inhabited primarily by dark brown-skinned people, the other blacks.”

“I was fascinated by that story you told about your ancestors. Can you walk me through it for the tape?”

“Sure. My great-grandfather was a slave. After emancipation he married a white woman, very rare in those days, and they had two children. One of them married black and one married white. The white side kept it all a secret, and they kept marrying white, just like my side kept marrying black. When we were tracing our family history I heard stories from a great-aunt about this whole line of our family who had ‘passed,’ you know, ‘gone white.’ Well, sure enough, I discovered it was true. I ended up tracing down the white side and talking with them on the phone. After we connected and I convinced them we were related, I told them there was this family secret which explains why we never met.”

“What did they say?”

“Well, they got real nervous and asked, ‘What secret?’ Like they wondered if Grandpa was a horse thief or a train robber. Actually, that news would have been a lot easier to take!” He laughed heartily. “So I looked for a gentle way to break it, and I finally told them, ‘Our great-grandfather was a slave.’ I made about eight of these calls to my long-estranged ‘white family,’ and the reaction was exactly the same from every one. ‘A
black
slave?’” He laughed again, shaking his head.

“So I set up this family reunion, and I don’t think it ever occurred to them that I would be black. They assumed I looked like them. You should have seen it. I got eight of my family members to meet with the six of them—six is all I could talk into coming. I’m a high yellow, but I have a light-skinned sister who works around whites who make racist comments about blacks, never realizing who she is. But then I’ve got two brothers almost as black as you. When those folks saw my brothers, they nearly fainted on the spot.”

“Must’ve made for an interesting reunion.”

“You got that right. But I’m convinced it was worth it. This one white cousin—we see each other now maybe three or four times a year—she told me just a week after our meeting some trouble broke out in the black part of town. Without thinking she said, ‘There they go again.’ Then she reminded herself, ‘I can’t say that anymore. Because they are me.”’

They are me
, Clarence jotted down.