Blacks are also twice as likely as whites to have high blood pressure, and five to seven times more likely to have dangerously high blood pressure. This is often attributed to the pressures of “racism,” but physiology is certainly part of the cause.
A study at the University of Maryland found that when black and white students were paired for age, diet, fitness, and medical history, and given a mild stress—their hands were put in ice for 30 seconds—blacks reacted by constricting their blood vessels (a hypertensive reaction) for at least ten times longer than whites. Research in Barbados has shown that mixed-race blacks are more likely to have high blood pressure if their maternal rather than paternal ancestors were African; genes passed down from the mother seem somehow to be involved. One reason for high blood pressure among blacks may be their relative inability to secrete sodium, so a salty diet can be more dangerous for blacks than for whites.
It has long been known that blood transfusions and organ transplants work best between people of the same race. Until the Second World War, stocks of blood were routinely segregated by race for this reason. Classification by race was ended when it was discovered to be “racist,” but blood banks are reinstituting segregation.
The distribution of the common blood types is different from race to race, and some rare types are unique to certain races. Only blacks have U negative blood; only whites have Vel negative or Lan negative blood. Dr. W. Laurence Marsh of the New York Blood Center justifies racial classification: “It makes no sense to screen 100,000 whites for U negative when no U negative white person has ever been found.”
Kidneys and other organs are classified by race for similar reasons. About 20 percent of blacks are so genetically incompatible with whites that they reject organs from all white donors.
Origin of Species
Clearly, all these differences cannot be dismissed with the fashionable notion that race is nothing more than a matter of skin color. No one knows for how long the different races have been evolving independently, but it might be necessary to go back one million years or more to find an ancestor common to all races. Clearly, a great deal of divergence has taken place during that time.
In his magisterial work, Race, John Baker suggests that certain racial groups are already so different from each other that they are not, technically speaking, the same species. Certain matings between extremely unrelated stocks—Bushmen and Europeans, for example—are thought to have produced only female children, or in some cases hybrids that could not mate successfully among themselves. These are well-known signs of an unrelatedness that is so vast as to be verging on separation into different species.
Indeed, according to Dr. Baker, in the prehistoric past different races and sub-races probably avoided cross-breeding and behaved as if they were different species. He points out that in nature, animals that are no more different from each other than northern Europeans and southern Europeans never breed with each other. It is only in domestication that a horse, for example, can be made to mate with a donkey. Man is, of course, the most domesticated of animals. As the French anthropologist Paul Broca remarked, “Man, especially civilized man, is of all the animals the least exclusive in his amours.”
Separate development is, to use Charles Darwin’s phrase, the origin of species. Apes and humans once had a common ancestor but are now distinct species. Likewise, racial differences are nature’s first steps towards the creation of new species. Left to themselves for long enough, the different races of man would have become so different that they could no longer produce fertile young. This might well have happened if the domesticating effects of civilization had come later, or if discovery and travel had not brought isolated peoples into contact with each other.
One of the great ironies of today’s quest for “diversity,”—the forcible mixing of peoples as unlike each other as possible—is that it is a destroyer of diversity. It is only through separation that nature can produce that culmination of true diversity: a new species.
|