Race

You're this tube to your two radio lab from NPR and WNYC Ladies and gentlemen the president of the United States June 26, 2000 to 19 a.m. At the White House. This is the moment race died. Good morning We are here to celebrate the completion of the first survey of the entire human genome of the entire human genome See for a hundred years scientists or at least a certain group of scientists had been trying to prove that race is real It's not just something that we see with their eyes But in fact there is something fundamentally different between a person who is white and person who is black or Asian And they looked at blood differences nothing they looked at differences in musculature the size of our heads nothing We couldn't really say this is this and that is that then In 2000 it is my great pleasure Bill Clinton introduces two of the most important scientists in the world dr.

Francis Collins and Craig Venter both of whom get up to The podium and say look we have searched all the way down to our DNA Can't get any deeper than that and when it comes to race the concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis It's just not there what that means is that modern science has confirmed what we first learned from ancient faiths The most important fact of life on this earth is our common humanity But a couple years down the road if you fast forward we began to look more closely and we began to know that some subtle differences based on ethnic background differences in people's health and race differences seemed like they could be important some genetic diseases target racial or ethnic groups more than others So that now just a couple years later even some of the scientists who were on the podium that day saying it was all over even they have started to We think are we rolling yes, we're rolling we are rolling. Oh, all right That's Francis Collins head of the human genome project in 2000 you were standing with Bill Clinton and Craig Venter you remember this day I do remember June 26 2000. Yes, it would be hard to forget that one. What was the weather like I don't care I think that was really hot that morning.

But really we didn't want to talk to Francis about that We actually wanted to ask him about something he said a couple years afterwards something he wrote in a medical journal Did you even not the fans are saying not oh well? I'll just read it to you. This is you talking okay? Increasing scientific evidence however indicates that genetic variation can be used to make it reasonably accurate prediction of geographic origins It is not strictly true that race or ethnicity has no biological connection.

So that's what we're kind of wondering It's not strictly true that it has no biological connection I won't defend that as being the world's best sentence construction But there's something that you want to say that you don't quite pass through your lips. It sounds like but Well, let me try again here. I think there are two points you can make about race and genetics one is we're really all very much alike Incredibly alike, but you can also say even that small amount of difference turns out to be revealing So that's our show today. What exactly can science reveal about race does exist does it not exist?

What really can you say about it? Yes? I'm Jada Bemrod. I remember Krollwich.

This is radio lab Okay, ready? Three two one so let's go back and consider it Francis Collins's safe. It is not strictly stop stop So it's not strictly speaking true that race has no biological connection. Who are you?

I'm Nell Greenfield voice I'm a science reporter with National Public Radio, but for the moment I'm your on your grammar instructor So take this double negative and make it into a sentence that is without the double negative It is sort of it's sort of true that race has something to do with biology, right? Right, right, right, but while he is tip-towing around with his fancy double negatives some people out in the real world That sounds like a cell phone. I'm good at that right now are taking that concept and they're just running with it Hello. Can you hear me?

Hello? Hello? Who's running with it exactly and how good well? I talked with one detective in Louisiana.

Let me just make sure I have your name pronounced correctly My name is Kip Judy's I am the patrol commander the Lafayette Parish Air Officer at the rank of captain who says that he actually used DNA to say something about race When was this all going down? C 2002 2003 and that helped him catch a serial killer We had a victim who had been blunged to death. Bernice a colon was only 23 years old She was left in a field and found by some hunters. It is believed her final moments alive We're spent visiting her mother's grave for abandoned car discovered her vehicle was found abandoned the cemetery right near her mother's grave site And just over a year four women have been murdered in Louisiana They're daffes linked by DNA evidence that all of the crime scenes that point through a single killer serial killer The Mia dubbed him the Baton Rouge serial killer.

It was in the news almost daily Self-defense classes are filling with frightened women Where will he strike next based on some witness information the suspected killer is believed to be a white male he is described as a white male White male in a white truck everything at that point they had I mean it seemed like it was probably a white guy Yes, I mean had this eyewitness report the fact that there seemed to be a serial killer and most serial killers are thought to be white guys And they started testing hundreds of white men police have launched an extraordinary effort to take DNA samples DNA samples from nearly a thousand men They were doing kind of a genetic dragnet dragnet for a serial killer in an area where crime tape is becoming part of the landscape Bob McNamara CBS News Baton Rouge it wasn't looking very Very promising so they went and they asked you know their crime lab is there anything in a DNA profile that identifies rice I mean we have the perpetrator DNA can we look at that and say whether it's a white guy or a black guy The immediate answer we had was no it's not you can't do that not a there's not a marker There's not a gene because you know race is not biological right however There was some technology out there that was looking into it. We're the first company I think in the world is in for phenotypes for forensics cases Who says that's Tony for Dakis he owns a company in Florida that sells tests genetic tests that he claims can be like an eye witness And tell you something about a person what they look like characteristics like eye colors and hair colors And skin color and the cops in Louisiana took him up on it We submitted the suspect profile to them and when the test came back this particular case the individual was primarily of African ancestry a black guy. Yes over 90% likely that it was a black male I do think it's important to note that there were other lines of evidence that had been developing that made them think a black I was likely but the DNA result I mean that was science within three or four days after that state police called and said we have a match The rest is history is since been convicted of two of the murders. So I think I thought the guy he was in fact black Yes, so does that mean that Tony for what is it for Dakis?

Tony for Dakis somehow found the gene for race that there is a race gene It's much more complicated than that and it all boils down to this idea of ancestry ancestry by DNA calm You can go online to his company DNA print and they will send you a kit just a simple mouth swab you do at home You can discover your unique genetic ancestry Kit and it's like a little science kit. Yeah, we're listening to John who am taking a DNA test of being interrupted by his wife I'm taking a DNA test and it's got these like swabs Open one of these sterile swabs and you like you know rub your cheek with it Aaah, aaah, aaah, aaah, aaah, aaah You literally just send this through the mail to the DNA print corporate headquarters in Sarasota, Florida and I went there Hi, hi. Good. I'm Nell Greenfield voice.

Oh, yeah, okay. So after the chisels arrive in Florida This is where items of evidence come nice. They run through a bunch of machines What exactly in the end are they looking at that gives them like some sense of my race? Well in your DNA there's lots of information there's billions of different little DNA letters letters letters letters letters letters letters letters letters Just for a second if I were to have you recite all the letters in your DNA at one letter per second Now how long it would take you to spell yourself?

No, no, it would take you six months a century It was a new century really to make it even more interesting instead of just you let's have you compare it to me I mean like if we both read it at one per second Yeah, we would be absolutely identical for about 17 minutes before there be any difference between us and every difference that there is whether it's like a little chemical tea or a little chemical G or whatever has a story behind it. How do you mean? Well? We all started in the same place together Well the evidence is very good that the human race as we currently know it had its origins in Africa According to Francis Collins head of the human genome project in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand years ago with as few as ten thousand people But soon after that Humans began to fan out across the globe some of us went east into Arabia Some of us went up north across the Sahari into the Mediterranean area all the while all these people are having babies And in the process the DNA is getting copied over and over and over parent the kid but sometimes the copying isn't exactly perfect You'll find a copying error Yes, that one right there.

Let's imagine that error No occurred in Asia about 25,000 years ago Imagine a Chinese woman had a baby and the baby was one letter different from the mommy an accident The A in the mom became a see in the baby and the mat see was handed down See and a thousand years down the road I look into your DNA I see that same mistake in the same spot You know what I know, but I now have a hunch if I shook to a family tree really hard Some Chinese ancestors would pop out it's sort of like a souvenir that your ancestors handed you down in your blood But you carry with you in every cell in your body So they've identified about 180 little variations in the DNA little souvenirs that people who share ancestry Share I guess Yours oh, I can tell you that's all right. You tell me we'll show you we've got it on a CD So we leave the lab and we go down this hallway to his office We determine that it is of alien origin That would explain a lot actually he pulls these things up on his computer screen. I'll show you what your results were So what does it say I'm dying here? Well, I guess before I tell you okay, that sample was determined to be I want to know What you think what do you think it's gonna be?

Well, my folks are Arab light skin both of them My dad's got some darker skin people on his side of the family So if I had to guess probably some European in there and then my dad's side I was thinking well, they're probably like Greek or Turkish way back when I wasn't really sure and I consciously didn't sort of look into it Okay, well, let me just tell you that this test you check is not gonna tell you countries. Okay, okay I'm oddly kind of nervous weirdly really yeah, just a little bit so your sub-Saharan African ancestry what percentage do you think it I'm gonna guess 12 0 0 0 0 0 0 all right Native American ancestry 1 1 East Asian 5% European 94% really 94% 94% 94% European no 94% pounds like noted to the words that we're using here a pretty arbitrary You should understand that his definition of quote unquote European includes from crescent or the Middle East Wow, so so wait a second if I'm a policeman we started this conversation and a cop was looking to describe a perpetrator Right, so if I find out that Jen and Bumran is European then I'm looking for someone who could be a huge range For example you've pulled up a bunch of digital photos when 24 day gets pulled up pictures of people with my exact ancestral mix Yeah, okay database Here's some males here's a female you brought up people with blonde hair blue eyes These are all people that had this sort of next even people from Poland who had like really red cheeks So these folks just look like pretty much like white folks to me none of the mill because I gotta tell Let me show you the picture of the guy who actually gave the sample That was just because does not know that jet is a dark curly hair swith So this is the guy and he doesn't really know anything about his mother and father I believe are from Lebanon although in this sample of maybe 20 people It's just that we don't have any samples of Lebanese But I guess I'm saying is for a cop someone who describes themselves as Lebanese versus Polish I mean that would be a really big difference. Oh, yeah, and to make that sort of distinction you need different markers Well, so then what does DNA actually tell you that well not a lot that's direct What he's doing basically is playing a guessing game based on ancestral percentages Like for instance, I'm 94% European 0% sub-Saharan He can plug that into his database pull up the pictures And he will notice that nobody with those percentages is black So he can tell he'll tell police this guy probably not black just like at the beginning we said that the picture there was pretty much not Yeah, there is one thing he can read directly in our DNA what I color So at the end of the day he can say I am not black and I have brown on that's it That's as far as you can tell you as a scientist. He does take it further What do you do?

Well, if he's got a DNA sample of perp you can go to his computer database and say okay database Show me everybody who's got these exact same percentages show me the pictures now Tell me what all these faces have in common visually like what's their average nose wet what's their average shape of the ears How big are their skulls skull shape see where this is going and what he tells the police look for people who have you know This type of head kind of here. It isn't genetics now. This is just photo averaging Yeah, this isn't sciences something else right, but when you hear things like measuring skulls measuring ears It's hard not to think back to pretty nasty periods of our history The eugenicists they tried to composite pictures into one face They measured skulls and they ended up inspiring the non-seals People called you a racist not once not once if I've been called a racist That was and that kind of surprises me. I'm just wondering how do you think you've escaped that hmm?

Are people critical of this? Yeah, I think a lot of scientists their first knee-jerk reaction is is that the poor masses out there aren't intelligent enough to handle this sort of information They'll start climbing over one another and killing themselves so that we either you know the smart ones need to sort of obfuskate I don't think that works very well. People may be a lot smarter than we might give them credit for being I think he's on to something there Well, there is a tendency that people have when this subject comes up to say We don't talk about that I mean I think people can talk about the real world and real differences respectfully and even with a certain amount of delicious interest Sure. Yeah, well you say sure but there are lots of shushers everywhere.

You're not gonna get me to stand on the side of shushing It's just I mean science complicates things even now This whole you know definition of science has of race being like ancestry or whatever It just it just doesn't jive with how people live race you mean how people talk about it really? Yeah, okay. Take a look at this photo this one here. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes We'll race you think he is he's back definitely black definitely.

Oh, yeah, how black is he how black is he? I'm a question for a visual black black black. How about Obama black? No, he's not he's blacker than that So he's unequivocally black, right?

I don't know my parents taught us because they came from the server to south you read the black or you were white There was no end between so the guy you're looking at the guy we just heard That's Wayne Joseph. He's an education director in LA and he also on the side writes essays But race mostly for national magazines and one day a couple years back He was watching TV and I happen to see a TV program Highlighting the fact that a couple of DNA labs were actually doing racial testing on DNA light bulb I said well, this will be perfect for this essay He thought he tests himself see what percentage of him was black versus other stuff and then write about it But what number do you think you would be the number I was thinking was 70 or 75 percent or more 75 percent African and 25 percent who knows what so I sent away for the kid swept both cheeks put it in the vial sent it back And then a few weeks later I get back the results first thing I did was I checked the kit number to make sure that they hadn't made a Mistake and sent me someone else's results, but the kit number matched. I couldn't believe it 57% Indo-European 39% Native American 4% Asian and 0% African 0% As in not as in zero nothing. I mean I've lived 50 years as a black man and I have no African genetically How did you make sense of that?

Did you just sit in all at once? No, what happened was after a couple of days I hadn't told my wife anything yet. I went to see my mother and I said look There's only one really logical explanation. I can live with it's okay.

I love you Just tell me the truth. I'm adopted she kind of giggled and she said look I can remember every pain I had having you I can still remember it. I said well, but then this doesn't make any sense She said yeah, it's a little surprising, but I'm too old too tired to be anything else So that's just the way it is for my brother when I told him the results. He said Wayne.

That's your DNA That's not my DNA. I'm a black man and that's the end of it for him. Hmm. What about your wife?

Well, my second wife happens to be Jewish her response was what do you mean? You're a black man I I defied my mother to marry you you've got to be black. Whoa, so she needed you to absolutely because she had told her mother at the time Look, I'm marrying Wayne. You're gonna have to decide whether you're gonna accept him or lose your daughter You really threw me for a loop.

You start thinking about your life There are certain decisions that are made in life based on who you think you are What I've married a black woman the first time what I have decided to go to a black high school Do you have answers to those questions? What do you have married a black woman? Would you have gone to a black high school? Maybe not.

How different would my life have been if I'd have known this 45 years ago Wayne Joseph is the director of alternative education for the Chino Valley School District in California a radio lab funded in part by the Alfred P. Low Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Science Foundation This is Radio Lab. I'm Jada Pomeron and I'm Robert Croward today's program is about race Okay, so we're are we literally learn we've learned that scientists when they talk about race They don't really mean race No, they mean that you have a set of ancestors who lived in a particular place on this planet for a while while they were there They acquired certain features skin color hair texture whatever and scientists won't go much further than just that Here's the thing if you're for forget to love scientists for a second if you're a doctor and your job is to save lives You can't help it notice that there are real differences between groups in terms of how healthy people are and if you want to treat that You end up talking about race and it never goes well Let me tell you a story now comes from our producer Soren Wheeler and it's about a drug called vital so you popped a few bottles This one I did I just wanted to test it out that it's supposed to loosen up the arteries That's supposed to so it's easier for the heart to pump as a white man That's about to talk about race on the radio. I figured it's time to loosen up.

Okay, introduce me to to our main dude here I'm Dr. Jay Cohn a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School This is him and what did you have for breakfast this morning? I don't eat breakfast tell me what he looks like well. He's a stocky.

He's got a white beard He's kind of got that weird grave doctor look probably because he spent his entire career worrying about how to help people with heart failure That's right, which for a really long time was kind of a lost cause Oh, yeah, it was a hopeless disease and then once it developed the implication was that the patient would die You're done. There was nothing much we could do but keep the patient comfortable But then back in the early 70s Jay had kind of a breakthrough The aha moment was the first patient Bedridden patient can't breathe easily bubbling up with fluid in the lungs. Jay gave this patient a combination of two drugs And the moment we did that this patient suddenly said my god I can breathe easily for the first time in months that fast. Oh, it's a dream.

It's immediate He confirms the effect in a longer-term trial over five years he gets a patent He finds a company they put it in a pill and they take it to the FDA and that's when the FDA said no no No, that's what they said. Why no you just said it worked really well. Well the doctors on the review board They said they thought the drug was pretty good. Yeah, they even started using it with some of their patients But they denied approval because it was not a big study study was just too small in the entire trial There were only 86 people that got the drug.

We were disappointed Frustrated we were using it. I was using it in my patient drag Yeah, so he goes back to what he was doing before all this started which was trying to figure out what the hell's going on with heart failure What the hell was going on with heart failure at that point? Well at the time scientists were just starting to look at racial differences When it comes to things like hide blood pressure and heart problems that black Americans were suffering a lot more than white Americans So he must have been hearing all this stuff this debate was going on out there and Jay was listening So Jay started thinking you know he had all that old data and they had actually broken it up by race Everyone checked a box black white American Indian all that they'd never bothered to look at that stuff Never teased it out and I said we should go back into our database because just maybe maybe black people respond differently to vital Well, we thought it would be worthwhile to go back and look we didn't know what we were going to find We just went back and checked off those people who had said they were black Jesus isn't gathered up the data and when they looked at the numbers. Oh my god.

He saw a bump What do you mean? Well still just a small trial, but in that trial the black patients did better significantly better really So he published and a couple weeks later He gets a call from a drug company and they say we'd like to do something with bible They would be willing to do a trial to demonstrate the efficacy of bido But here's the thing they wanted to do the trial just with black people that seem to be the path of least resistance Why would they why would they want to limit it just the black people? Well, they could do a smaller study so it would be cheaper and when it came time to sell the drug ready made market Alright, so they do this big study only in black people and what are they fine? An amazing result.

We got a 43% reduction in mortalities. Wait, what in other words if you were a black person in this trial and you took Bido your chance of dying from heart failure was cut in half. Well, that's huge. Yeah, so they go back in 2005 That's Troy Dester, the sociologist at NYU the FDA approves this as a first racialized drug Think about that the first racialized drug the first drug ever approved for racialized sub population After hundreds of years of looking for differences between black people and white people after the mapping of the human genome Here's the FDA saying We're different.

Some of us said this is a huge mistake We knew this was a terribly sensitive issue as we move into the 21st century well aware of the terrible history of racial and ethnic categories What should we do? We had a symposium to welcome you all Here at the University of Minnesota. We actually have a sold out crowd today and it was mainly aimed at attacking me I just don't think race this a scientific category and there was a very well-known law professor So hostile to the idea that she said I would rather die from heart failure than take by do well That's not quite what you said. I'd be terrified about a doctor making a diagnosis like that based on their view of me Is belonging to a particular racial category?

Well, but it goes on all the time. That doesn't make it right That's why I say that doesn't that right it does if any categories have you know It's look you would object then to a doctor seeing an African-American with anemia I said if you went into the doctor's office and we're anemic the doctor would appropriately check you for sickle cell Just a natural everyday phenomenon and she insisted well that's wrong It's I you know there's a sickle cell disease is not confined black and misdiagnosed well She is right of course, but the statistical likelihood of a white person with sickle cell disease is so low damaging their prevalence issues. There is a higher we can look at a patient and help identify some Processes of diagnosis and treatment that might improve our precision to disregard that we need a better way to do it Well, but that's just I think but you know what I think that if we if Seems to me that these racial categories are impeding good medical care and good biomedical research. They're not assisting it Well, I don't get that at all Why would declaring a difference impede it seems exactly the opposite if you know that a group of people are likely to get sick in a certain way Then you should target them and help them do you do you know what you think you know?

I think it's what she's saying and by looking at one target group Are you somehow shutting yourself off from the real target group that you should be looking? I don't know what you're talking about okay, let me give you an example, okay? When you go to the doctor yes, they put that thing around your bicep and they go Yes, the squeezing blood pressure, okay? It's well known that black Americans have much higher rates of high blood pressure hypertension Which is my point that so you know that it can seem like it's caused by race or it's purely a racial phenomenon But then I mentioned a sichroide duster I said how do you explain this black American stuff like twice the amount of hypertension the white Americans make the argument for me?

This is somehow not an innate difference okay the best argument here is Richard Cooper's work I'm Richard Cooper I'm the chair of the department of preventive medicine epidemiology here at Loyola Richard Cooper is a doctor and a researcher in here So he did he went to poor neighborhoods in Chicago and methodically house the house taking blood sample measure people's blood pressure And then he took that data and compared it to other countries Canada Spain Italy United Kingdom is huge eight nations sampling 85,000 people 85,000 people 85,000 and he then a race nations in terms of hypertension Because he wants to know like who's got the highest rates who's got the lowest and does this really have anything to do with the race? right and At the very end the nation with the highest of hypertension know terminal please is Germany Germany actually Richard Cooper says that Finland Poland and Russia are even worse, okay? How many black people learn Russia? Probably seven.

And the nation with the lowest of hypertension know is Nigeria. No kidding. Yeah, and it's like this. It's not like this.

It's like this. You put your hands way apart from each other. Okay. Your point being here what?

Not obvious. I mean if you're a doctor and you're just focused on the United States data You would assume that it has something to do with race these high blood pressure disparities So you therefore a miss all the Russians and Vince that came into your office B. You would over treat the American blacks and see God forbid a Nigerian should walk in. You're gonna give him all these drugs He doesn't even need.

Then what does cause the differences? Like if it's not race? What is it? Yeah, it's not race what?

Diet? Diet? Diet? Diet?

Really? I know it's not that exciting, but that's what he says. Well, then what about Biden? I mean you think that's wrong too?

No, I mean, but if you are the first drug ever to be approved for black people When you want to know that your drug works better for black people as compared to other groups? Yeah, and you want to be sure, right? Yes, well, they only ever tested it in black people. They never actually compared blacks to whites.

Yeah, well, that's true We don't know and we haven't gone back and studied a large white population I personally believe that by deal will work in white people as well Maybe not to the same frequency, but I use it in my white patients. Are you at all then upset that it's that's wrong? We learn again. It's FDA approved only for blacks.

Well, it's not getting to blacks. I mean, that's the real tragedy What's he talking about? Well, in the end, vital kind of tanked. Why?

You know the way they priced and marketed the drug all that kind of stuff But according to Jay, it was also because of opposition to the idea to the concept of vital that this is a drug for blacks It's a crime that this life-saving drug is not being as widely used as it should be very discouraged about that So the takeaway here, I guess is if a doctor or a scientist or a pharmaceutical company announces that there is a racial difference in the human family Check the footnotes. Exactly. On the other hand, I think an awful lot of us in our regular life get all excited about racial differences When we watch sports. I mean, everyone notices for example in track and field.

Like why? Well, did you make it swing? Yeah, always Jamaicans. So we founded Jamaica.

I owned Jamaican. Not go glad. Well, a writer of the sort of Jamaican He's Canadian Jamaican English. Also the author of the tipping point in the I don't know all those best-selling books We talked to him about his early days as a runner.

Am I running away when I was 13 or 14 was about a hundred five hundred? So you like just kind of danced on the ground. I'm 30 pounds heavier than I was in my running prime. Are you good?

Yes, at that age. Am I good in the global sense? No. Was I good at 13?

I was really good. I was I was all Canadian. You were in a one in your country and what event? 15 centimeters.

Age-class track and field in Ontario in 1970s was so overwhelmingly West Asian. It was in retrospect hilarious. Think back on it. I mean you would go to these track meets and there's like reggae music playing in the guitar time and the stands are full of Jamaicans So you were dealing with this fact, you know, you're 13.

You're not very sophisticated. You're dealing with this fact that You just aren't any white people. It's all Jamaicans in lanes one through eight are all Jamaicans right off the boat Jamaica's right and so you you begin and when you see it was really funny I remember there was a guy named Arnold Stott's and Arnold Stott's dominated the quarter mile for years in age class running Arnold Stott's was a white guy. He was a white guy and we all looked at Arnold and we said it's not gonna last right can't last Sure not it didn't you thought Arnold won't make it because he doesn't have the right stuff the right stuff being whatever It is that you make the question was how long can Arnold keep beating the Jamaicans and the answer is it can't be for that much longer And he was a tremendous spinner But we had this kind of unspoken prejudice that said if you weren't Jamaican it was hopeless And did you ever have an opportunity at the age of 14 to ascribe this to anything?

I mean I began to kind of process it in a very very crude Unspisicated way and then I would look at the world and I would see in the world black people won all sprints So I think well, maybe just black people are faster than white people So in a very primitive young guy kind of way Malcolm was I don't know exactly what the blade word for this Is but he was a racist or a chauvinist maybe or just somebody who sees West Indians winning everything So he figured there's gotta be a genetic advantage here because he could feel it in himself Listen, I had that gift. I was really really good when I was 15 14 and 30. I was the best in Canada I used to beat Dave Reed Dave Reed when I beat Dave Reed when I'm the Canadian Olympic team Really? Okay, that was the thing.

That was the caliber runner I was with How old were you and Dave Reed at the time when you were beating him? 14 Okay, let's make that clear But now that he's older and slower He's revised his thinking in this area I no longer am all that enamored of a kind of a genetic case for black athletics superiority I think it maybe explains some tiny amount It's not the real issue nature takes care of the fundamental things in the beginning and then as we as activities grow more involved and more complex Individual choice starts to matter more and more and more and more and more and when he says individual choice He's thinking of the moment when you're an athlete and it's the last turn or maybe the last lap of a race when you run 1200 meters in a 50 meter race You run six miles of a seven-mile country race you're beginning to suffer pain is about to start You're in a position where you possibly can win if you exert yourself and that's the moment is not the one every athlete has to ask How much do I care? There's always a struggle. Do I really care?

Does it matter to me? Do you think that Mickey mantle or I think everyone has that you think all athletes have that question Some people say I do care and some people say I don't and how you answer that question? Yes, or no has very little to do with jeans says now That's not the critical difference between me and Tiger Woods, you know It's the if the tiger gets up to five in the morning and hits 10,000 golf balls before breakfast That's the difference Why does he want to do that and why is that inconceivable for me to do there's your interesting story in Malcolm's case He says he did love running you know when you're that age you really can't run forever I'll never forget the feeling but he also loved reading books and he loved going to school and he loved thinking and I don't know my father comes to that glorious tradition of English amateurs and which says you should do many things and none of them Well, oh rich in that critical moment made answering yes, I will put up with the pain and win this race a little bit more difficult I struggle with it and I there was a moment I had that conversation and I said I didn't care and the moment happened when he was preparing for the Canadian National Championship Canadian Championship two of his friends were also back I go for a run with this guy David who's a great runner of the Creation another guy named Chris Brewster another great runner of my generation at the time We would have thought of ourselves as equals those guys didn't have as many your options as Malcolm There's a famous hill called Telegraph Hill or no signal hill steep is the steepest it's like running up the steepest five steps You ever go up from like San Francisco's yeah goes up forever and the first day I think we ran up it and I just thought it was ridiculous because you're having a puffy or because why would we do this? It's like just too crazy and the next day we went there We went we ran like seven miles to signal hill and then David and Chris Brewster decided they wanted to run up the hill backwards Really which is you know you just run seven miles at probably five forty five pace.

It's six in the morning And they want to run up this huge hill backwards and I I said no and I went home I didn't want to run anymore. I wanted to be on the debating team And I wanted to read books and I wanted to hang out with my friend Terry I quit So what is left to say about these genetically based racial differences in your mind very little So all the things that we've been talking about in this show that maybe there's a tendency to get sick in a certain way Maybe some medicines work a little better for one group than another. Let's say it's all true Yeah, you say it's true, but it's not true enough to me anything but a very short story Yeah, it's I don't I mean I'll grant you all those things and then I'll roll my eyes and say I don't really care I'm glad we'll the latest book is called outliers and the radio lab will return in a moment This is Chad Canakey calling you from my living room in Cincinnati, Ohio Radio lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation Enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world more information about Sloan at www.slown.org Thanks Hey, I'm Jada Bumran and I'm Robert Kohler This is radio lab our topic today is race what science can or cannot tell us about race now that we're at the towards the back end of the Program the front end of the back end we're the front of the back and we can confess that what we asked before what could a Scientist tell us that's hard and true about the biology of race nothing No, it's better than nothing right something But once you drop the science part of race and think of it as just a way of sorting people into us's and them then it gets interesting Or at the very least more complicated Here's an example we're uptown Manhattan's 1 p.m. Third periods about the start we're at charter school called facing history Which has about 150 kids mostly Hispanic and we'd come because we'd heard that every year in the ninth grade they do this particular Guessing exercise, okay?

All these microphones and other people that you guys see today. They are not in the room You can ignore them like sometimes you want to ignore me All right First your teacher David Sharon He tells his class with about 12 freshmen to pull up their seats into a semicircle same same class I was always let's go to get on their race goggles all right, so we have an activity here called sorting people After handing out some worksheets David kills the lights flips on his overhead projector and immediately eight faces appear projected Onto the wall what I want us to do is go kind of one by one and try to decide try to come to a consensus Okay, what race are these people based on looking at them and then we'll test it out explains It got four choices black white Asian Native American So why don't we start out with the first one the woman on the top left pink cheeks light skin bushy hair big Filipina nose, that's how it looked me tomorrow. What do you think white? She just seems white, but then when you look at her hair it seems like a black black I'm gonna go with white so what do we think for the man on the bottom left mustache borderline Afro?

Asian Native American a vaguely ethnic version of Tom's Selik I'm picking between white and Asian white or Asian I think he's black Hispanic we're actually not gonna use Hispanic So let's take them over here. How many people say black three okay white for how many people say Native American? All right to cut to the chase after eight of these faces David revealed the results turned out pink face girl was black Tom Selik was Asian and all in all the class got three right three out of eight which thrilled David What does this tell us one of the kids in the back of the class a girl named Bianca finally says well What it tells us this activity retarded sorry, it's stupid Okay, so let's say that you had a white mother and a black father the child will come out brown How would it come out great no it will come out brown okay? I'm not white or black I'm Dominican my mother is light skin like David's color and my father is dark skin and I came out Oh mixed color.

I'm brown. So it's browner is so I guess I'm brown done Interestingly in a cafeteria after class when we asked people how do they identify it's gonna sound like a dumb question But what race are you most people said something like this? Name the country Mexican making I'm Colombian I was no one said I'm one of those four official categories if they mentioned it all it was just to say that they're Somewhere in between where did they switch back and forth? I've put a weekend outside of the rain I'm a mix of black people in Spanish.

Yeah, I'm Mexican, but I'm not a percent machine My spirit is like if I'm like in my neighborhood people see me as Spanish But if I go like to my grandma's black people see me as like white when I go back home to Cuba Oh, that's the black and when I come here all of a sudden I change my race. So I become a spanner Do you do that too? Do I race shift like these kids? No, I mean I get I get confused a lot I mean you could pass as a Jew I think even though you're an Arab Oh, yeah, New York forget it, but what's interesting is these kids it wasn't like they were unaware of race I mean they're aware of it It's just fluid for them because I guess so many of them can pass for different things It just it becomes then all about like what you wear what you listen to like small things in the end But in some circumstances we all know this the tiniest differences can suddenly mean everything I we talked to we're gonna switch locations here from New York to Baghdad in Iraq we talked to any rocky guy named Ali Abbas Who worked for the translator as a journalist in Baghdad?

Yeah with NPR Baghdad office And when you were growing up in Baghdad when you were kid did you know whether you were she or Sunni? No, no, no the first time I knew that I was a Sunni or Shia in fact It was sixth grade we were sitting after a class break and someone asked me if I'm a Sunni or Shia like another kid I remember it was a degree to kid the police. That's the village we were aware of so that we're so that we're yeah That's the town or so that grew up. What did you answer?

I answered? I don't know Because you really didn't know I really didn't know so they made fun of me and they're turned home and they said to my mom Am I a Sunni or Shia the first answer from my mom was a slap on my face really? Yeah, she said never ask about these things you're a Muslim and that's all what you care about But that was them this is now today's is all the in Baghdad. You can't go around saying I don't know where I am now you have to choose.

Yeah, even if you don't want to me 2007 a friend of mine close friend of mine. He calls me and says Ali Did you hear about what happened to me? And I'm like no what happened? He said my father they kidnapped him his father is an old guy 62 was just and his neighborhood buying candies for his grandson and then he disappeared just disappear no one knows in Baghdad when someone's kidnapped they usually don't come back usually The body just shows up in a more so what Ali's friend wanted as he wanted to go to Baghdad More to go and you know find his father But the problem was his friend couldn't go alone because he's Sunni his name is Amr and the more gets completely controlled by Shia It's a Sunni man was trying to get his relatives body out of the morgue somewhere along the line the Shia militia They would check the names and they would ask him about something, you know She deep she had three legend questions and if he fails that's what they would just you know lynch him They would what they would take him out of the hospital to somewhere and they probably killed and dump his body somewhere Can ask a really dumb question sure he walking through Baghdad you're walking through this hospital You see as soon as you see a Shia can you tell the difference with your eyes at all?

Sometimes you can't really know But sometimes you could take advantage of this confusion to help a friend Ali after all was always helping journalists get around Baghdad and you never knew who was gonna be asking you questions Sometimes it would be a Sunni militia sometimes a Shia militia It's very hard to know So journalists would go around the town with two IDs simultaneously one would be a Shia ID the other a Sunni ID And they're putting it like somewhere in their pocket, you know the right is the Sunni the left is the Shia They say the right is the Sunni the left is a Shia Yeah, so if in that split second you think this guy's Sunni you go right and if you're Shia you'll go left That's not where me. I just I know that I know how I thought you know what happened But it's not really it's not really fun though Especially when your job on this particular day is to take your Sunni friend into a hospital controlled by Shia militia So Ali decided to protect his Sunni friend Amhar Maybe the best protection would be a slight name change when they went to the hospital They would call him Amhar not Amhar Amhar is a pure Sunni name Amhar is something in the middle could be Sunni or Could be seen as a different spellings different spelling. Yeah different spelling. Yeah different spellings They said almost identical.

Yeah, but you know just the alif or the a in the middle and by adding that one letter that one Extra a Ali hoped that would keep his friend alive So we went there I took him and my brother was Shia who's also physician at that time came with us He came with us and I told him not to call Amhar Amhar I told him to call Amhar Amhar So Ali and his friend and brother using this new name that into the more where they were taken to a room Where everybody sits to look at pictures of people who were dead? We sat in that computer room They call it where they're like seven computer monitors and there's someone on the side of the room where he's holding the the mouse And he's moving with his finger the pictures changing the pictures and people sitting on the ground Probably 35 or 40 other people on the ground looking at the pictures hoping not to see a picture of their brother or their mother or their father So whenever there's a picture of one of the relatives you will hear someone crying shouting wailing We were looking at the pictures looking at the pictures picture after picture after picture And you know we finally found a rich that decision that his father wasn't among the pictures and suddenly his father's picture comes out No more their stout and crying and you know and my brother would say I'm hard don't worry I'm a don't I'm a this is God's decision. This is God's dad And then you today say no I'm a I'm a I'm a I'm a I'm a I'm a I'm a I'm a I'm a I'm a I'm a hit him on his chest Don't say this word don't say it because not only I'm a be killed it'll be us as well But nobody in the room apparently heard him say I'm are the wrong pronunciation So they got a number from the picture and then they had to go to a different part of the morgue to actually locate the body And then of course bring it home for proper burial So we walked out from the computer room we went to the to their fridge or which is actually not the refrigerator It's just hallways all these buddies dumped on both sides of the hallway and as soon as you enter these hallways You can barely hold your breath The smell the order is so so stingy and it's like it's impossible to bear and the whole ground is full of a thick layer of Greasy blood, you know, it sticks to your foot when you walk it's like And it was a very long hallway Omar was he actually felt twice we would stop him from falling down and we would slap him on his face wake up We're gonna keep going so we would walk all the way down to find all these piles of body then in one pile the guy who's wearing boots They work her there he would toss I think your father is within this pile and he's like talking normally he's unbathered by all of this He threw the buddies from this side from this side and then he took Omar's father from his arms And he just pulled him from underneath the pile and Omar didn't want to believe that this was his father He didn't want to believe he said I don't know I don't think this is my father I don't see him but the tag number was there and because the tag number was there they knew it was from our father We came out and we thought you know that's that's it We're gonna take the buddy and go home and at that moment They were suddenly approached by two Shia militionen Very obvious they're she is and they're from the media from one of the most radical groups in Baghdad and One of them said let me see your ID though. Omar had to give him his physician ID But that ID had his real name is soon able he looked at it.

So Omar. He said, huh? He said Omar. Omar.

Huh? So he knew he knows yes He talked to his friend next to him. They kept whispering to each other about the ID and realized probably that's the moment when we're all done today Yeah, we're done So immediately immediately we started talking to them in a very loud voice Listen guys where your colleagues here, whatever you need come to the emergency room ask for me I'm dr. Ali Abbas and this is my brother has a bus you know to show them their shit It's started talking in a very heavy she attacks if you know You can come at any moment if you want to the if you have anything just tell us let us know where we'll brothers help us here I always kept looking at their eyes when they're doing it and Thank God they gave us the papers back.

We got almost further out and he took him in very tense Ali Abbas has now left Baghdad He's moved to Brooklyn, New York neighborhood very proud of its mix of races and people from all over the world But remember Baghdad was a multicultural city as well for hundreds of years longer than Brooklyn So I asked him now that you're here and given what you've seen What do you think about us? I would tell you something the subway is my I would sit in a subway car You know and looking at the people African Americans Hispanic wide, you know, I question myself. He's a Jew He's not a Jew he's Christian and looking at the people and it's exactly this question that comes in my mind Who how they're living together? How does it seem like something that could explode?

Oh, yeah, it's something that I always think I mean I look at them and look at all kind of phrases and wonder how can this country hold that together? That was Ali Abbas often a translator for National Public Radio. Okay time to go radio lab.org is our website radio lab at wnyc.org is our email I'm jad epumrod. I'm number cold which thanks for listening Radio lab is produced by foreign wheeler and dad of a rat Our staff includes William Miller Thomas and Mitchell Ellen Horn, Almondra, Aron Bic and Jessica Binkle But help him Sally Hershey and our boy called Wheelock, Ike, Chris, Condoras special thanks to David Charing Terry Donhew, Delos Dory and Anderson, Stacy, Davidson and the facing of the school And his mailbox