Digital Race

   'Well, they've done it to Betty Crocker at the apogee of civilisation as well as mitochondrial Eve at its incecption - used computer programs to morph their faces into racially blended mixes into which our current differences can be read.  Nothing wrong with that of course - even Jesus has been having something of a makeover. 

Race, like gender, is a cultuural obbsession in the blobal North.  The two share several key characteristics.  First is that both are (literally) dressed up in a series of outwardand visible signs: dashikis vs kimonos, boots vs high heels and so forth.  Second, we maintain purity at the expense of ambiguity.  Census categories shoehorn people into racial identities (and although the choice has gotten a little easier in the US, it's still a limited, flawed set on offer for the melting pot.  The intersexed get assigned a gender category at birth, since the medical establishment and many parents believe that it's too confusing to be both male and female.  Third, we learn how to act as and identify with our own gender.  We reinforce the artificial categories by building culture around them. The current contest for the Democratic nomination is a clear example - voters have been pigeonholed into racial, ethnic, gender and age categories (reminds me of my favorite sociologists' T-shirt, which had 'Broken Down by Age and Sex' emblazoned across the chest).  Through the magic of the meaningless statistic and the persuasive power of pollsters, we have come to see the primariees in part as black vs white (a characterization recently lamentably championed by Hilary Clinton) as well as male vs female.   (I saw a lovely breakdown of the last presidential election which showed that a key variable was distance from a major highway or other arterial hub - people who are more 'hooked in' vote Democrat.  But we don't talk about the 'infrastructured' vs 'uninfrastructured' voting blocks because they don't have the same kind of cultural capital and organizational ability). 

When in 2003 the news broke that some 16 million folks today are related to Genghis Khan through their Y chromosomes (a mircale fiinding, since we  have no DNA from Genghis himself), it seemed that our quest for origins was finally being realized by modern science.  One such descendant is pictured above with his forefather.  And of course we are all carrying our heritage from mitochondrial Eve, should you chhoose to believe that story.  Khan as ur-patriarch and Eve as Great Mother: deeply engrained tropes expressing themselves now in science, now in the arts, and now in the humanities. The unholy persistence of racial discourse is but one symptom of a core feature of the global political economy so beauutifully desciibed in Zizek's The Fragile Absolute where he explores the drive to fit people into smaller and smaller categories both so that they can be niche-marketed to and so that they cannot recognize the larger political and cultural realities they share (create difference and conquer - I guess it beats Genghis' model).

In the diitial age, genomics cannot escape the racial dimensions of this discourse.   Consider the language of Bryan Sykes, who argued that the English, Irish, Welsh and Scots shared a single racial history - the consequent invasions by Romans and Normans not doing much to differentiate English stock.   Sykes argues that the cultural myth of Celtic difference for outlying areas of the UK: "is very entrenched and has a lot to do with the Scottish, Welsh and Irish identity: their main identifying feature is that they are not English" - he himself being: "an Englishman who has traced his Y chromosome and surname to an ancestor who lived in the village of Flockton in Yorkshire in 1286" (must have been a short life but prodigious life).  An an English person who has always proudly claimed my Roman invader heritage - the nose knows - I have to agree with him.  Many English are obsessed with their Celtic roots (for me its one eighth Manxness).  And when I go online to search for 'Celtic roots' on Googlle I get countless pages of information and community around that imagined collective; a similar search for 'Roman roots' brings up on the first results page information about the declension of Latin verbs and about root crops the Romans cooked.

At issue here is an important dimension of our understanding of the apparently limitless supply of information which is the Web.  I can type in any eldritch concept and find a website devoted to it, a hacker who has spent her time compoling sources and blogging about it andd so forth.  I can give you the population of China, the rate of continental drift or the futures market in Hong Kong at the touch of a button.  However, this information is not an ill-sturctured almannac.  It reproduces and reinforces the categories of the wider culture.  The smallest unit for the stories with which the Web abounds are the classification systems used (racial, gender, age and so forth).  Just because there's a whole lot of it out there doesn't mean that it's any less narrow than earlier cultural forms.  The Web is not democratic and playful if its constituent stories are elitist and rigid.