The following is an interview with Harvard professor Anthony Appiah, deconstructing the word 'race,’ for the Australian radio program, Lingua Franca, September 12, 1998. Appiah is, among many books, the co-author of Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (1996).

Jill Kitson: You do …look at genetic studies of race, if only just to blow it out of the water, and I find it interesting that that 19th century notion of the Anglo-Saxon race, the Teutonic race, have pretty well disappeared from conversation, language, ideas and so on. But the notion of a black race really hasn't, and I suppose the notion of there being black, yellow and white 'races', is still there.

Anthony Appiah: It's very hard for people who see a dark-skinned person here, with curly hair, and a person here with almond-shaped eyes and sort of what we call yellow skin (but I've never understood why we call the skin colour of the people from East Asia yellow), and then, as it were, Bjorn Borg. And they say, 'Well what could be more obvious than the distinction between these people?' And the answer is, 'Well of course, they look different, they are different looking people.' And there's a genetic reason why they look different: skin colour is partly genetically determined. It's also obviously determined by how much sun you get, but it's partly genetically determined. And your response to the sun is partly genetically determined.

And so there are differences in skin colour, nobody should deny that. The question is whether those differences in skin colour are importantly connected with other biological differences. Is the difference that goes with skin colour more than skin deep? And it was a reasonable hypothesis in the 19th century to investigate that it was significantly correlated with other things. It turns out that that's not really true. There's a vast range of genetic variability within all the groups of people who are very dark skinned. There's a slightly lesser genetic variety among light skinned people, and this is probably because the earliest humans were in fact from Africa, and you tend in biological populations to have the largest genetic variety in the descendants of the core population, and as people moved out in the world you get slightly less genetic variation.

So there's a vast biological variation even in Zaire. Most of the human genetic variation in fact that there is, is in Zaire. Most of the genes that you can find around the world, apart from a few that have to do with skin colour and a number of other things - to do with hair and so on - can be found in Zaire. And if you measure genetic difference in terms of the number of differences in alleles of the same gene at a particular site on a chromosome and so on, if you look at that question, it turns out that most of the difference between, say, a Swede in Stockholm and a Swede up the valley somewhere within that group, between those two people, you get most of the genetic variation that there is. There isn't much more genetic variation if you compare that Swede with a Zairean.

Now of course, if you insist on focusing exclusively on skin colour and on the surface, you will say, 'Well, but there is a difference', and as I say, there's no point in denying there's a difference between people with dark skins and people with lighter skins, the question is whether that goes with anything else. As I say, it goes with a few things. But many of the interesting biological variations across the planet, for example in things that anatomists are interested in--like what kinds of teeth you have and so on--don't correlate very well with the skin colour differences. There are independent gradients, and the map of how genes spread is a map in which there are many, many different ways of classifying people. If you classify people according to skin colour, you get one classification. If you use blood type, you get another classification which actually cross-cuts skin colour quite a lot. And so on.

Jill Kitson: All of which makes it obviously a nonsense to attach moral status to a notion of race which in any case is impossible to define. But that is of course, at the heart of what racism is, and you speak of two types of racism: extrinsic and intrinsic. Would you like to explain those?

Anthony Appiah: I would, though I should say I haven't had a lot of luck in getting people to agree with me that this is an important distinction since that book came out and I try and explain it regularly and people often wonder why I bothered. But the extrinsic and intrinsic distinction was a distinction I made (and I'll say what it is in a minute) in order to focus on what I think is an important moral question. The distinction is between people who think that people of different races should be treated differently because they are different in some respect that is already morally relevant, and that's extrinsic racial distinction or racism, on the one hand. And people on the other hand who say, 'No, there doesn't have to be any independent difference, the mere fact that I am of the same race as you, or you are the same race as somebody else, gives you ground for treating each other in a different way from the way you treat people of another race.'

So the model for extrinsic racism is someone who says, 'Well I don't assign any intrinsic weight to race, but the fact is Jews are all greedy. And the reason I don't like Jews isn't because I have any particular thing about races, it is because it just happens to be the case that as it were Jews are more likely to be greedy, and surely you would agree with me that there's something wrong with being greedy, so that's what's wrong with being Jewish. Blacks are stupid, if they were clever that would be fine, but they're not' and so on. That's the model of the extrinsic racist.

And the intrinsic racist says, 'No, I don't have to believe that there's any deep difference between greed or intelligence or kindness or courage between my race and your race. I just think that we should hang together and you should hang together.'

Now what's going on there, I think, is that people are rationalising something. They feel they can't just say 'We hate them' without saying 'We hate them, because ...' Now I'm clear now, clearer than I was when I wrote the book, that there's a whole range of important responses to racism that are not at the level of argument and the level of the intellectual and the level of making these distinctions and arguing about what the evidence actually is. I always knew that, but I think I probably under-rated the importance of other things, and it seems to me that if I wanted to identify another line of approach to racism, along with the intellectual one, it would be one that said, 'Look, in the end, people find it easiest to be comfortable with and nice to people with whom they have done things.' And I would say I would put a lot of faith in children growing up together, not because we're lecturing them all the time about being nice to each other but because they just do grow up together and they form friendships. And there is good social psychological evidence that it's harder for these people to fall into these racist habits, and the same is true about people who have for example, played competitive sports in multi-racial teams, they're just less likely to find it easy to fall into racism….."

Do you agree with Professor Appiah? Do you believe in his concept of extrinsic and intrinsic racism? What, in your opinion, is the significance of skin color? What is the connection of skin color to race? And how does all of this relate to your concept of identity? To your understanding of racism?

For tomorrow, please write 2-3 paragraphs responding to these questions and any others that you feel are raised by the passage. If we are already able to post on the website, then you should post your response before class tomorrow. Come to class prepared to talk about your view on this.