The Lie Of Pure Blood
Hatred hasn't disappeared. Neither has the old fantasy that human beings can be divided into clean ancestral categories.
Most of us don't invent our first ideas about people. They are given to us. Families hand down beliefs along with everything else. Communities reinforce them. Children learn very young who is considered familiar or different, who their parents trust, and who they don't. Later, we tend to build friendships inside the world that already seems familiar to us.
This is one of the ways racism survives.
The idea of racial purity survives with it, and I understand exactly why. It is useful. It offers rank to people who have earned none. A person who has built nothing, questioned nothing, and learned nothing can still wake up believing he stands above millions of strangers. All it costs him is his decency and integrity. It is the cheapest pride.
It is also preposterous.
According to the 2020 Census, 33.8 million Americans—more than one in ten—reported more than one race. Even that number barely touches the reality, because a census measures how people identify. Human ancestry is considerably messier than a box on a form.
There isn't even a scientifically meaningful number for how many people in the world are "pure blood." Admixture has shaped nearly every human population, and human beings do not fall into genetically pure, discrete biological races.
(Hellenthal et al., "A Genetic Atlas of Human Admixture History," Science, 2014; American Association of Biological Anthropologists, Statement on Race and Racism, 2019.)
And really, look around.
One cannot look at a Black person and simply say "African." What does that mean? Ethiopian? Nigerian? Haitian? Jamaican? African American with European or Native American ancestry somewhere in the family?
You cannot look at someone who is Hispanic and know whether their family is Mexican, Colombian, Puerto Rican, Spanish—or whether their ancestry also includes Indigenous, Basque, African, or other roots.
And a white person isn't simply "white." Irish, Polish, English, Portuguese, Italian, Scandinavian, Eastern European—sometimes half of Europe is sitting quietly inside one family tree.
The same is true of people we casually call Asian. Indian, Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Vietnamese, Japanese—and the families where those lines have already crossed.
We are simply not as separate as we imagine ourselves to be.
Look deeply enough into a family tree, through records or DNA testing, and certainty starts to break down. DNA estimates aren't perfect. They shift as databases grow. But they can do something useful: they can shatter certainty.
This is the conceit of racism: that a category can tell the whole story of a human being. It cannot. People have been migrating, marrying, having children, crossing borders, changing languages, and carrying pieces of one another across continents for thousands of years. We were mixing long before anybody invented the racial boundaries that have so often been shaped by ignorance, fear, and hate.
Culture and history are important. Ethnicity and family matter. None of it establishes human rank or worth.
Skin color certainly doesn't make anybody pure.
No child is born believing it does. Someone has to teach them.
Marni Fraser
0928.2026
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