Ethnicity

Ethnicity

This entry probes the intersections of religion and science from a cultural perspective. Culture and ethnicity are crucial to the ongoing dialogue about meaning, nature, and the role of humankind in the cosmos, Historically, it was assumed that dominant cultures provided the only reliable scientific methodologies and theological interpretations. This preoccupation with rationality, objectivity, and neutrality relegated the wisdom of indigenous people to myth and mystery. Yet scientific findings are more congruent with ancient wisdom than modernist deductions. Ancient intuitions hint at a universe that is expansive rather than exclusive, connected rather than isolated.

Both religion and science offer intriguing insights about the universe, culture, and human nature. Both disciplines, however, have been complicit in the oppression of racial/ethnic people. Historically, religion was used as a catalyst for domination, wars, atrocities, and abuses of humankind are still perpetrated in the name of God. In North America, Christian slave masters hoped that Christian conversion would encourage slave to accept their fate. The promise of freedom in heaven relieved owners of the need to redress immediate and grievous breaches of human rights. During the civil rights movement, it was the unified efforts of local clergymen who urged Martin Luther King Jr. to slow his initiatives for justice.

Theological discourses also rely upon problematic dyads of light and dark to signify good and evil. This is done even though biblical texts refer to a God who is identified with light but who also dwells in darkness. People live in a world that is seduced by light, intrigued by its properties, and theologically persuaded that evil is synonymous with darkness. This paradigm allows people with dark skin to be deemed pariahs and strangers within the world community.

Despite cultural assumptions to the contrary, most scholars agree that race is not a biological or physical category, yet racial perceptions persist. Race always develops within a matrix of superiority and inferiority. Distinctions based on color, physical traits, or ethnicity mask issues of power, fear of difference, and social control. Those who envision an egalitarian society in the twenty-first century will be challenged to use all of the resources at hand to deconstruct mythologies about race.

Seekers of justice usually rely on the discourses of religion to describe their visions of freedom and reconciliation, but reject the metaphors of science when they try to delineate the contours of the beloved community. Even though both science and religion incorporate issues of power, hierarchy, and the assignment of inferiority, ethnic communities have a historical mistrust of scientific contributions to issues of race.

In scientific circles, eugenics attempted to tie social constructions of inferiority to physical attributes. In the eighteenth century, Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1708) created "scientific" racial classifications and descriptive characteristics. In the nineteenth century, Louis Agassiz (1807–1873), a Swiss-born Harvard professor, argued that human beings do not share a common ancestry (monogenism); instead, he argued that God created the races as separate and distinct human categories (polygenism). On the medical front, the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments conducted at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama from 1932 to 1972 allowed syphilis to advance untreated in African-American male subjects despite the eventual availability of penicillin. Nazi experiments on Jewish prisoners are also ignominious moments in history.

The sciences also influence social institutions, laws, and theological perspectives. As physicist Nick Herbert notes, Isaac Newton's description of the world "as a giant clock" was translated in cultural contexts into "atomicity, objectivity, and determinism" (p. xi). A rigid and mechanistic view of the universe influenced political and social initiatives that oppressed those deemed to be at the bottom of the hierarchy. The case can be made that both science and religion can reflect the best and the worst in human culture.

Despite these problems, the quest for justice is not just a social and spiritual construct; it also reflects the view of the universe and the human task within the cosmos. Accordingly, liberation initiatives require the resources of both science and religion. The questions change when science and religion inform discussions of race and ethnicity. What does race mean in a scientific context, when darkness is no longer an indicator of inferiority, but instead becomes a cosmological metaphor for the power and predominance attributed to dark matter? Biology teaches that social separations based on difference are false. People are connected through a common human ancestry and genome. Cosmology teaches that separation is not the way of the universe. Instead connections that defy rational processes abound. By means of the Uncertainty and Complementarity Principles, physics demonstrates that observations and attempts to know other humans connect people at the most fundamental levels.

Conflicts based on race, ethnicity, gender, class, or sexuality are power struggles that attempt to define social acceptability through force or appropriation of the public narrative. The addition of religious and scientific concepts and discourses offer a rhetorical corrective to social and legal theories about life in diverse and multicultural spaces.

See also Anthropology; Eugenics; Liberation Theology; Womanist Theology

Bibliography

herbert, nick. quantum reality: beyond the new physics. new york: anchor/doubleday, 1985.

montagu, ashley. man's most dangerous myth: the fallacy of race, 6th edition. walnut creek, calif.: altamira press, 1997.

rothman, barbara katz. the book of life: a personal and ethical guide to race, normality and the implications of the human genome project. boston: beacon press, 2001.

barbara a. holmes