Thread by @ewanbirney

More musings on human genetics and race, but this time from a personal level to explain I think the different ways people "think about" racism and their role in it.

In this thread I am going to be critical about how many people think about broad structural racism/unconscious bias, but I will do this via critiquing my younger self, as it is super-hard to do this broadly without offending people; I can own offending myself :)

In my 20s I spent a fair bit of time in America and considered myself reasonably cool and trendy - worked hard at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, partied hard in NYC and Harvard, where I had friends.

I met broad American culture in both places - Long Island Jewish and Italian-American culture, preppy New England culture and my first interaction with African-American culture.

I had a friend from my English private school (Eton) that went to Harvard, Kiki Ssenymantono who was Ugandan, and he had a dynamite combination of English accent (it is semi-magical in the US! Adds 10 points to your IQ!) and deep black skin.

My love of America continued - both scientifically and culturally - and this was brought together in a summer at the end of my undergraduate when I worked for Kurt Schmoke, the 2nd African-American Mayor of Baltimore.

During that summer I got under the skin of city life in Baltimore; spent a hair-raising week with an unmarked police unit in the projects; a week with community work in East Baltimore, learning about the 'numbers' and the role of Pastors in political American life.

(I am convinced that the third season of the Wire was based on that summer; my only disappointment is that they didn't have a young English kid from Oxford on the Mayor's team).

Over this time I was working on computational biology (I was a precocious student) and in my graduate world was super lucky to work on the human genome - I've never looked back. And, as the diversity sequencing of humans started I realised these clear truths of human diversity -

Firstly that we are very *undiverse* genetically; secondly that our explosive growth from African means our genetic diversity patterns is dominated by the shared history in Africa (this always blows people's minds open) and third just how much we move around and have sex.

(there is tendency to think the moving around and having sex is a recent thing in human history - recent admixture etc - sometimes always associated with chattel slavery and rape >>

The latter is a horrible part of human history but they are plenty of other big movements of humans, and likely more consensual sex relationships, as well as slavery, though a lot of our pre-history we have to reconstruct via archeology and genetics, so it's not so easy to know)

One reflection of this story is I've realised my position on "race differences" has changed a lot in the last ~25 years. When I was younger, I had closer to what I now call the "animal farm" view of difference - all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.

What I mean by that is that people would acknowledge equality as an ideal, point to obvious differences such as skin colour, often acknowledge other differences associated with skin colour (the classic: 100 meters sprinting) and then >>

<< imply other things are natural consequences of differences, such as the proportion of white skinned professors. It is a comfortable, "we are being equal" mindset and sees the long shopping list of differences in the world as somehow quite natural.

It doesn't actually hold up as a solid thesis, and certainly not one where genetics justifies these differences we see; genetics does underlie skin colour but not so obviously sporting ability nor professorial achievement.

A side note: the sporting ability argument is one of the most protracted and boring arguments brought up; As @AdamRutherford notes, there is not great human genetics on elite sporting ability- no good GWAS and it is all a bit kooky argumentation on individual genes or ethnicity

I don't want to really want to dive down this rabbit hole now; rather I note that my 25 year old self thought that some aspect of this argument held water, with a strong thread of equality and equal opportunity whatever our biological differences

What I find interesting here is not the precise arguments, but very clearly for *myself* my younger self was more "accepting of structural racism" or "comfortable with my unconscious biases" - I could even claim more crudely, "more racist".

Now my younger self would be pretty pissed off with this characterisation and probably rightly take umbrage if my older self used such crude language. And what about a future self? Quite possibly my future self will look at this tweet thread with wry smile.

One could accuse me of virtue signaling perhaps with my "anti-racist crusade" though actually my motivation to me feels far more about trying to untangle genetics from this nexus of ethnicity and race.

It is hard to guess the blind spots my future self or other people know can see here (that goes with the definition of blind spot) but I do know that many people have not gone on the same journey as I have about genetics and race.

Namely that race or ethnicity is not some crude read out of someone's genetics. Actually, if anything, the links between race/ethnicity and genetics are thin, concentrated in a handful in physical attributes, such as skin colour, hair type, facial features.

The genetics that underlie these features are they themselves are dispersed across the world in a very messy way which, due to the fundamentals of human population genetics (explosive growth from Africa; much movement and sex throughout human history) is just .... really messy.

I feel here this knowledge is key part of my journey to a better place, and this is partly why I tweet, blog and write things about this (often with colleagues). I hope it is useful, and I can help make the world a bit better in this area.