Early into Bill Bryson’s latest book called The Body – A Guide for Occupants, we are exposed to one of mankind’s greatest myths. It comes in Chapter Two where he tackles the most visible areas of the subject, our skin and hair.
Bryson tells us of visits to Penn State University anthropology professor Nina Jablonski who applies her scalpel and a cadaver to show him skin colour is determined by a sliver of epidermis just one millimetre thick. Jablonski uses her unusual prop to explain: “People act as if skin colour is a determinant of character when all it is, is a reaction to sunlight.”
As “the doyenne of all things cutaneous” goes deeper, her findings show the idiocy of every race-obsessed bigot who ever walked this earth (and the many who still do): “Biologically, there is actually no such thing as race – nothing in terms of skin colour, facial features, hair type, bone structure or anything else is a defining quality among peoples.”
She goes on to explain that skin colour is “convergent evolution” (influenced by geography) and thanks to genomics, how we now know de-pigmentation of skin happens in just “two of three thousand years”. Which tells us South Africans circa 4019 are likely to be united by their lovely light brown colouring – and chuckles at the racially-based myths of our age.
