Playing the Race Card

The Illogical, Unscientific, and Unbiblical Concept of Race

by Calvin Smith on January 14, 2025
Featured in Calvin Smith Blog

Race. It’s a hot topic in culture today that can get you canceled pretty quickly if you aren’t careful about what you say. The leverage gained by certain factions in Western society using the so-called “race card” continues to be effective in many circumstances. But does it need to be such a controversial topic?

Two women. One white, one black.

Look at this picture and imagine you saw these two young ladies walking down the street in your hometown, chatting with one another. You would likely think it’s just two friends or coworkers out for a stroll, right?

However, most people wearing the current sociopolitical lenses promoted in the West through the media and state-run school systems might add various layers of context to their observations in addition to that simple thought. And what might the most obvious of those be?

Well, it would be pretty common to assume most would identify them as being racially different, one “white” and one “black.”

Twin sisters with different skin tones.

However, they are actually twin sisters.1 They have the same parents. So how exactly could they be different “races” if they came from the same parents? You see, their father has lighter skin, and their mother is darker, but the girls just inherited a different subset of DNA from the same genetic pool.

Biologically speaking (as sexually reproducing organisms), we inherit half of our DNA from our father and half from our mother. So, in the case of these young ladies—even though the DNA that they expressed outwardly shows different traits—each of them still retains 100% of the genes they inherited from both their parents, any of which they might pass along to their children. Just look at the variety among the children in this family photo.

Family with diverse skin tones.

OK, but let’s add a more politically motivated question into the mix here to see why a proper biblical understanding of human anthropology is critically important. And the question is (especially for those factions of the so-called progressive left in society that often use the “race card”), “Which of these two sisters do you think should possibly pay reparations to the other?”

Where Did the “Races” Come From?

Starting to see why I am discussing this? In today’s culture, where many people view the word of God as anti-science, most people scoff at the idea that we all stem from our original parents—Adam and Eve. Why?

It’s because the story of evolution has been promoted in contradiction to God’s Word in education and media to the point that the majority of people have been convinced we descended from apelike ancestors over millions of years, not from our prototypical forefather/mother as the Bible clearly teaches.

Because of that, they believe the various “races” of people we see today are the result of evolution. Here are some pictures from the type of books I was weaned on when I was a kid in school here in Canada that promoted that idea explicitly.

Book that promotes evolution.

Note that they identified the “Australoid, Mongoloid, Caucasoid, and Negroid” races all evolving from various hominids or apelike creatures back then. Inherent in the image’s presentation was the idea that some races were more evolved (i.e., superior) than others.

All this certainly stuck in the minds of several generations of people, such as myself, influencing many of us to regard it as “proven science.”

One of the most-asked questions Christians have to deal with is, How do you explain the different races if we only come from two people originally? Obviously, according to a plain reading of the Bible, the short answer is that there is only one race, the human race.

However, even though that is the simple answer, people (even professing Christians) get hung up on the fact that people often have different physical characteristics from one another. Then people will hear educators, social commentators, and even scientists assign the term race to those with similar grouped traits in relation to those that differ.

Modern science has finally caught up to what the Bible plainly says in Genesis about our origins.

In essence, they don’t understand scientifically how two people (Adam and Eve) could account for all the genetic variation expressed in humans that we describe as racial characteristics. The resulting belief in the non-biblical idea of differing human races as the answer can lead to many negative consequences.

So, to demonstrate how the idea of race itself is unscientific, illogical, and certainly unbiblical, let me show you several additional examples of what many might consider “racial anomalies” to make the point. In doing so, I’ll show how modern science has finally caught up to what the Bible plainly says in Genesis about our origins.

Not the Only Ones

OK, the ladies we discussed earlier aren’t the only examples of typically unexpected results coming from the same parents. For example, here is another set—known as the two-tone twins—whose parents, you will notice (unlike the first example), both have a medium brown skin shade.

Two-tone twins—whose parents both have a medium brown skin shade.

In this case, each of these parents (both medium brown) had parents of their own who were what would be “black” and “white,” resulting in them both having that blended skin tone. However, it just so happened that their twin daughters each inherited a different subset of each of their parents. So this diversity can come about in a variety of ways as we’ll continue to explore.

The Rainbow Family

In this next example (called the Rainbow Family), Dad is quite dark, and Mom is quite light; however, look at their children. They are like a gradient from darker to lighter skin tones. As the title of an article discussing them said:

“Our Rainbow Family: Three Children, Three Skin Colours . . . All Born to the Same Parents”2
Three Children, Three Skin Colours

Blonde Bombshell!

Indeed, spectacular diversity in people’s offspring has been observed at a level that might make some parents question their spouse’s fidelity (but of course, that can be dispelled with DNA testing today)! Case in point, the Nigerian parents of this child were shocked when their little girl was born with a very light skin tone and blonde, wavy hair.

Nigerian parents with biological daughter who has a light skin tone and blonde, wavy hair

The New York Post article covering the story said,

The baby, which the couple named Nmachi, is not an albino, doctors say. Ben Ihegboro says his mother has a fairer shade of skin, “but we don’t know of any white ancestry. We wondered if it was a genetic twist. But even then, what is with the long curly blond hair?” It’s an unusual case, but it’s not unheard of. Skin and eye color are determined by melanin, and the amount or type of melanin is controlled by about a dozen different genes, as Bryan Sykes, an Oxford University professor of human genetics, told the tabloid.3

Genetic experts offered a couple of theories on how this could have come about.

  • She’s the result of a gene mutation unique to her. If that is the case, Nmachi would pass the gene to her children—and they, too, would likely be white.
  • She’s the product of long-dormant white genes, passed on to her by her parents, that their predecessors might have carried for generations without surfacing until now.

What Color Were Adam and Eve?

OK. So here we have four different examples—and a quick search on the internet will show many others as well—each demonstrating a similar idea (and by the way, each of which has nothing to do with the story of evolution).

The idea is that if the parents had the proper amount of genetic diversity—in these cases for the different forms of melanin (color)—to start with, their offspring could inherit a wide variety of gene combinations that result in specific looks that we often categorize today using the term race.

This is why when I’m asked what shade of color I believe Adam and Eve had, I reply with “medium brown.” If God originally gave them the balanced combination of genes that typically result in that medium brown skin tone, they could have supplied their offspring with “all the colors of the rainbow” in one generation—just like in the example of the two-tone twins mentioned earlier.

And note that even in the case of little Nmachi, where they mentioned that her lighter skin tone may have come about by a genetic mutation, that result would have been due to a loss of color, not an addition of something that was never there before.

Just like we know now that people with blue eyes are the result of a melanin-reducing mutation, a change in a creature brought about by the subtraction of genetic diversity is not an upward, information-gaining evolutionary result.

As this Science.org article discussing the origin of blue eyes states, “Blue-eyed? Thank a genetic switch that turns off your body’s ability to make brown pigment in your peepers.”4

Again, turning off the production of preexisting pigment can’t be seen as some type of evolutionary mechanism. Evolution is supposed to be about creatures getting new, never-before-seen traits and abilities, not losing something they used to have.

The Illogicality of So-Called “Race”

Now, as far as the idea of race goes, genetically, have you ever wondered how much of the totality of your expressed DNA is involved in your physical appearance, which is how people typically attempt to identify so-called racial characteristics?

Well, a New York Times article reporting on the completion of the monumental human genome project and its conclusions stated the following, “If you ask what percentage of your genes is reflected in your external appearance, the basis by which we talk about race, the answer seems to be in the range of .01 percent.”5

The fact is there’s only one race—the human race.

Now, think about the implications of that. Isn’t it sad to think that throughout history, sinful human beings have denigrated, humiliated, enslaved, and destroyed others due to a wrong understanding of what .01 percent of another person’s genetic makeup entailed (i.e., they were supposedly a so-called “lesser race” of people, inherently deserving of such treatment)?

Are you starting to get a glimpse of how ridiculous the idea of “race” is?

The fact is there’s only one race—the human race. I believe that because the Bible says that we are all descendants of our original two parents. And this is backed up not only in Genesis but also in the New Testament. As the Apostle Paul stated in his address at the Greek Areopagus, “He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26).

As I mentioned earlier, this is exactly what modern science has concluded as well. Here is an excerpt from the same New York Times article I quoted earlier regarding the human genome project and its ultimate conclusion about this topic.

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health recently announced that they had put together a draft of the entire sequence of the human genome, and the researchers had unanimously declared, there is only one race—the human race.6

Fueling the Race Wars

So why is it that if both the Bible and science clearly demonstrate that there is only one human race, some people continue to use the natural variation that God built into the entire gamut of his creation as a way to divide and denigrate one another by the illegitimate, illogical, made-up term race?

By the way, if some of you reading this think I’m being too simplistic regarding the topic, I get it. Being a Canadian, I obviously don’t have the same cultural background as those from the United States, for example, where slavery was once enacted and racist attitudes were once embedded in the laws of specific areas.

When I speak about this issue, I often have people wanting to point out specific nuances or cultural details they feel I should acknowledge. However, I think that for so-called racial tensions to die down and eventually be done with completely (as much as humanly possible in this sin-cursed world), I think that people (especially Christians) should understand the truth about the fallacy of racial differences so that this issue can be dealt with once and for all.

Having a correct understanding of anthropology is important not only in terms of countering “scientific claims” against the Bible from the story of evolution but also in avoiding troubling moral and ethical pitfalls.

The Pseudoscience of So-Called Race

People have tried to identify race scientifically, not just according to skin shade but also with other characteristics—such as eye shape. But can you imagine if we also did that with other specific characteristics?

For example, humans can be born with different ear shapes, attached ear lobes, or free and floppy ones like mine. Can you imagine if we started describing those attached ear-lobe people as a separate race from us floppy-lobed individuals? “Ewww! Who’d want to associate with those people?” Again, it would seem ridiculous, wouldn’t it?

Well, I believe focusing on any specific physical traits to attack the character of others is simply outrageous. It’s the same as today where many left-wing extremist groups accuse people of “whiteness” and then demean and ascribe all sorts of moral deficiencies toward people who don’t express large amounts of melanin in their skin—like me.

This is as preposterous as the One Drop Doctrine that was accepted in the United States years ago, which promoted the idea that if a person had even one drop of “black blood” (meaning they had even the remotest of “black” ancestry), then they were considered black and, therefore, “lesser” as a person. As a PBS article describing the One Drop Doctrine put it:

This definition reflects the long experience with slavery and later with Jim Crow segregation. In the South, it became known as the “one-drop rule,'” meaning that a single drop of “black blood” makes a person black. It is also known as the “one black ancestor rule,” . . . meaning that racially mixed persons are assigned the status of the subordinate group.7

And yet, science has shown that there is no difference in a person’s blood linked to the amount of melanin that person has, the eye or ear shape, or any other characteristic that person might have. The idea of race is bunk through and through! All it really is now is a weapon for people to promote division and hatred, which certain people then use for profit and political power.

That’s why debunking the evolutionary-based idea of race is important for regaining a healthy society. For example, when I ask the question that I posed earlier—“Which of these twin girls should possibly pay reparations to the other?”—to audiences when I present at an event, you can typically see a ripple of uneasiness and nervous laughter go through the audience.

The question really highlights the ridiculousness of what some race-baiting individuals and groups are using to promote division in Western society. Essentially, it would be like asking, “Which one of these twins was born with some inescapably deficient moral capacity and/or innate privilege over the other?”

The obvious answer is neither. But that answer could get you hammered pretty hard in certain public venues if you were just talking about two unrelated people with different skin shades, and people have been walking on eggshells for a while now because of it.

Why the Story of Evolution Promotes Racism

With both Scripture and science debunking racist ideas, I believe the main reason (outside of its political use) that the concept of race is sustained in Western culture is due to the continued promotion of the story of evolution. Evolution is epitomized through the popular “ape-to-man” image, typically showing primitive, dark-skinned hairy apes turning into Caucasians (i.e., white people), which is racist to its core.

It has long kindled the racist concept of different human races, having evolved at differing rates I mentioned earlier, meaning some are more advanced than others. This means some are closer to the apes than others, which is why calling someone with darker skin an ape or a monkey, flipping them a banana, or making monkey sounds toward them is considered overtly racist.

From the beginning, these racist concepts were promoted by the father of the modern-day story of evolution—Charles Darwin. Just look at what he said in his book on human origins from 1872 titled The Descent of Man.

At the same time the anthropomorphous apes [i.e., the apes that look like people] . . . will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider . . . even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian [Aborigine] and the gorilla.8

Because of his belief that we evolved from apelike creatures, Darwin ranked humans and apes alongside one another on a hierarchal scale that concluded with white people being the most highly evolved. And this was taught in schools throughout the West for years as scientific, even though it’s been debunked now.

And yet, without the story of evolution, there would be no leftover, “scientific” rationale for racism kicking around in people’s minds. Because when people finally realize there’s only one human race, how could they be “racist” toward anyone else?

It makes you wonder, if they are so concerned with racism, why hasn’t Darwin been canceled by modern progressives? Maybe it’s because there’s money and power to be gained by fueling the “race wars.”

Why Only the Bible Makes Sense of Human Anthropology

The Bible’s big picture regarding human anthropology is a message of unity, one that makes the “race card” vanish. Scripture says we are all of one race and one blood. We are all human beings, created in the image of God—period.

The Bible’s big picture regarding human anthropology is a message of unity

No matter what genetic combination we inherited from our parents and no matter how that specific .01% of DNA that makes up our outward appearance is organized and expressed, we are all of equal value in God’s eyes.

We are all descendants of Adam and inherited a sin nature from him. And that is why God the Father sent his son—Jesus—to pay the penalty for sin for those who put their faith and trust in him.

For to this end we toil and strive, because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe. 1 Timothy 4:10
And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us. Acts 17:26–27

Footnotes

  1. ITV, “The Black and White Twins Born to Mixed Race Parents,” ITVX News, March 2, 2015, https://www.itv.com/news/westcountry/2015-03-02/the-black-and-white-twins-born-to-mixed-race-parents.
  2. Andrew Levy, “Our Rainbow Family: Three Children, Three Skin Colours . . . All Born to the Same Parents,” Daily Mail, July 7, 2009, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1197836/Pictured-The-mixed-race-couple-rainbow-children.html.
  3. Andy Soltis, “Black Parents Give Birth to White Baby,” New York Post, July 21, 2010, https://nypost.com/2010/07/21/blond-bombshell/.
  4. Science, “Don’t It Make Your Brown Eyes Blue?,” Science.org, February 1, 2008, https://www.science.org/content/article/dont-it-make-your-brown-eyes-blue.
  5. Natalie Angier, “Do Races Differ? Not Really, Genes Show,” New York Times, August 22, 2000, https://web.archive.org/web/20240819205814/https://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/22/science/do-races-differ-not-really-genes-show.html.
  6. Angier, “Do Races Differ?”
  7. F. James Davis, “Who Is Black? One Nation’s Definition,” PBS.org, accessed January 13, 2025, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/jefferson/mixed/onedrop.html.
  8. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (Chicago: Great Books of the Western World, 1952).

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