(Racialist Thinking Lingering in Genetic Studies — Despite the General View Among Biologists That the Concept of Race Does Not Apply in Explaining Human Vari…

(Racialist Thinking Lingering in Genetic Studies — Despite the General View Among Biologists That the Concept of Race Does Not Apply in Explaining Human Variation, Historians Need to Be Aware That Racialist Thinking Can Still Linger Unacknowledged Even in the Work of Geneticists, the Assertion That There Is “No Sub-Saharan” Component in the Egyptian Population Betraying an Unexamined Assumption Tracing Back to Racist Early Twentieth-Century Scholarship — That There Was Something Like a “True Negro” Type Represented by Certain Coastal West African Populations, the Adjective “Sub-Saharan” Being a Historically Loaded Term to Be Avoided): Despite the general view among biologists these days that the concept of race does not apply in explaining human variation, historians need to be aware that racialist thinking can still linger unacknowledged even in the work of geneticists. The assertion in a recent article, for example, that there is “no sub-Saharan” component in the Egyptian population betrays an unexamined assumption that traces back to racist, early twentieth-century scholarship — that there was something like a “true Negro” type, and that this pure type was represented by certain coastal West African populations. The adjective “sub-Saharan” is itself the particular historically loaded term used repeatedly in earlier literature to convey that kind of racialist belief and attitude, and thus a terminology very much to be avoided. The critique is precise and important. The term “sub-Saharan” encodes a racial geography that treats the Sahara as a civilizational boundary — with “real Africa” (meaning Black Africa) on one side and the Mediterranean world on the other. When a geneticist declares that there is “no sub-Saharan component” in the Egyptian population, they are not making a neutral scientific observation. They are reproducing a racial taxonomy that defines Africanness in terms of a coastal West African phenotype and then declares everything that does not match that template to be non-African. The Horn of Africa — the very region from which the Afrasian language family originated, from which early grain-collecting populations spread into Egypt, from which genetic markers have been traced northward into the Levant — is entirely south of the Sahara. The claim that Egypt has no “sub-Saharan” genetic component is, as Ehret says flatly, nonsense.