ideas couched in sitcom belly laughs rather than serious ... with which the term "black" is used in the lit- ... universal agreement about who is black in our world.
Stated thus, the play sounds a muddleand it is. Scientists usually fare badly on the stage, and this work is no exception. Except for the rounded portrait of Elinor by the marvellously versatile Frances de la Tour, the rest of the realisations are cardboard, worse on the stage than in the text, with the ideas couched in sitcom belly laughs rather than serious discussion. And too many ideas are struggling to emerge, none fully realised. Little is credible in Blinded by the Sun. Perhaps only a simpleton would expect Poliakoffs department to show the attributes of science described by Robert Merton, the American sociologist and philosopher:
disinterestedness, organised scepticism, and colleageality. But too many elements defy belief: that Al-a Lucky Jim-like figure who has published only two papers in seven years-is promoted as a closed appointment on the say so of his predecessor and the appointments committee, without even an interview; Al's transformation from a shambolic layabout in the first act to a strutting academic powerbroker in the second; and Elinor's refusal for decades even to state what research she is doing, let alone allow colleagues into her laboratory. Alas, then, Blinded by the Sun is yet another instance of Britain's failing to come to terms with serious issues, mirrored indeed by its
own handling of research fraud. The theatrical failure is particularly vivid given that, on another stage at the National Theatre, Ibsen's masterpiece John Gabriel Borkman is playing to sold-out houses. Would that Ibsen were alive to tackle scientific fraud as well-his play would have concentrated on the really important issues: the scapegoating of whistleblowers, for example; the "arms race" for publication; or why some of the lacklustre so called leaders of the British scientific community lack the guts of their counterparts in the United States or Scandinavia to tackle both the prevention and the management of a stain on the face of science.- STEPHEN LOCK, Editor BMJ' 1975-91.
when the Anglo-Americans admitted them into the club. These political considerations are, sadly, reflected in the ONS ethnic categories: there are white, black, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Chinese, and other groups. Two groups are identified by colour-the rest are identified by nationality or region of origin. The system would have been more consistent if the ONS had designated all groups by the same criterion. When the concept of blackness emerged it had a purely political connotation. But there does not exist any human population whose every member is endowed with only negative qualities. The political categorisation of any group of human beings as black is totally without validity.
Speaking of skin complexions, some people possess dark skins, but the dark skinnedness of these people embraces a spectrum from very fair through brown to actually black. Being dark skinned is a widespread phenomenon which does not define any specific group of human beings. The tendency to reserve the designation black to sub-Saharan Africans and people of their extraction is manifestly misinformed. Most people in the world are dark skinned and could also be called black. The one drop rule in the United States holds that anyone with so much as one drop of black blood in his or her veins is black, even if most of his ancestors were white. The use of the term black to designate skin colour or any other aspect of phenotype must therefore be abandoned because there is such considerable overlap in the expression of our polymorphic genetic endowment that it is not really possible for us to be slotted into distinct groups on the basis of appearance. In any case, the genetic uniqueness of every individual makes a mockery of the whole concept of race as a biological reality. The third measure of blackness is cultural, culture, according to the Reader's Digest Great Illustrated Dictionary, being "the totality of socially transmitted behaviour patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought characteristic of a population." We seem to believe that there exists such a thing as black culture. But what is it? There may have been a time when various human societies existed in relative isolation, knowing little or nothing about other societies. But contact has grown to the point at which we now live in what is, to all intents and purposes, a global village. Apart from a few small tribes in the South American rain forest every community on earth experiences influences from practically all others. Culture is an immensely dynamic entity. Cultural hybridisation and intermixture is the order of the day. There no longer exists any pure culture anywhere in the world and, since there is no distinct black population, there is no such thing as black culture. It is a fiction generated and sustained by those who still strive to see cultural and racial purity for their own nefarious purposes.-IKECHUKWU OBIALO AZUONYE is a consultant psychiatrist in Lambeth
a.: _
Who is "black" in medical research? Ikechukwu Obialo Azuonye
T he United Kingdom Department of Health requires all healthcare institutions to specify the ethnic group to which inpatients belong. The minimum standard for specifying ethnic groups is the codes used by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) for the 1991 census. The confidence with which the term "black" is used in the literature might lead you to think that there is universal agreement about who is black in our world. But what are the measures of blackness? There is firstly the political measure. The Europeans who took Africans into slavery during a 200 year period beginning in the 17th century found it expedient to attribute all sorts of negative characteristics to them to justify enslaving their fellow human beings. The Europeans saw themselves as superior, good, and deserving everything ("white"), and the Africans as inferior, bad, and deserv-
"The simple reality is that there is only one human race."
The second measure of blackness is visual. Our eyes tell us that we exist in local geographic or global populations distinguished by physical characteristics. These are the so called races, viewed in genetics as populations which exhibit ing nothing ("black"). different distributions of certain gene frequenWhiteness and blackness were therefore cies. The trouble with the biological notion of invented, as G Lipsitz said, "as relevant race, appearances notwithstanding, is that there categories in American life largely because of is more in common between people of different realities created by slavery and segregation. A races than between people of the same race. fictive identity of 'whiteness' appeared in law Besides, extensive intermarriage has produced as an abstraction, and it became actualised in individuals who possess the distinctive physical everyday life in many ways.... [We can] characteristics of two or more racial groups. understand how people who left Europe as The ONS refers to these people as Calabrians or Bohemians became something black/white, Black/Asian, Asian/white, and so called 'whites' when they got to America, and on, but this is unsatisfactory. The simple realhow that designation made all the difference ity is that there is only one human race, and in the world." the handful of variations in appearance do not So the English colonisers of the Americas suffice to divide us into distinct racial groups, called themselves "whites," and only reluc- especially as further studies have shown that tantly extended the designation of whiteness the various physical types merge into one to other European peoples in order to gain another, so it is impossible to identify a typical their support in the struggle to control their member of any so called race. Our phenotypic African slaves. Jewish and Irish people in the variations are simply adaptations to the Americas, for example, only became "white" environments in which our bodies evolved.
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BMJ VOLUME 313
21 SEPTEMBER 1996
