REICH'S RESULTS CONFIRM AGE OLD RACIAL PREJUDICES

This is not about what most Americans think of as the origin of racism, the Jim Crow Era. 

I am not really writing this for Americans. They have always been, in many ways, a lost cause.

He tries to classify negative racism as population purity.

Let's just call this Reich's Fallacy.

His definition of racism is an intentional purity red herring, straw man.

That was how they, ancient societies he mentions, thought of it, not Reich. Not me.

Prehistoric people sometimes thought of race in terms of pure and impure, it seems. So what.

The biases they had, and acted on, though not based on genetic DNA population purity, were nevertheless based on very real, obervable, longstanding, racial and physiognomic differences among prehistoric populations, often based on very long periods of endogamy, climatic differentiation, natural selection, etc,  which he discusses. Endogamy comes closest to capturing the sense of purity ancients would have conceived, but as he points out at many points, endogamy was not permanent almost anywhere.

It is useless and counterproductive to deny the ubiquity of racial judgments and actions thereon by trying to arbitrarily limit the concept of racial differences, for prehistoric people themselves, to distinctions of purity which the evidence then refutes (prehistoric people were wrong), even though those purity/impurity terms were the terms they themselves used and acted on.

The fact that they were wrong about the concept of the purity of one group, their group, and the ostensible impurity of others, is logically distinct from the fact that they made critical distinctions between racial, physiognomic, and cultural differences between themselves and other populations, and vice versa. 

Reich's research in fact establishes the racial and physiognomic differences of a number of prehistoric West Eurasian human populations who he admits would have seen each other as very different races in their own time, as different as modern Europeans are from modern east Asians. p. 95

The fact that prehistoric people properly distinguished themselves from others, and discriminated against each other, based on real and observable differences, has nothing logically to do with the fact that the concept of originalist racial purity of any single population is erroneous. 

The most that can be said of the concept of purity, of some kind associated with the beliefs of a particular population, is that it was the product of some long period of endogamy giving rise to distinctive traits compared to other populations.