Racial and cultural mixture is a foundational human condition, not a modern anomaly

Evidence

This prompts a more general point. Much less than an anomaly of social being arising late in the record of social history, heterogeneity and mixing are actually marks of human being. The Cape offers a case in point. Khoi, perhaps even more so than San, are now commonly thought from the archaeological evidence to have emerged from many thousands of years of miscegenation with equally mobile East African groups before finding their way to the southern part of Africa. Mixture and its outcome, cultural as much as miscegenational, are products of human movement, as old as homo sapiens. Movement and so mixture may have become more robust with the euro-modern, and so more noticeable. But that’s not to say they are absent earlier. Quite the contrary. Biodiversity is as much a human condition as one marking plant and animal life. It would be surprising if it were otherwise; it is shocking that so many have thought to the contrary. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1335

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how supposedly ‘pure’ categories are revealed as historically constructed mixtures — parallels the grafted-tree theme in ‘Grafting & Growth.’ — connects to: Multicultural practices do not erase allegiance to an encompassing cultural group. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 931
• STORYSTEM: A world or origin-myth angle: a people whose founding story begins not with purity but with millennia of prehistoric mixing — the ‘shocking’ refusal to acknowledge mixture as norm.