JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. Our topic today is race, what science can or cannot tell us about race.

ROBERT: Now that we're towards the back end of the program ...

JAD: The front end or back end?

ROBERT: We're at the front end of the back end. We can confess that what we asked before: what could a scientist tell us that's hard and true about the biology of race ...

JAD: Nothing!

ROBERT: No, it's better than nothing.

JAD: All right, something.

ROBERT: But once you drop the science part of race and think of it as just a way of sorting people into us's and thems, then it gets interesting.

JAD: Or at the very least, more complicated.

CHILD: I didn't know!

JAD: Here's an example. We're uptown Manhattan, it's 1:00 p.m. Third period's about to start. We're at a charter school called Facing History which has about 150 kids, mostly Hispanic. And we'd come because we'd heard that every year in the ninth grade they do this particular guessing exercise.

DAVID SHERRIN: Okay. All these microphones and other people that you guys see today, they are not in the room. You can ignore them like sometimes you want to ignore me. All right?

JAD: This is first-year teacher David Sherrin. He tells his class of about 12 freshmen to pull up their seats into a semi-circle.

DAVID SHERRIN: Same class style as always. Let's go.

JAD: And to get on their race goggles.

DAVID SHERRIN: All right. So we have an activity here called "Sorting people."

JAD: After handing out some worksheets, David kills the lights, flips on his overhead projector and immediately eight faces appear projected onto the wall.

DAVID SHERRIN: What I want us to do is go kind of one by one and try to decide, try to come to a consensus okay, what race are these people based on looking at them, and then we'll test it out.

JAD: He explains they've got four choices: Black, white, Asian and Native American.

DAVID SHERRIN: So why don't we start out with the first one, the woman on the top left.

JAD: Pink cheeks, light-skinned, bushy hair, big Filipino nose. At least that's how it looked to me.

DAVID SHERRIN: Demaro, what do you think?

DEMARO: White.

DAVID SHERRIN: Richard?

RICHARD: Black.

DAVID SHERRIN: Tasha, what do you think?

TASHA: She just seems white, but then when you look at her hair it seems like that she's Black.

DAVID SHERRIN: David?

DAVID: I'm gonna go with white.

DAVID SHERRIN: So what do we think for the man on the bottom left?

JAD: Mustache, borderline afro.

BOY: Asian.

GIRL: Native American.

JAD: A vaguely ethnic version of Tom Selleck.

BOY: I'm picking between white and Asian.

BOY: White or Asian or Native American.

BOY: I think he's Black.

BOY: Black.

BOY: Hispanic?

DAVID SHERRIN: We're actually not gonna use "Hispanic." So let's take a vote here. How many people say Black? Three, okay. White? Or how many people say Native American?

JAD: All right, to cut to the chase, after eight of these faces, David revealed the results. Turned out, pink face girl was Black, Tom Selleck was Asian, and all in all the class got three right.

DAVID SHERRIN: Three out of eight.

JAD: Which thrilled David.

DAVID SHERRIN: What does this tell us?

JAD: One of the kids in the back of the class, a girl named Bianca, finally says, "Well, what it tells us is this activity ...

BIANCA: It's retarded. Sorry. It's stupid.

DAVID SHERRIN: Why?

BIANCA: Because it's stupid.

DAVID SHERRIN: Could you be a bit more specific?

BIANCA: [laughs] Okay. So let's say that you had a white mother and a Black father, the child will come out brown.

BOY: No, it'd come out gray.

BOY: Right.

BIANCA: How would it come out gray? No, it will come out brown, okay? I'm not white or Black, I'm Dominican. My mother is light skinned like David's color, and my father is dark-skinned and I came out a mixed color. I'm brown. So is brown a race? So I guess I'm brown then.

JAD: Interestingly, in the cafeteria after class when we asked people how they identify ...

JAD: This is gonna sound like a dumb question, but what race are you?

JAD: ... most people said something like this.

GIRL: Trinidadian

BOY: Ecuadorian.

GIRL: Dominican.

JAD: They named the country.

BOY: Mexican.

BOY: Jamaican.

BOY: I'm Colombian.

GIRL: Puerto Rican.

JAD: Almost no one said I'm one of those four official categories. If they mentioned it at all it was just to say that they're somewhere in between, or that they switch back and forth.

BOY: Half Puerto Rican, half Salvadoran.

BOY: I'm a mix of Black people and Hispanics.

BOY: I'm Mexican but I'm not 100 percent Mexican.

BOY: My spirit is Black. You get what I'm saying?

BOY: If I'm, like, in my neighborhood, people see me as Spanish. But if I go, like, to my grandmother's block people see me as, like, white.

BOY: When I go back home to Cuba everybody, "Oh, that's the Black kid." But when I come here all of a sudden I change my race, so I become Hispanic.

ROBERT: Do you do that too?

JAD: Do I race shift like these kids? No. I mean, I get confused a lot.

ROBERT: I mean, you could pass as a Jew, I think, even though you're an Arab.

JAD: Oh yeah, in New York? Forget it. But what's interesting is these kids, it wasn't like they were unaware of race. I mean, they're aware of it. It's just fluid for them, because I guess so many of them can pass for different things, it becomes then all about, like, what you wear, what you listen to, like, small things in the end.

ROBERT: But in some circumstances—we all know this—the tiniest differences can suddenly mean everything. We talked to—we're gonna switch locations here from New York to Baghdad in Iraq. We talked to an Iraqi guy named Ali Abbas ...

ROBERT: ... who works as a translator, as a journalist in Baghdad.

ALI ABBAS: Yeah, with NPR Baghdad office.

ROBERT: And when you were growing up in Baghdad, when you were kid, did you know whether you were Shia or Sunni?

ALI ABBAS: No. No, no. The first time I knew that I was a Sunni or a Shia, in fact it was sixth grade. We were sitting after a class break, and someone asked me if I'm a Sunni or a Shia. Like, another kid. I remember it was a Tikriti-kid because ...

ROBERT: That's the village where Saddam Hussein grew up.

ALI ABBAS: Where Saddam—yeah. That's the town where Saddam grew up.

ROBERT: What did you answer?

ALI ABBAS: I answered, "I don't know." [laughs]

JAD: Because you really didn't know?

ALI ABBAS: I really didn't know. So they made fun of me, and I returned home and I said to my mom, "Am I a Sunni or a Shia?" And the first answer from my mom was a slap on my face.

JAD: Really?

ALI ABBAS: Yeah.

JAD: Why?

ALI ABBAS: She said, "Never ask about these things. You're a Muslim, and that's all what you care about."

ROBERT: But that was then, this is now. Today, says Ali, in Baghdad you can't go around saying, "I don't know who I am." Now you have to choose.

ALI ABBAS: Yeah.

ROBERT: Even if you don't want to.

ALI ABBAS: May, 2007. A friend of mine, close friend of mine, he calls me and says, "Ali, did you hear about what happened to me?" And I'm like, "No, what happened?" He said, "My father, they kidnapped him." His father is an old guy, 62. Was just in his neighborhood buying candies for his grandson.

ROBERT: And then he disappeared.

ALI ABBAS: Just disappeared. No one knows.

ROBERT: And in Baghdad, when someone's kidnapped they usually don't come back. Usually, the body just shows up in the morgue. So what Ali's friend wanted is he wanted to go ...

ALI ABBAS: To Baghdad morgue to go and find his father.

ROBERT: But the problem was his friend couldn't go alone.

ALI ABBAS: Because he's Sunni. His name is Ahmar. And the morgue is completely controlled by Shia.

ROBERT: If a Sunni man was trying to get his relative's body out of the morgue, somewhere along the line, the Shia militia ...

ALI ABBAS: They will check the names, and they would ask him about something, you know, deep Shi'ite religion questions. And if he fails, then so they would just lynch him.

ROBERT: They would what?

ALI ABBAS: They would take him out of the hospital to somewhere, and they'd probably kill and dump his body somewhere.

JAD: Can I ask a really dumb question?

ALI ABBAS: Sure.

JAD: You're walking through Baghdad. You're walking to this hospital, you see a Sunni, you see a Shia, can you tell the difference with your eyes at all?

ALI ABBAS: Sometimes you can't really know.

ROBERT: But sometimes you could take advantage of this confusion to help a friend. Ali, after all, was always helping journalists get around Baghdad, and you never knew who was gonna be asking you questions. Sometimes it would be a Sunni militia, sometimes a Shia militia.

ALI ABBAS: It's very hard to know.

ROBERT: So journalists would go around the town with two IDs simultaneously. One would be a Shia ID, the other a Sunni ID.

ALI ABBAS: And they're putting it, like, somewhere in their pockets. You know, the right is the Sunni, the left is the Shia.

JAD: Wait a second. The right is the Sunni, the left is a Shia?

ALI ABBAS: Yes.

JAD: So if in that split second you think this guy's Sunni you go right?

ALI ABBAS: And if you're Shia you would go left. That's ...

ROBERT: You know, if it were me, I just—I know how I'd die. [laughs]

JAD: You would.

ALI ABBAS: But it's not—it's not really fun, though.

ROBERT: Especially when your job on this particular day is to take your Sunni friend into a hospital controlled by a Shia militia. So Ali decided that to protect his Sunni friend Ahmar, maybe the best protection would be a slight name change. When they went to the hospital they would call him Amaar, not Ahmar.

ALI ABBAS: Ahmar is a pure Sunni name. Amaar is something in the middle. Could be Sunni or could be Shia.

JAD: And is the same—is there different spellings?

ALI ABBAS: Different spelling, yeah. Different spellings.

JAD: They sound almost identical.

ALI ABBAS: Yeah. But just the Alif or the A in the middle.

ROBERT: And by adding that one letter, that one extra A, Ali hoped that would keep his friend alive.

ALI ABBAS: So we went there. I took him. And my brother who was Shia, who's also a physician at that time came with us. He came with us, and I told him not to call Ahmar Ahmar. I told him to call Ahmar, Amaar.

ROBERT: So Ali and his friend and his brother using this new name got into the morgue where they were taken to a room where everybody sits to look at pictures of people who are dead.

ALI ABBAS: We sat in that computer room they call it, where there are, like, seven computer monitors. And there's someone on the side of the room where he's holding the mouse and he's moving with his finger the pictures, changing the pictures, and people sitting on the ground, probably 35 or 40 other people on the ground looking at the pictures.

ROBERT: Hoping not to see a picture of their brother or their mother or their father.

ALI ABBAS: So whenever there's a picture of one of the relatives you will hear someone crying, shouting, wailing. We were looking at the pictures, looking at the pictures.

ROBERT: Picture after picture after picture.

ALI ABBAS: And, you know, we finally found—reached a decision that his father wasn't among the pictures. And suddenly his father's picture comes out. Then Ahmar started crying and, you know, my brother would say, "Ahmar, don't worry. Ahmar, don't—Ahmar, this is God's decision, this is God's dah dah dah dah dah." And then ...

JAD: He'd say, "No, Ahmar?"

ALI ABBAS: "Ahmar, Ahmar." And I would hit him on his chest. "Don't say this word. Don't say it." Because not only Ahmar will be killed, it will be us as well.

ROBERT: But nobody in the room apparently heard him say Ahmar, the wrong pronunciation. So they got a number from the picture, and then they had to go to a different part of the morgue to actually locate the body and then of course bring it home for proper burial.

ALI ABBAS: So we walked out from the computer room, we went to the refrigerator, which is actually not a refrigerator. It's just hallways. All these bodies dumped on both sides of the hallway. And as soon as you enter these hallways you can barely hold your breath. The smell, the odor is so, so stringent. It's like it's impossible to bear. And the whole ground is full of a thick layer of greasy blood. You know, it sticks to your foot when you walk. It's like squish, squish, squish.

ROBERT: And it was a very long hallway.

ALI ABBAS: Ahmar was—he actually fell twice. We would stop him from falling down, and we would slap him on his face, "Wake up, we gotta keep going." So we would walk all the way down to find all these piles of bodies. Then in one pile, the guy who's wearing boots, the worker there, he would tell us, "I think your father's within this pile." And he's, like, talking normally. He's unbothered by all of this. He threw the bodies from this side and from this side, and then he took Ahmar's father from his arms and he just pulled him from underneath the pile. Ahmar didn't want to believe that this was his father. He didn't want to believe. He said, "I don't know. I don't think this is my father. I don't see him." But the tag number was there.

ROBERT: And because the tag number was there, they knew it was Ahmar's father.

ALI ABBAS: We came out and we thought, you know, that's—that's it. We're gonna take the body and go home. And at that moment ...

ROBERT: They were suddenly approached by two Shia militiamen.

ALI ABBAS: Who were very obvious they are Shiites and they're from the Mahdi.

ROBERT: From one of the most radical groups in Baghdad.

ALI ABBAS: And ...

ROBERT: One of them said, "Let me see your ID."

ALI ABBAS: So Ahmar had to give him his physician's ID.

ROBERT: But that ID had his real name, his Sunni name on it.

ALI ABBAS: He looked at it. "So Ahmar," he said. "Huh."

JAD: He said Ahmar.

ALI ABBAS: "Ahmar. Huh."

JAD: So he knew is what you're saying.

ALI ABBAS: He knew, yes. Yeah, he talked to his friend next to him. They kept whispering to each other about the ID, and realized probably that's the moment when we are all going to die. Yeah, we're done. So immediately, immediately we started talking to them in a very loud voice. "Listen guys, we're your colleagues here. Whatever you need, come to the emergency room, ask for me. I'm Dr. Ali Abbas and this is my brother Hazad Abbas," you know, to show them that we're Shiites. We started talking in a very heavy Shiite accent, you know? "You can come at any moment if you want to the ER. If you have anything just tell us. Let us know. We're your brothers. Help us here."

JAD: And then they waited.

ALI ABBAS: You know, we just kept looking at their eyes, what they're doing. And thank God, they gave us the papers back. We got Ahmar's father out, and he took him and buried him.

ROBERT: Ali Abbas has now left Baghdad. He's moved to Brooklyn, New York, a neighborhood very proud of its mix of races and people from all over the world. But remember, Baghdad was a multicultural city as well for hundreds of years longer than Brooklyn. So I asked him now that you're here, I mean, given what you've seen, what do you think about us?

ALI ABBAS: I would tell you something. The subway is my—I would sit in a subway car, you know, and looking at the people: African Americans, Hispanic, white. I questioned myself. "He's a Jew. He's not a Jew. He's Christian." And I'm looking at the people, and it's exactly this question that comes in my mind: how they're living together? How ...

ROBERT: Does it seem like something that could explode?

ALI ABBAS: Oh, yeah. It's something that I always think. I mean, I look at them, and look at all kind of races, and wonder how can this country hold that together?

ROBERT: That was Ali Abbas, also the translator for National Public Radio.

JAD: Okay. Time to go. Radiolab.org is our website. Radiolab(@)WNYC.org is our email. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

[LISTENER: Radiolab is produced by Soren Wheeler and Jad Abumrad. Our staff includes Lulu Miller, Jonathan Mitchell, Ellen Horne, Amanda Aronczyk and Jessica Benkel, with help from Sally Herships. Special thanks to David Shearing, Carey Donahue, Phyllis Glory and Alley Stanton, Stacey Abramson and the Facing History School.]

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