STEVE OLSONJournalist Steve Olson, who holds a B.S. in phy.docx

STEVE OLSON
Journalist Steve Olson, who holds a B.S. in physics from Yale
University, has reported for the Atlantic, Science, and Scientific
American and has published multiple books, including Mapping
Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins (2002),
which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Count
Down (2004), about teens at the International Mathematical
Olympiad.
In Mapping Human History, the source of the following
selection, Olson studies the path of our species through genes
and continents, tracking all of humanity back to a small group
that lived in eastern Africa, debunking racial myths along the
way. Regardless of what appear to be differences among us,
suggests Olson, biologically we are all basically the same. Our
group origins and differences, which were superficial to begin
with, lose importance as time goes by.
In "The End of Race: Hawaii and the Mixing of Peoples,"
Olson considers centuries of intermarriage between native and
nonnative races in the Hawaiian islands. Although this exten-
sive "mixing of peoples" has led some to propose Hawaii as an
example of interracial harmony, Olson acknowledges that such
claims are not entirely true. Though the majority of those born
and raised in Hawaii come from a complex racial and ethnic
makeup, social, political, and historical influences have
contributed to deep cultural divides
among the various island populations. Now, in the aftermath of
European colonization, the
preservation of Hawaiian culture and the definition of what it
means to be a native Hawaiian

are pressing questions with no easy genetic or biological
answers. Thus Olson ultimately
questions whether racial and cultural identity is rooted in
biology or affiliation. The "end of
race" is, perhaps, no end at all.
What defines race? And given how complicated such a
definition must inevitably be,
how can we end racism and promote racial harmony?
TAGS: race, integration, research, diversity, bioethics,
diplomacy, community
Questions for Critical Reading
i. What is a "community of descent"? Develop a definition by
reading Olson's text to
locate quotations that define the concept. Offer, too, an example
of a community of
descent from your own experience.
333
Steve Olson
As you read, ask yourself how Olson defines race. Create a
definition and support it
using quotations from Olson's essay. To do so, you will need to
read his essay critically,
paying close attention to what Olson has to say about the
concept of race.
If race no longer has a biological basis, as Olson claims, why do
ethnicities continue to

function in society? Use Olson's text to propose reasons why
race persists.
The End of Race: Hawaii and the
Mixing of Peoples
He loved everything, he was full of joyous love toward
everything that he saw.
And it seemed to him that was just why he was previously so
ill—because he
could love nothing and nobody.
—HERMANN HESSE, Siddhartha
On the morning of November 26, 1778, the 100-foot-long,
three-masted ship Resolu-
tion, captained by the fifty-year-old Englishman James Cook,
sailed into view off the
northeast coast of the Hawaiian island of Maui. The island's
Polynesian inhabitants
had never seen a European sailing ship before. The sight of the
Resolution just beyond
the fierce windward surf must have looked as strange to them as
a spaceship from
another planet. Yet they responded without hesitation. They
boarded canoes and
paddled to the ship. From atop the rolling swells they offered
the sailors food, water,
and, in the case of the women, themselves.
One can easily imagine the contrast: the European sailors-—
gaunt, dirty, many
bearing the unmistakable signs of venereal disease—and the
Polynesians, a people
who abided by strict codes of personal hygiene, who washed
every day and plucked

the hair from their faces and underarms, whose women had
bodies "moulded into the
utmost perfection," in the words of one early admirer. At first
Cook forbade his men to
bring the women on board the ship "to prevent as much as
possible the communicat-
ing [of the] fatal disease [gonorrhea] to a set of innocent
people." In the weeks and
months to come, as the Resolution lingered offshore, Cook was
far less resolute. Toward
the end of 1779, the first of what are today called hapa haoles—
half European, half
non-European—were born on the island of Maui.
The nineteenth-century stereotype of the South Pacific as a
sexual paradise owes
as much to the feverish imaginations of repressed Europeans as
to the actions of the
Polynesians. The young women who swam out to the ships in
Hawaii, Tahiti, and
other South Pacific islands were from the lower classes, not
from the royalty, which
carefully guarded its legitimacy. Many were training to be
dancers in religious festi-
vals. They would rise in status by exchanging their sexual
favors for a tool, a piece of
cloth, or an iron nail.
The Polynesians paid dearly for their openness. At least 300,000
people, and possi-
bly as many as 800,000, lived on the Hawaiian islands when
Captain Cook first sighted
them (today the total population of the state is about 1.2
million). Over the course of
the next century, diseases introduced by Europeans reduced the
native population to

fewer than 50,000. By the time the painter Paul Gauguin
journeyed to the Pacific in
The End of Race: Hawaii and the Mixing of Peoples 335
Hawaii's high rates of
intermarriage have fascinated
academics for decades.
1891, the innocence that Europeans had perceived among the
Polynesians was gone.
"The natives, having nothing, nothing at all to do, think of one
thing only, drinking,"
he wrote. "Day by day the race vanishes, decimated by the
European diseases— There
is so much prostitution that it does not exist.... One only knows
a thing by its contrary,
and its contrary does not exist." The women in Gauguin's
paintings are beautiful yet
defeated, without hope, lost in a vision of the past.
Today visitors to Maui land on a runway just downwind from
the shore where
Captain Cook battled the surf eleven generations ago. Once out
of the airport, they en-
counter what is probably the most genetically mixed population
in the world. To the
genes of Captain Cook's sailors and the native Polynesians has
been added the DNA of
European missionaries, Mexican cowboys, African American
soldiers, and plantation
workers from throughout Asia and Europe. This intense mixing
of DNA has produced
a population of strikingly beautiful people. Miss Universe of

1997 and Miss America of
2001 were both from Hawaii. The former, Brook Mahealani Lee,
is a classic Hawaiian
blend. Her ancestors are Korean and Hawaiian, Chinese and
European.
Bernie Adair—who was selling candles at a swap meet in
Kahului, Maui's largest
town, when I met her—told me that her family's history was
typical. Adair, whose
ancestors came to Hawaii from the Philip-
pines, married a Portuguese man in the
1960s, In the 1980s their daughter Marlene
married a man of mixed Hawaiian, Chinese,
and Portuguese descent. Adair's grand-
daughter Carly, peeking shyly at me from under a folding table,
therefore embodies
four different ethnicities. "These children have grandparents
with so many different
nationalities you can't tell what they are," Adair said.
Almost half the people who live in Hawaii today are of "mixed"
ancestry. What it
means to be mixed is not at all obvious genetically, but for
official purposes it means
that a person's ancestors fall into more than one of the four
"racial" categories identi-
fied on U.S. census forms: black, white, Native American, and
Asian or Pacific Islander.
Intermarriage is a cumulative process, so once an individual of
mixed ancestry is
born, all of that person's descendants also will be mixed. As
intermarriage continues
in Hawaii—and already almost half of all marriages are between
couples of different
or mixed ethnicities—the number of people who will be able to

call themselves pure
Japanese, or pure Hawaiian, or pure white (haole in Hawaiian),
will steadily decline.
Hawaii's high rates of intermarriage have fascinated academics
for decades. The
University of Hawaii sociologist Romanzo Adams wrote an
article titled "Hawai'i as
; a Racial Melting Pot" in 1926, and many scholars since then
have extolled Hawaii as
[a model of ethnic and racial harmony. The researchers have
always been a bit vague
I about the reasons for all this intermarriage; explanations have
ranged from the benign
Iclimate to the "aloha spirit" of the Native Hawaiians. But their
lack of analytic rigor
fhasn't damped their enthusiasm, One of the goals of the former
Center for Research on
tmic Relations at the University of Hawaii was "to determine
why ethnic harmony
xists in Hawai'i" and "to export principles of ethnic harmony to
the mainland and the
dd,"
The rest of the United States has a smaller percentage of mixed
marriages than
es Hawaii, But given recent trends, one might wonder if the
country as a whole
i headed down a road Hawaii took long ago. According to the
2000 census, one in

336 Steve Olson
twenty children under the age of eighteen in the United States is
mixed, in that their
parents fall into more than one racial category. Between the ]
990 and 2000 censuses,
the number of interracial couples quadrupled. This number —
about 1.5 million of
55 million married couples—is not yet high, but because of
kinship ties, American
families are already much more mixed than they look.
Demographer Joshua Goldstein
of Princeton University has calculated that about 20 percent of
Americans are already
in extended families with someone from a different racial
group—that is, they or their
parents, uncles and aunts, siblings, or children have married
someone classified as a
member of a different race.
The rapid growth of interracial marriages in the United States
and elsewhere
marks a new phase in the genetic history of humanity. Since the
appearance of modern
humans in Africa more than 100,000 years ago, human groups
have differentiated in
appearance as they have expanded across the globe and have
undergone some mea-
sure of reproductive isolation. This differentiation has always
been limited by the re-
centness of our common ancestry and by the powerful tendency
of groups to mix over
time. Still, many human populations have remained sufficiently
separate to develop
and retain the distinctive physical characteristics we recognize
today.

In Hawaii this process is occurring in reverse. It's as if a
videotape of our species'
history were being played backward at a fantastically rapid
speed. Physical distinctions
that took thousands of generations to produce are being wiped
clean with a few genera-
tions of intermarriage.
The vision of the future conjured up by intermarriage in Hawaii
can be seductive.
When everyone is marrying everyone else, when the ethnic
affiliation of most people
can no longer be ascertained at a glance, one imagines that
ethnic and racial tensions
would diminish. But spending some time in Hawaii shows that
the future will not be
that simple. Despite the high rate of intermarriage here, ethnic
and racial tensions
haven't really disappeared. They have changed into something
else, something less
threatening, perhaps, but still divisive. Hawaii may well be a
harbinger of a racially
mixed future, But it won't be the future many people expect.
Many of the harshest conflicts in the world today are between
people who are physi-
cally indistinguishable. If someone took a roomful of
Palestinians and Israelis from
the Middle East, or of Serbs and Albanians from the Balkans, or
of Catholics and Prot-
estants from Ireland, or of Muslims and Hindus from northern
India, or of Dayaks and
Madurese from Indonesia, gave them all identical outfits and
haircuts, and forbade
them to speak or gesture, no one could distinguish the members

of the other group—at
least not to the point of being willing to shoot them. The
antagonists in these conflicts
have different ethnicities, but they have been so closely linked
biologically throughout
history that they have not developed marked physical
differences.
Yet one of the most perverse dimensions of ethnic thinking is
the "racialization" of
culture—the tendency to think of another people as not just
culturally but genetically
distinct. In the Yugoslavian war, the Croats caricatured their
Serbian opponents as tall
and blond, while the Serbs disparaged the darker hair and skin
of the Croats—even
though these traits are thoroughly intermixed between the two
groups. During World
War II the countries of Europe fiercely stereotyped the physical
attributes of their en-
emies, despite a history of intermarriage and migration that has
scrambled physical
The End of Race: Hawaii and the Mixing of Peoples 3J7
j characteristics throughout the continent. In Africa the warring
Tutsis and Hutus
I often call attention to the physical differences of their
antagonists, but most observers
[have trouble distinguishing individual members of the two
groups solely on the basis
I of appearance.
The flip side of this biological stereotyping is the elevation of

one's own ancestry.
|The Nazis were the most notorious believers in the purity of
their past, but many other
;roups have similar beliefs. They proclaim themselves to be
descended from ancient
ribes of noble warriors, or from prominent families in the
distant past, or even from
amous individuals.
Genetics research has revealed the flaw inherent in any such
belief. Every group
s a mixture of many previous groups, a fleeting collection of
genetic variants drawn
om a shared genetic legacy. The Polynesian colonizers of the
Hawaiian archipelago
; a good example. In 1795 the German anatomist J. F.
Blumenbach proposed that the
{(Malays" — a collection of peoples, including the Polynesians,
from southeastern Asia
ad Oceania — were one of the five races of humanity, in
addition to Africans, Cauca-
ns, Mongoloids, and Native Americans. But all of these groups
(to the extent that
iey can be defined) are genetic composites of previous groups.
In the case of the Poly-
esians, this mixing was part of the spread of humans into the
Pacific. The last major
Brt of the world to be occupied by humans was Remote
Oceania, the widely separated
nds scattered in a broad crescent from Hawaii to New Zealand.
Before that, humans

|The Polynesian inhabitants of Hawaii are descended from
people who lived both in
outheastern Asia and in Melanesia, which includes New Guinea
and nearby islands. The
Polynesians migrated first to the South Pacific islands of Fiji,
Tonga, and Samoa, with later
Migrations taking their descendants from the Marquesas islands
to Hawaii. More recent
;rants have included people from Asia, the Americas, and
Europe.
338 Steve Olson
had been living only in Near Oceania, which includes Australia,
Papua New Guinea,
and the Bismarck Archipelago. The humans who settled these
regions were adept at
short ocean crossings, but they never developed the kinds of
boats or navigation skills
needed to sail hundreds of miles to Fiji, Samoa, and beyond.
Then, about 6,000 years ago. rice and millet agriculture made
the leap across the
Formosa Strait from the mainland of southeastern Asia to
Taiwan. From there, ag-
riculture began to spread, island by island, to the south and
southeast. With it came
two important cultural innovations. The first was the
Austronesian language family,
which eventually spread halfway around the world, from
Madagascar to Easter Island.
The second was a suite of new technologies—pottery,

woodworking implements, and
eventually the outrigger canoe* and ways of using the stars to
navigate across large
expanses of open water. Archaeological evidence shows that
people first reached the
previously uninhabited island of Fiji about 3,000 years ago.
They sailed to Easter Is-
land, their farthest point east, in about AD 300 and to New
Zealand, their farthest point
south, in about 800.
One hypothesis, known as the express-train model of Polynesian
origins, claims
that both the knowledge of agriculture and Austronesian
languages were carried
into the Pacific by people descended almost exclusively from
the first farmers who set
sail from Taiwan. But genetic studies have revealed a much
more complex picture.
Mitochondrial and Y-chromosome haplotypes1 among today's
Polynesians show that
there was extensive mixing of peoples in Near Oceania, which
eventually produced
the groups that set sail for the remote islands. Though many of
the mitochondrial
haplotypes and Y chromosomes of the Polynesians do seem to
have come from the
mainland of southeastern Asia and Taiwan, others originated in
New Guinea and
its nearby islands — a geographic region known as Melanesia
(named for the gener-
ally dark skin of its inhabitants). Geneticists Manfred Kayser
and Mark Stoneking of
the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in
Leipzig have dubbed the
resulting synthesis the "slow-boat model." According to this

model, today's Polyne-
sians can trace their ancestry both to the Austronesian speakers
who moved out of
southeastern Asia and to the people who already occupied
Melanesia.
The Polynesians first reached the Hawaiian islands around AD
400, probably in a
migration from the Marquesas islands. A subsequent wave of
people migrated to Ha-
waii from Tahiti between the twelfth and the fourteenth century.
Then the islands saw
no more newcomers until Captain Cook's arrival four centuries
later.
The discovery of Hawaii by Europeans did not result in an
immediate influx of colo-
nists. The early decades of the nineteenth c e n t u r y brought
just a trickle of settlers to the
islands—washed-up sailors, retired captains, British and
Russian traders, missionar-
ies. Large-scale migration began only after the first sugar
plantations were established
around the middle of the century. In 1852, three hundred
Chinese men arrived to work
the plantations. Over the next century nearly half a million more
workers followed.
They came from China, Japan, Korea, Puerto Rico, Spain,
Poland, Austria, Germany,
* Outrigger canoe: Canoe w i t h a side float at ion unit for
increased stability |F,d.|.
: Mitochondrial and Y-chromosome haplotypes: Genetic
information t h a t can be used to trace ancestry
through the mother's and father's lineage |Ed. ].

Norway, and Russia. Some of these groups have long since
disappeared, blending into
the genetic background. Others still have a significant ethnic
presence on the islands.
A i'ew miles from the Honolulu airport is a vivid reminder of
those times. Hawaii's
Plantation Village is one of the few tourist attractions designed
as much for the locals
as for mainlanders. It meticulously recreates a camp town of the
type that once dotted
the islands, housing the workers who toiled each day in the
sugar and pineapple fields.
Each house along the main avenue reflects the ethnicity of the
workers who lived there:
A large bread oven sits next to the Portuguese house, rice
cookers dominate the kitchen
of the Chinese house, crucifixes adorn the walls of the Puerto
Rican house. A Japanese
shrine is a few doors away from the Chinese society building.
Down the hill by the taro*
fields is a dohyo, a sumo ring, where the workers wrestled every
Sunday afternoon.
Mike Ha ma showed me around the day I was there. The
descendant of Japanese,
German, Hawaiian, and Irish grandparents, Hama grew up on a
plantation camp in
the 1940s. "Kids of all different nationalities played together in
these camps," he told
me. "We didn't know we were different." They communicated

using a pidgin that com-
bined words from many languages. The German kids taught the
other kids to polka in
the camp social halls. The Japanese kids taught their friends
sumo wrestling. When
the Japanese emperor visited Hawaii after World War II,
according to a widely told if
hard-to-verify story, he was so impressed to see wrestlers of all
different nationalities
in the dohyo that when he returned to Japan he opened the
country's sumo rings to
foreigners.
When Hama was eighteen, he joined the military and was
stationed in California.
"That was a real awakening for me," he recalls, "For the first
time I saw the bigotry that
was going on outside Hawaii." He moved back to Hawaii as
soon as he could and mar-
ried a woman of mixed ancestry. His four daughters think of
themselves as nothing
other than local Hawaiians.
The camp towns disappeared decades ago in Hawaii, yet they
have left a remark-
able legacy. Large-scale segregation in housing remains rare on
the islands. People of
all ethnic backgrounds live side by side, just as they did in the
camp towns. The only
people who live in ghettos are the soldiers on military bases and
wealthy haoles who
wall themselves off in gated communities. Because
neighborhoods are integrated in
Hawaii, so are most of the schools. Children of different
ethnicities continue to grow up
together and marry, just as they did in the camps.

Integrated neighborhoods, integrated schools, high rates of
intermarriage—the is-
lands sound as if they should be a racial paradise. But there's
actually a fair amount
of prejudice here. It pops up in novels, politics, the spiels of
standup comics. And it's
especially prominent in everyday conversation — "talk stink" is
the pidgin term for dis-
respecting another group.
Some of the prejudice is directed toward haoles, who continue
to occupy many
of the positions of social and economic prominence on the
islands (though their days
as plantation overlords are long gone). Nonwhites label haoles
as cold, self-serving,
arrogant, meddling, loud, and even that old stereotype—smelly
(because, it is held,
* Taro: Common name for several varieties of a root vegetable
[Ed.].
340 Steve Olson
they still do not bathe every day). White kids say they'll get
beat up if they venture
onto certain nonwhite beaches. Occasionally a rumor sweeps
through a school about
an upcoming "Kill a Haole" day. The rumors are a joke meant to
shock the prevailing
sensibilities. But one would not expect such a joke where racial
tensions arc low.

Other groups come in for similarly rough treatment. The
Japanese are derided as
clannish and power-hungry, the Filipinos as ignorant and
underhanded, the Hawai-
ians as fat, lazy, and fun-loving. And, as is true of stereotypes
everywhere, the objects of
them have a tendency to reinforce them, either by too
vigorously denying or too easily
repeating them.
"Intermarriage may indicate tolerance," says Jonathan Okamura,
an anthro-
pologist at the University of Hawaii, "but it doesn't mean we
have an egalitarian soci-
ety on a larger scale." Though he calls his viewpoint a
"minority position," Okamura
holds that racial and ethnic prejudice is deeply ingrained in the
institutional struc-
tures of everyday life in Hawaii. For example, the integration of
the public schools is
deceptive, he says. Well-off haoles, Chinese, and Japanese send
their children to pri-
vate schools, and the public schools arc underfunded. "We've
created a two-tiered
system t h a t makes inequality increasingly worse rather than
better," says Okamura.
Meanwhile the rapid growth of the tourism industry in Hawaii
has shut off many tra-
ditional routes to economic betterment. Tourism produces
mostly low-paying jobs in
sales, service, and construction, Okamura points out, so people
have few opportunities
to move up career ladders.
Of course, talented and lucky individuals still get ahead.
"Students with parents

who didn't go to college come to the university and do well—
that happens all the
time," Okamura says. "But it doesn't happen enough to advance
socioeconomically
disadvantaged groups in society."
Several ethnic groups occupy the lower end of the
socioeconomic scale, but one in
particular stands out: the people descended from the island's
original inhabitants. Na-
tive Hawaiians have the lowest incomes and highest
unemployment rates of any ethnic
group, They have the most health problems and the shortest life
expectancy. They are
the least likely to go to college and the most likely to be
incarcerated.
Then again, applying statistics like these to a group as large and
diverse as Native
Hawaiians is inevitably misleading. Individuals with some
Hawaiian ancestry make
up a f i f t h of the population in Hawaii. Some are successful;
some are not. Some are
consumed by native issues; others pay them no mind. And
Native Hawaiians are much
less marginalized in Hawaii than are, for example, Native
Americans in the rest of the
United States. Hawaiian words, names, and outlooks have
seeped into everyday life on
the islands, producing a cultural amalgam that is one of the
state's distinct attractions.
Native Hawaiians should not be seen as simply another ethnic
group, the leaders
of their community point out. Other cultures have roots
elsewhere; people of Japanese,

German, or Samoan ancestry can draw from the traditions of an
ancestral homeland
to sustain an ethnic heritage. If the culture of the Native
Hawaiians disappears, it will
be gone forever. Greater recognition of the value and fragility
of this culture has led to
a resurgence of interest in the Hawaiian past. Schools with
Hawaiian language im-
mersion programs have sprung up around the islands to
supplement the English that
children speak at home. Traditional forms of Hawaiian dance,
music, canoeing, and
religion all have undergone revivals.
Exactly who is a Native
Hawaiian?
This Hawaiian Renaissance also has had a political dimension.
For the past sev-
eral decades a sovereignty movement has been building among
Native Hawaiians that
seeks some measure of political autonomy and control over the
Jands that the U.S. gov-
ernment seized from the Hawaiian monarchy at the end of the
nineteenth century.
Reflecting the diversity of the native population, several
sovereignty organizations
have carried out a sometimes unseemly struggle over strategies
and goals. One radi-
cal faction advocates the complete independence of the islands
from the United States.
More moderate groups have called for the establishment of a

Native Hawaiian nation
modeled on the Indian tribes on the mainland. Native Hawaiians
would have their own
government, but it would operate within existing federal and
state frameworks, and its
citizens would remain Americans.
Native Hawaiian sovereignty faces many hurdles, and it is
premature to harp on
exactly how it would work. But whenever the topic comes up in
discussion, a ques-
tion quickly surfaces: Exactly who is a Na-
tive Hawaiian? "Pure" Hawaiians with no
non-Hawaiian ancestors probably number
just a few thousand. Many Native Hawai-
ians undoubtedly have a preponderance
of Hawaiian ancestors, but no clear line separates natives from
nonnatives. Some
people who call themselves Native Hawaiians probably have
little DNA from Polyne-
sian ancestors.
Past legislation has waffled on this issue. Some laws deline
Native Hawaiians as
people who can trace at least half their ancestry to people living
in Hawaii before the
arrival of Captain Cook. Others define as Hawaiian anyone who
has even a single
precontact Hawaiian ancestor. These distinctions are highly
contentious for political
and economic as well as cultural reasons. Many state laws
restrict housing subsidies,
scholarships, economic development grants, and other benefits
specifically to Native
Hawaiians,

As the study of genetics and history has progressed, an obvious
idea has arisen.
Maybe science could resolve the issue. Maybe a genetic marker
could be found that oc-
curs only in people descended from the aboriginal inhabitants of
Hawaii. Then anyone
with that marker could be considered a Native Hawaiian.
No one is better qualified to judge this idea than Rebecca Cann,
a professor of
genetics at the University of Hawaii. Cann was the young
graduate student at the
University of California at Berkeley who, with Mark Stoneking,
did much of the work
that led to the unveiling of mitochondrial Eve.* She haunted
hospital delivery rooms
to obtain mitochondrion-rich placentas, which at that time was
the only way to get
enough mitochondrial DNA to sequence. She ran gels and
compared nucleotides. Her
faculty adviser, Allan Wilson, landed mitochondrial Eve on the
cover of Newsweek, but
Cann did the footwork.
She moved to Hawaii even before mitochondrial Eve made
headlines, respond-
ing to an ad in Science magazine for a job. She's been here ever
since, though her Hat
* Mitochondrial live: A term in genetics for the maternal
ancestor of every human now alive. This woman is
estimated to have lived about 200.000 years ago in liast Africa
|Kd.|.

342 Steve Olson
American accent still betrays a childhood spent in Iowa. She
met me at the door of her
office, in the foothills above Honolulu, dressed in sandals and a
patterned Hawaiian
dress. "I think we correctly anticipated many of the applications
and potential prob-
lems of this research," she said, "right down to people wanting
to clone Elvis from a
handkerchief he'd used to wipe his brow. What we didn't
understand was the degree to
which religious and cultural beliefs would dictate attitudes
toward genetic materials.
In Hawaii, for instance, there's a very strong belief in mana, in
the power of the spirit,
which is contained in the remains of a person's ancestors. The
absolute disgust that
many people have toward the desecration of a grave—that was a
cultural eye-opener
for me."
Despite the occasional cultural difficulties, Cann has continued
her study of
human genetics in Hawaii and has played an important role in
piecing together the
prehistory of the Pacific, By comparing the mitochondrial DNA
sequences of people on
various islands, she has traced the gradual eastward spread of
modern humans from
southeastern Asia and Melanesia. She has discovered that men
and women had differ-
ent migration patterns into the Pacific and has even detected
tantalizing evidence, still
unconfirmed, of genetic contacts between Pacific Islanders and
South Americans. "I'm

convinced that our history is written in our DNA," she told me.
Yet she cautioned against using genetics to determine ethnicity.
"I get people
coming up to me all the time and saying, 'Can you prove that
I'm a H a w a i i a n ? ' " She
can't, she said, at least not with a high degree of certainty. A
given individual might
have a mitochondrial haplotype that is more common among
Native Hawaiians. But
the ancestors of the aboriginal Hawaiians also gave rise to other
Pacific populations, so
a mitochondrial sequence characteristic of Native Hawaiians
could have come from a
Samoan or Filipino ancestor.
Also, a person's mitochondrial DNA is not necessarily an
accurate indication of
ancestry. The only way for a person to have mitochondrial DNA
from a woman who
lived in Hawaii before the arrival of Captain Cook is for that
person to have an unbro-
ken line of grandmothers dating back to that woman. But
because groups have mixed
so much in Hawaii, mitochondrial lineages have become
thoroughly tangled. People
who think of themselves as Native Hawaiian could easily have
had non-Hawaiian fe-
male ancestors sometime in the past eleven generations, which
would have given them
mitochondrial DNA from another part of the world.
These genetic exchanges are also common elsewhere in the
world, even in popu-
lations that think of themselves as less mixed. Most native
Europeans, for example,

have mitochondrial DNA characteristic of that part of the world.
But some have mi-
tochondrial DNA from elsewhere—southern Africa, or eastern
Asia, or even Polyne-
sia—brought to Europe over the millennia by female
immigrants. The British matron
who has a mitochondrial haplotype found most often in southern
Africans is not an
African, just as the Native Hawaiian with mitochondrial DNA
from a German great-
great-grandmothcr does not automatically become German.
This confusion of genetic and cultural identities becomes even
greater with the
Y chromosome, given the ease with which that chromosome can
insert itself into a
genealogy. Most of the early migrants to Hawaii, for example,
were males, especially
the plantation workers. Those males mated with native women
more often than na-
tive men mated with immigrant women, so nonnative Y
chromosomes are now more
common in mixed populations than nonnative mitochondrial
DNA. In some popula-
tions in South America, virtually all the Y chromosomes are
from Europe and all the
mitochondrial DNA is from indigenous groups.
The mixing of genes can cause great consternation, but it is the
inevitable conse-
quence of our genetic history. Several years ago a geneticist in

Washington, D.C., began
offering to identify the homelands of the mitochondrial DNA
and Y chromosomes
of African Americans. The service foundered for several
reasons, but one was that
30 percent of the Y chromosomes in African American males
come from European
ancestors.
Within a few years geneticists will be able to use DNA
sequences from all the chro-
mosomes to trace ancestry. But these histories will be just as
convoluted as those of
mitochondrial DNA and the Y. Granted, geneticists will be able
to make statistical as-
sessments. They will be able to say, for instance, that a given
person has such and such
a probability of descent from a Native Hawaiian population, and
in some cases the
probability will be very high. But probabilities don't convey the
cold, hard certainties
that people want in their genealogies.
Beyond the purely genetic considerations are the social ones.
When children are
adopted from one group into another, they become a member of
that group socially, yet
their haplotypes and those of their descendants can differ from
the group norm. Rape is
another way in which the genetic variants of groups mix. And
sometimes people from
one group make a conscious decision to join another and are
gladly accepted, despite
their different genetic histories.
"I get nervous when people start talking about using genetic

markers to prove eth-
nicity," Cann told me. "I don't believe that biology is destiny.
Allowing yourself to be
defined personally by whatever your DNA sequence is, that's
insane. But that's exactly
what some people are going to be tempted to do."
When geneticists look at our DNA, they do not see a world of
rigidly divided groups
each going its own way. They see something much more fluid
and ambiguous — some-
thing more like the social structures that have emerged in
Hawaii as intermarriage has
accelerated.
The most remarkable aspect of ethnicity in Hawaii is its loose
relation to biology.
Many people have considerable latitude in choosing their ethnic
affiliations. Those of
mixed ancestry can associate with the ethnicity of a parent, a
grandparent, or a more
distant ancestor. They can partition their ethnic affiliations:
They can be Chinese with
their Chinese relatives; Native Hawaiian with their native kin;
and just plain local with
their buddies. The community of descent that a person
associates with has become
more like a professional or religious affiliation, a connection
over which a person has
some measure of control.
People whose ancestors are from a single ethnic group have
fewer options, but
they, too, can partake of at least some of Hawaii's ethnic
flexibility. Young whites, for
example, sometimes try to pass themselves off as mixed by

maintaining an especially
dark tan. Among many young people, dating someone from a
different ethnic group is
asocial asset rather than a liability, in part because of the doors
it opens to other com-
munities. Many prospective students at the University of Hawaii
simply mark "mixed"
in describing their ethnicity on application forms, even if both
parents have the same
344 Steve Olson
ethnic background. "My students say they don't want to be
pigeonholed," says Oka-
mura. "That way they can identify with different groups,"
Hawaii's high rates of intermarriage also contribute greatly to
the islands' ethnic
flux. Ethnicity is not defined just by who one's ancestors were.
It also is defined pro-
spectively—by the group into which one is expected to marry.
For most young people
in Hawaii, the pool of marriageable partners encompasses the
entire population. Rela-
tions among groups are inevitably less fractious when their
members view each other
as potential mates.
Of course, ethnic and even "racial" groups still exist in Hawaii,
and they will for
a long time. Despite the rapid growth of intermarriage in Hawaii
and elsewhere, the
mixing of peoples takes generations, not a few years or even
decades. Most people

around the world still choose marriage partners who would be
classified as members
of the same "race," In many parts of the world—the American
Midwest, China, Ice-
land—few other options are available. Five hundred years from
now, unless human
societies undergo drastic changes, Asians, Africans, and
Europeans still will be physi-
cally distinguishable.
But the social effects of intermarriage are much more immediate
than are the bi-
ological effects. Socially, intermarriage can quickly undermine
the idea that culture
has biological roots. When a substantial number of mixed
individuals demonstrate, by
their very existence, that choices are possible, that biology is
not destiny, the barriers
between groups become more permeable. Ethnicity in Hawaii,
for example, seems far
less stark and categorical than it does in the rest of the United
States. The people of Ha-
waii recognize overlaps and exceptions. They are more willing
to accept the haole who
claims to have non-European ancestors or the Native Hawaiian
who affiliates with
Filipinos. It's true that people talk about the differences among
groups all the time, but
even talking about these differences, rather than rigidly
ignoring them, makes them
seem less daunting. Expressions of social prejudice in Hawaii
arc more like a form of
social banter, like a husband and wife picking at each other's
faults.
The logical endpoint of this perspective is a world in which

people are free to
choose their ethnicity regardless of their ancestry. Ethnicity is
not yet entirely volun-
tary in Hawaii, but in many respects the islands are headed in
that direction. State law,
for example, is gradually coming to define a Native Hawaiian as
anyone with a single
Hawaiian ancestor. But at that point ethnicity becomes
untethered from biology—it is
instead a cultural, political, or historical distinction. People are
no longer who they say
they are because of some mysterious biological essence. They
have chosen the group
with which they want to affiliate.
Genetically, this view of ethnicity makes perfect sense. Our
DNA is too tightly
interconnected to use biology to justify what are essentially
social distinctions. Our
preferences, character, and abilities are not determined by the
biological history of
our ancestors. They depend on our individual attributes,
experiences, and choices. As
this inescapable conclusion becomes more widely held, our
genetic histories inevitably
will become less and less important. When we look at another
person, we won't think
Asian, black, or white. We'll just think: person.
In his novel Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse tells the story of a
young man in ancient India,
a disciple of an inspired teacher, who sets out to find the reality
beneath the world of

appearance. After years of study and wandering, Siddhartha
becomes a ferryman,
learning from his predecessor how to listen to the voices in the
passing river. One day
a childhood friend named Govinda comes to the river.
Siddhartha and Govinda have a
long conversation about the interdependence of illusion and
truth, about the existence
of the past and future in the present, about the need not just to
think about the world
but to love it. Finally Govinda asks Siddhartha how he has
achieved such peace in his
life. Siddhartha replies, "Kiss me on the forehead, Govinda."
Govinda is surprised by
the request, but out of respect for his friend he complies. When
he touches Siddhartha's
forehead with his lips, he has a wondrous vision:
He no longer saw the face of his friend Siddhartha. Instead he
saw other faces,
many faces, a long series, a continuous stream effaces—
hundreds, thou-
sands, which all came and disappeared and yet all seemed to be
there at the
same time, which all continually changed and renewed
themselves and which
were all yet Siddhartha.,,, He saw the face of a newly born
child, red and full
of wrinkles, ready to cry. He saw the face of a m u r d e r e r . .
. . He saw the naked
bodies of men and women in the postures and transports of
passionate love
Each one was mortal, a passionate, painful example of all that is
transitory.

Yet none of them died, they only changed, were always reborn,
continually
had a new face; only time stood between one face and another.
I began this book [Mapping Human History] by calling attention
to the different
appearances of human beings. I conclude it now by calling
attention to the opposite.
Throughout human history, groups have wondered how they are
related to one an-
other. The study of genetics has now revealed that we all are
linked: the Bushmen
hunting antelope, the mixed-race people of South Africa, the
African Americans
descended from slaves, the Samaritans on their mountain
stronghold, the Jewish pop-
ulations scattered around the world, the Han Chinese a billion
strong, the descendants
of European settlers who colonized the New World, the Native
Hawaiians who look to
a cherished past. We are members of a single human family, the
products of genetic
necessity and chance, borne ceaselessly into an unknown future.
Exploring Context
1. Read the U.S. Census Bureau's explanation of the racial
categories used in the census
taken every ten years at census.gov/population/race. How do
these categories relate to
Olson's argument? Relate your response to your work on the
persistence of race from
Question 3 of Questions for Critical Reading.
2. Visit Hawaii's official state government website at
hawaii.gov and then visit the official

Hawaii tourism website at gohawaii.com. How is race
represented on these sites? What
races do you see in the images? Is the representation of race the
same for residents and
for tourists? Why might there be differences? Use the definition
of race you developed
in Question 2 of Questions for Critical Reading to support your
position.
j. One place that race persists in Hawaii, according to Olson, is
in schools. Locate web-
sites for some schools in Hawaii. Do you find evidence to
support Olson's argument or
to complicate it?
| � the review of faith & international affairs
T
his would be the best of all pos-
sible worlds if there were no
religion in it!!” So wrote John
Adams to Thomas Jefferson.
The quotation, well known to proselytiz-
ing atheists, appears differently when
placed in context. The full passage reads:
Twenty times in the course of my late
reading have I been on the point of
breaking out, “This would be the best
of all possible worlds if there were no
religion in it!!” But in this exclama-
tion I would have been ... fanatical....

Without religion this world would be
something not fit to be mentioned
in polite company, I mean hell.
In his song “Imagine,” John Lennon
urged us to dream of a world free of religious
doctrines. For many nonbelievers, religion is
not the solution to anything. For centuries,
they argue, people have been making each
other miserable in the name of God. Studies
indicate that wars with a religious component
last longer and are fought more savagely than
other conflicts. As the acerbic liberal columnist
I.F. Stone observed, “Too many throats have
been cut in God’s name through the ages,
and God has enlisted in too many wars. War
for sport or plunder has never been as bad
as war waged because one man’s belief was
theoretically ‘irreconcilable’ with another.”
The fault in such logic is that, although
we know what a globe plagued by religious
strife is like, we do not know what it would
be like to live in a world where religious faith
is absent. We have, however, had clues from
Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, and, I would also
argue, the Nazis, who conjured up a soulless
Christianity that denied and defamed the
Jewish roots of that faith. It is easy to blame
religion—or, more fairly, what some people do
in the name of religion—for all our troubles,
but that is too simple. Religion is a powerful
force, but its impact depends entirely on
what it inspires people to do. The challenge
for policy-makers is to harness the unifying

potential of faith, while containing its capac-
ity to divide. This requires, at a minimum,
that we see spiritual matters as a subject worth
studying. Too often, as the Catholic theologian
Bryan Hehir notes, “there is an assumption
that you do not have to understand religion
in order to understand the world. You need
Madeleine Albright served as U.S. Secretary of State from 1997
to
2001, and is currently the Mortara Endowed Distinguished
Professor at the
Georgetown School of Foreign Service. Her distinguished career
in govern-
ment includes positions in the National Security Council and as
U.S. ambas-
sador to the United Nations. Her books include Madam
Secretary: A Memoir
(Miramax, 2003) and The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections
on America,
God, and World Affairs (HarperCollins, 2006).
FaIth anD DIplomacy
1
by madeleine albright
“
� | fall �006

to understand politics, strategy, economics,
and law, but you do not need to understand
religion. If you look at standard textbooks of
international relations or the way we organize
our foreign ministry, there’s no place where
a sophisticated understanding of religion as
a public force in the world is dealt with.”
To anticipate events rather than merely
respond to them, American diplomats will
need to take Hehir’s advice and think more
expansively about the role of religion in for-
eign policy and about their
own need for expertise.
They should develop the
ability to recognize where
and how religious beliefs
contribute to conflicts
and when religious prin-
ciples might be invoked
to ease strife. They should
also reorient our foreign
policy institutions to take fully into account
the immense power of religion to influence
how people think, feel, and act. The signs
of such influence are all around us in the
lives of people of many different faiths. By
way of illustration, I offer three stories.
In 1981, I visited Poland; it was during the
second year of the uprising by the Solidarity
movement against the communist govern-
ment. I had long studied central and eastern
Europe, where, for decades, very little had
changed. Now the entire region was awaken-
ing, as from a deep slumber. A large part of

the reason was that Pope John Paul II had
earlier returned for the first time to Poland,
his native land. Formerly Karol Wojtyla, a
teacher, priest, and bishop of Kraków, the pope
exemplified the pervasive role that religion
had played in the history of Poland. While
communist leaders in Warsaw dictated what
Poles could do, parish priests in every corner of
the country still spoke to what Poles believed.
The government, alarmed by the prospect of
the pope’s pilgrimage, sent a memorandum
to schoolteachers identifying John Paul II as
“our enemy” and warning of the dangers posed
by “his uncommon skills and great sense of
humor.” The authorities nevertheless made a
tactical mistake by allowing church officials
to organize the visit, giving them a chance to
schedule a series of direct contacts between
the “people’s pope” and the pope’s people.
One of the titles of the bishop of Rome is
pontifex maximus, or “greatest bridge-builder.”
In Poland, John Paul II helped construct a
bridge that would ultimately restore the con-
nection between Europe’s East and West.
For bricks, he used words carefully chosen to
expose the void at the heart of the communist
system, arguing that if
people were to fulfill their
responsibility to live accord-
ing to moral principles,
they must first have the
right to do so. He made
plain his conviction that the

totalitarian regime could
not survive if Poles had the
courage to withhold their
cooperation. Above all, he urged his country-
men not to be afraid—a simple request with
enormous impact. Slowly at first, but with
gathering momentum, the pope’s listeners drew
strength from one another. No longer were
they separated into small, controllable groups;
the communists’ obsession with isolating dan-
gerous ideas had met its match. Standing amid
huge crowds, the listeners recognized in each
other once again the qualities that made them
proud to be Polish—faith in God and a will-
ingness to run risks for freedom. The pope’s
visits—for he made more than one—sparked
a revolution of the spirit that liberated Poland,
brought down the Berlin Wall, reunited
Europe, and transformed the face of the world.
The pope helped the people of Poland to
overcome their fear. Bob Seiple, who served
with me in the State Department as the first
American ambassador-at-large for international
religious freedom, tells a second story, this
one about overcoming hate. It concerns Mary,
a young Lebanese woman he encountered
while working as the head of World Vision,
a Christian relief and development agency.
In the 1980s, Lebanon had been the scene
of a destructive and multisided civil war.
Mary lived in a mostly Christian village; and
faith and diplomacy

they should recognize
where and how religious
beliefs contribute to
conflicts and when
religious principles might
be invoked to ease strife
when a Muslim militia invaded it, everyone
fled. Mary tripped on a root, plunging face-
first to the ground. As she scrambled to her
knees, a young man of no more than twenty
pressed the barrel of a pistol into the side of
her head and demanded, “Renounce the cross
or die.” Mary did not flinch. “I was born a
Christian,” she said. “I will die a Christian.”
The pistol fired, propelling a bullet through
Mary’s neck and spine. Remorselessly, the
militiaman carved a cross on her chest
with his bayonet, then left her to die.
The following day, the militia returned
and prepared to occupy the village. As
they carted off the dead, a few of them
came across Mary, still alive but unable to
move; she was paralyzed. Instead of finish-
ing her off, the militiamen improvised a
stretcher out of wood and cloth and took
her to a hospital. Seiple continues:
And I’m talking to Mary, sitting across

from her, and I said, “Mary, this makes
absolutely no sense. These are people who
tried to kill you. Why in the world would
they take you to the hospital the next day?”
She says, “You know, sometimes bad
people are taught to do good things.”
And I said, “Mary, how do you feel about
the person who pulled the trigger? Here you
are, an Arab woman in a land twice occupied at
that time—the Israelis in the south, the Syrians
every place else—strapped to a wheelchair,
held hostage by your own body, a ward of
the state for the rest of your life. How do you
feel about the guy who pulled the trigger?”
She said, “I have forgiven him.”
“Mary, how in the world
could you forgive him?”
“Well, I forgave him because my God
forgave me. It’s as simple as that.”
In Seiple’s view, there are two lessons in this
story. The first is that there are people who are
willing to die—and kill—for their faith. This
was true thousands of years ago and is no less
true today. The second lesson is that religion at
its best teaches forgiveness and reconciliation,
not only when those acts are relatively easy
but also when they are almost unbelievably
difficult. (Mary, I need hardly add, is a more
forgiving person than most—including me.)

The third story involves a boy with haunted
eyes whom I met on a blisteringly hot after-
noon in December 1997 during my first trip
to Africa as secretary of state. The youngster
looked about five years old and spoke softly, in
a voice drained of emotion. He told me that,
two weeks earlier, the small village where his
family lived had been attacked. His mother
had thrown him to the ground, shielding
him with her body. When it was quiet, he
wriggled his way out from under her and
looked. His mother was dead. The bodies of
other women were nearby, more than a dozen,
drenched in blood. The boy then heard an
infant crying; it was his sister, lying among
the corpses. He gathered the baby into his
arms and started walking. For hours, as the
youngster stumbled along over hills and rocks,
the infant wailed. Eventually they came to
a place where the boy knew from experience
that they would be welcomed and kept safe.
That place was Gulu, a town in a remote
part of northern Uganda. World Vision ran the
camp and hospital there—a haven for local vil-
lagers, who were being terrorized by an outlaw
militia group. During the previous decade, an
estimated 8,000 children had been kidnapped;
most were presumed dead. Boys who survived
and did not escape were impressed into rebel
units; girls were taken as servants or “wives.”
Camp officials blamed rebel leaders who
had twisted religion into something grotesque.
The tragedy had begun in 1986, when a

change in government threatened the privileges
of a previously dominant tribe, the Acholi.
Fear is a powerful motivator, and the Acholi
feared retribution for the many abuses they
had committed while in power. A potential
savior arrived in the unlikely form of a thirty-
year-old woman, Alice Auma, who said that
she was able to commune with spirits—a
rare but by no means unique claim in her
culture. She told her companions that she had
been possessed by a deceased Italian military
officer who had instructed her to organize
an army and retake Kampala, the Ugandan
madeleine albright
6 | fall �006
capital. Once victory was achieved, com-
manded the spirit, the Acholi should cleanse
themselves by seeking forgiveness. Auma’s
sacred campaign was launched but lacked
the military clout to match its supernatural
inspiration. After some initial successes, the
movement—armed only with sticks, stones,
and voodoo dolls—was crushed. Auma, her
mind no longer host to the Italian officer,
found refuge across the border in Kenya.
That would have ended the story had not
Joseph Kony, Auma’s nephew, decided to take
up the cause of holy war. Piecing together
a small force from various rebel groups, he
assembled what came to be known as the

Lord’s Resistance Army (LR A). From 1987 on,
the LR A has attacked villagers throughout the
region, also targeting local governments and
aid workers. Because Kony finds adults hard
to control and reluctant to enlist, he kidnaps
children as a means of procuring troops. Once
captured, the children are forced to obey or be
put to death; and obedience demands a will-
ingness to kill anyone, including one another.
Discipline is administered in the form of beat-
ings, lashings, and amputations predicated on
their leader’s reading of the Old Testament.
The LR A’s professed goal is to overthrow
the Ugandan government and replace it with
one based on the Ten Commandments—or
actually ten plus one. The eleventh, added
by Kony to restrict the movements of adver-
saries, is “Thou shalt not ride a bicycle.”
Itself a product of fear, the LR A has
survived twenty years by instilling fear in
others. The Ugandan government has veered
between efforts to make peace with the LR A
and efforts to destroy it, but officials lack the
resources to protect those living in the vicin-
ity of the rebel force. That task has been left
to World Vision and similar groups whose
resources are also limited, as I saw during my
tour of the camp in Gulu. The surroundings
reminded me of pictures I had seen of the
Crimean War. The camp hospital smelled of
disinfectant and human waste. Ancient IVs
dripped. Mosquitoes were buzzing everywhere.
There were hundreds of patients, most of them
children, many covered with welts and scars,

some missing a limb. I met a group of teenage
girls sitting on mattresses, braiding each other’s
hair. They looked as if they belonged in junior
high school, yet several were already mothers,
their babies sired by LR A rapists. “Even if you
are a very young girl,” said one, who was wear-
ing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, “you would be
given to a man who was the age of my father.”
As I started to leave, a young man came
up to me holding an infant. “This is the girl
that little boy brought to us, his little sister.
Her name is Charity.” As I cradled the tiny
orphan, I was told that the girl had been
named for one of the volunteers at the mis-
sion. There were many such volunteers. It
was a place filled with terrible suffering but
also a resilient joy. Patients and volunteers
laughed, sang, played games, and cared for
each other. The Italian doctor who ran the
facility had been in Gulu for more than
twenty years. What a contrast between the
faith that manifests itself in such love and
the twisted fantasies pursued by the LR A.2
One insight that is present in these stories
and often in religious faith more generally
is that we share a kinship with one another,
however distant it may sometimes seem; we
are all created in the image of God. This in
turn places upon us a responsibility to our
neighbors. That principle provides both a solid
foundation for religion and a respectable basis
for organizing the affairs of secular society.
What complicates matters is that religion
can be interpreted in ways that exclude large

numbers of people from any claim to kinship.
Those truly imbued with religious faith—such
as Pope John Paul II, Bob Seiple’s Mary, and
the volunteers in Gulu—may affirm “We are
all God’s children”; but others may follow their
convictions to a more argumentative conclu-
sion—“I am right, you are wrong, go to hell!”
When I appeared on a panel with the
Jewish writer and thinker Elie Wiesel, a
survivor of the Holocaust, he recalled how
a group of scholars had once been asked
to name the unhappiest character in the
Bible. Some said Job, because of the trials he
endured. Some said Moses, because he was
denied entry to the promised land. Some said
faith and diplomacy
the Virgin Mary, because she witnessed the
death of her son. The best answer, Wiesel
suggested, might in fact be God, because of
the sorrow caused by people fighting, kill-
ing, and abusing each other in His name.
This is why so many practitioners of foreign
policy—including me—have sought to separate
religion from world politics, to liberate logic
from beliefs that transcend logic. It is, after
all, hard enough to divide land between two
groups on the basis of legal or economic equity;
it is far harder if one or

both claim that the land
in question was given to
them by God. But religious
motivations do not disap-
pear simply because they
are not mentioned; more
often they lie dormant
only to rise up again at the
least convenient moment.
As our experience in Iran reflected, the United
States has not always understood this well
enough. To lead internationally, American
policy-makers must learn as much as possible
about religion, and then incorporate that
knowledge in their strategies. Bryan Hehir has
compared this challenge to brain surgery—a
necessary task, but fatal if not done well.
In any conflict, reconciliation becomes pos-
sible when the antagonists cease dehumanizing
each other and begin instead to see a bit of
themselves in their enemy. That is why it is a
standard negotiating technique to ask each side
to stand in the shoes of the other. Often this
is not as difficult as it might seem. The very
fact that adversaries have been fighting over
the same issue or prize can furnish a common
ground. For centuries, Protestants and
Catholics competed for religious ascendancy
in Europe. That was a point of similarity:
wanting to be number one. For even longer,
Christians, Muslims, and Jews have pursued
rival claims in Jerusalem; that, too, is a point
of similarity—wanting to occupy the same
space. In parts of Asia and Africa, Christians
and Muslims are fighting, but they share

a desire to worship freely and without fear.
When people are pursuing the same goal,
each side should be able to understand what
motivates the other. To settle their differences,
they need only find a formula for sharing what
both want—a tricky task, but one that can at
least be addressed through an appeal to reason.
Not all conflicts lend themselves to this
sort of negotiation. During World War II,
the Axis and the Allies were fighting for two
entirely different visions of the future. Today,
Al Qaeda’s lust for a war of vengeance fought
with the tools of terror cannot be accommo-
dated. Some differences are
too great to be reconciled.
In most situations, how-
ever, reconciliation will
be eminently preferable
to continued stalemate
or war. But how is rec-
onciliation achieved?
When participants
in a conflict claim to
be people of faith, a negotiator who has the
credentials and the credibility to do so might
wish to call their bluff. If the combatants
argue the morality of their cause, how is
that morality reflected in their actions? Are
they allowing their religion to guide them or
using it as a debating point to advance their
interests? Has their faith instilled in them

a sense of responsibility toward others or a
sense of entitlement causing them to disre-
gard the rights and views of everyone else?
If I were secretary of state today, I would
not seek to mediate disputes on the basis of
religious principles any more than I would try
to negotiate alone the more intricate details of
a trade agreement or a pact on arms control.
In each case, I would ask people more expert
than I to begin the process of identifying key
issues, exploring the possibilities, and suggest-
ing a course of action. It might well be that
my involvement, or the president’s, would
be necessary to close a deal, but the outlines
would be drawn by those who know every
nuance of the issues at hand. When I was
secretary of state, I had an entire bureau of
economic experts I could turn to, and a cadre
of experts on nonproliferation and arms con-
trol whose mastery of technical jargon earned
when participants in a
conflict claim to be people
of faith, a negotiator who
has the credentials and the
credibility to do so might
wish to call their bluff
madeleine albright
� | fall �006
them a nickname, “the priesthood.” With

the notable exception of Ambassador Seiple,
I did not have similar expertise available for
integrating religious principles into our efforts
at diplomacy. Given the nature of today’s
world, knowledge of this type is essential.
If diplomacy is the art of persuading
others to act as we would wish, effective
foreign policy requires that we comprehend
why others act as they do. Fortunately, the
constitutional requirement that separates state
from church in the United
States does not also insist
that the state be ignorant
of the church, mosque,
synagogue, pagoda, and
temple. In the future, no
American ambassador
should be assigned to a
country where religious
feelings are strong unless
he or she has a deep under-
standing of the faiths commonly practiced
there. Ambassadors and their representatives,
wherever they are assigned, should establish
relationships with local religious leaders. The
State Department should hire or train a core
of specialists in religion to be deployed both
in Washington and in key embassies overseas.
In 1994, the Center for Strategic and
International Studies published Religion, the
Missing Dimension of Statecraft. The book
makes a compelling case for recognizing the
role of religion in affecting political behavior
and for using spiritual tools to help resolve

conflicts. Douglas Johnston, the book’s coau-
thor, subsequently formed the International
Center for Religion and Diplomacy (ICRD),
which has continued to study what it calls
“faith-based diplomacy” while also playing
an important mediating role in Sudan and
establishing useful relationships in Kashmir,
Pakistan, and Iran. Johnston, a former naval
officer and senior official in the Defense
Department, believes that, ordinarily, everyone
of influence in a given situation is not neces-
sarily bad, and those who are bad aren’t bad all
the time. He argues that a faith-based media-
tor has means that a conventional diplomat
lacks, including prayers, fasting, forgiveness,
repentance, and the inspiration of scripture.
The ICRD is not alone in its efforts.
After leaving the State Department, Bob
Seiple founded the Institute for Global
Engagement, which is working to improve
the climate for religious liberty in such
volatile nations as Uzbekistan and Laos.
The institute’s mantra is, “Know your faith
at its deepest and richest best, and enough
about your neighbor’s faith to respect it.”
While in office, I had
occasion to work closely
with the Community of
Sant’Egidio, a lay move-
ment that began in Rome
in the 1960s, inspired
by the Second Vatican
Council of Pope John

XXIII. Over a period
of years, Sant’Egidio
successfully brokered nego-
tiations ending a long and bloody civil war in
Mozambique. It has also played a constructive
role in, among other places, Kosovo, Algeria,
Burundi, and Congo. The community sees
prayer, service to the poor, ecumenism, and
dialogue as the building blocks of interreli-
gious cooperation and problem solving.
Numerous other faith-based organiza-
tions, representing every major religion, are in
operation. They are most effective when they
function cooperatively, pooling their resources
and finding areas in which to specialize. Some
are most skilled at mediation; others are best
at helping former combatants readjust to civil-
ian life. Still others emphasize prevention,
addressing a problem before it can explode
into violence. Many are experts in economic
development or building democracy, both
insurance policies against war. Together, these
activists have more resources, more skilled
personnel, a longer attention span, more experi-
ence, more dedication, and more success in
fostering reconciliation than any government.
The most famous example of faith-based
peacemaking was orchestrated by President
Jimmy Carter at Camp David in 1978. Most
observers acknowledge that the peace agree-
the state department should
hire or train a core of

specialists in religion
to be deployed both in
washington and in key
embassies overseas
faith and diplomacy
ment between Egypt and Israel would never
have come about if not for Carter’s ability to
understand and appeal to the deep religious
convictions of President Sadat and Prime
Minister Begin. I recently asked the former
president how policy-makers should think
about religion as part of the foreign policy
puzzle. He told me that it is not possible to
separate what people feel and believe in the
spiritual realm from what they will do as a
matter of public policy. “This is an opportu-
nity,” he argued, “because the basic elements
of the major religious faiths are so similar—
humility, justice, and peace.” He said that in
the unofficial diplomacy he is often asked to
conduct through the Carter Center, one of
the first aspects he investigates is whether the
parties to a dispute represent the same faith.
He said it is often simpler to deal with people
of completely different faiths than with those
who share a religion but disagree about how it
should be interpreted. As a moderate Baptist,
Carter said he found it less complicated to
have a conversation with a Catholic than with

a Baptist fundamentalist; with the Catholic
it was easier simply to accept the differences
and not feel obliged to argue about them.
When I broached this same subject with
Bill Clinton, he stressed two points. First,
religious leaders can help to validate a peace
process before, during, and after negotiations;
through dialogue and public statements,
they can make peace easier to achieve and
sustain. Second, persuading people of dif-
ferent faiths to work cooperatively requires
separating what is debatable in scripture
from what is not. “If you’re dealing with
people who profess faith,” he said, “they must
believe there is a Creator; if they believe
that, they should agree that God created
everyone. This takes them from the specific
to the universal. Once they acknowledge
their common humanity, it becomes harder
to kill each other; then compromise becomes
easier because they’ve admitted that they
are dealing with people like themselves, not
some kind of Satan or subhuman species.”
Faith-based diplomacy can be a useful tool
of foreign policy. I am not arguing, however,
that it can replace traditional diplomacy.
Often the protagonists in a political drama are
immune to, or deeply suspicious of, appeals
made on religious or moral grounds. But if we
do not expect miracles, little is lost in making
the attempt. The resurgence of religious feel-
ing will continue to inf luence world events.
American policy-makers cannot afford to

ignore this; on balance they should welcome
it. Religion at its best can reinforce the core
values necessary for people from different
cultures to live in some degree of harmony; we
should m
madeleine albright
1. This article is excerpted by permission from: Madeleine
Albright, The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on
America, God, and World Affairs (New
York: HarperCollins, 2006), chapter 5.
2. In October 2005, the International Criminal Court issued
arrest warrants for Joseph Kony and four other LRA leaders on
the charge of crimes
against humanity. The court does not, however, have any
independent capacity to enforce those warrants.

STEVE OLSONJournalist Steve Olson, who holds a B.S. in phy.docx

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