Race in Amerca

The PBS series “Race: The Power of an Illusion” effectively works to expose race as a social construct and deconstructs the false notions that race is a biological marker. The series first discusses that all human beings originated from Africa but dispersed about 70,000 years ago to various places in the world. As a result of this migration, people were spread to different locations throughout the world with different environmental conditions that affected their physical traits. It was many years after the migration in which people began to display these new physical traits such as slanted eyes, fair skin, and differing hair textures. While the series notes the physical changes that occurred during the migration it also emphasizes that race while it may seem apparent in skin color and other physical features has no real biological basis.

The invention of race was largely a created to validate slavery and continuing to exploit Native Americans. Race from its foundation was a tool representing social ranking and differences of individuals. Race goes deeper than skin color, hair texture, nose size, and eye color. Race is about how people want you to appear. Race was formed so slave owners could remain slave owners. Race permits certain people the right to freedom and justice. Today race is a instrument justifying what had already been position unequal social groups: It is from the start as it is today about who should have access to privilege, power, status, and wealth and who should

In Race: The Power of an Illusion, California Newsreel and its co-director Larry Adelman crafted a documentary that is both accessible and sophisticated. Making use of state-of-the-art scientific, historical, and social-scientific accounts, the series was about the crew being on a detailed tour of a wide range of attitudes and beliefs about race. It exposes the many misconceptions and inadequacies of the "common sense" views into which we have all been deeply socialized.

Throughout the history of the country, America has been considered a fairly racist union. From the workplaces to the society, as an Asian, I felt there's a strong barrier between white and black people, although I felt a little bit of racial among us. In this essay, I will talk about the major racial issue of this country through out my experiences.

In the podcast “Race Doesn’t Exist. Or Does It?” talks about what we can really say about race and what genetics can tell us about race. They begin to talk about how our race and genetics are very similar, but there is a small difference between us. We all started in same place together which was Africa, but then humans began to leave to different areas across the globe. DNA is being copied, but sometimes the coping isn’t perfect which creates coping errors. They have identified 180 little variations in the DNA that people who share the same ancestry. DNA can’t specifically tell you a lot about the color of your skin, but it can rule out different skin colors by looking at the different ancestral percentages. DNA can tell you your eye color though.

Throughout the Americas, the notion of race has been commonly used for making social distinctions (Telles, & Paschel, 2014) Race continues to influence power relations, construction of identities and resource distribution (Jenkins & Dillon 2012). The consequences of slavery led to desegregation and since then there has been ongoing issues of discrimination, prejudice, hate crimes, regarding race in the United States (Lee, & Bean, 2007). W.E.B. Dubois, in 1903, predicted that the issues of the twentieth century would be problems of the color line, by which he meant a metaphorical line that divides the country for historical reasons (Lee, & Bean, 2007). His prediction was spot on, because what was set in motion was a series of black and white

Throughout the talk, Nelson desired to stir conversation on how biological and DNA research can strip away the veil of racial bias and, hopefully, shed light on ways to repair it. She mentioned at the beginning of her talk that this work has not been easy or even well received. In fact, getting people on board was much harder than researchers anticipated, she said. Early adopters were upper and middle class citizens in their 50’s and 60’s. They took the results they received seriously, but with a grain of salt. Nelson said that while the data was taken seriously, it didn’t become a part of their daily lives. She

Race in America has been a conscientious objective since the beginning of time. Individuals of different hues perpetuate the racial spoils system which vigorously rejects the Martin Luther King theory of a color blind society. Throughout history, the criterion of which racism has stemmed has evolved vastly, yet it’s probably more of an issue in today’s current events than ever before. Through researched data I was able to create a census for this so called issue with race in America. This research project will be an expository of three valid sources which perceive race in America through differential diagnosis. The dogma of race has logical consequences that are profoundly important. If blacks, for example, are equal to whites in every way, what accounts for differential success levels or other factors? Since any theory of racial differences has been outlawed, America must be racked with a pervasive and horrible understanding of the concept of race since it has a deeper literal meaning than phenotypically. Through this textual evidence I plan to educate the ignorant of the many obstacles faced that go unseen or unheard in the Black community of America.

First is the belief that race is central, not peripheral, to American thought and life. Second is the notion that racism is common and ordinary rather than rare and episodic, so that a great deal of Americans’ social life is affected by it. A third strand is material determinism, or interest convergence—the idea that racial relations maintain a white-over-black/brown hierarchy that provides benefits and profits to elite groups in the majority race and are for that reason difficult to reform. A fourth feature is the social construction thesis, according to which races are products of social thought and invention, not objective or biologically real (Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, 2011, p. 1).

Although the topic of race is a multifaceted topic with many elements that have developed over time, the topic race, however, has always been a way for people to justify personal gain by objectifying people’s inherent differences. Many authors and important figures like Charles Darwin and the Kellogg family used race and other techniques like eugenics the stripped away the thinly veiled cover that slightly suggested that all people were the same and partially equal. They wanted the people to understand that the only race to have the best chance surviving and over the best genetically fit race would to be to sterilize lesser races so that there would not be any competition or genetic impurity.

At this point in history scientific racism rose dramatically, and the theory of evolutionary psychology built itself up with the Darwinian Theory as the main foundation (Kock, 2009). Some research carried out was said to show that “Negroes” have smaller brains than Caucasians, however “Negroes” had better “primitive” skills such as better hearing and vision than that of a Caucasian (Richards, 1997 as cited in Sidhu, 1999). This shows research was very culturally biased, it could be argued that in today’s society although racial bias exists. Results from a more recent study (Kennedy, 2012) carried out on African Americans and Caucasians show that Caucasians are not seen to be any more intelligent than African Americans (Kennedy, Allaire, Gamaldo, Whitfield, 2012). Showing that institutions and society have already taken on the role of individuals been more diverse and open minded to new ideas from other cultures.

Today in the United States one of the most controversial issues is race relations. Mainstream America would like to exist in an environment of integration and race independent societal construct. However, one cannot negate the existence of racially motivated problems. Slavery, which is a primary component of the development of what we call modern American culture and its abolition could be considered the moment where race relations started to become an issue in the US.

In the first episode of Race, the Power of Illusion, popular misconceptions about race are debunked. The myths about race are laid out on the table. As discussed in the film, race is typically determined by visual differences, such as skin complexion, eye shape, or the texture of one’s hair. The idea of race being biological then leads to other misconceptions; furthermore, many believe that race plays a role in academic or athletic abilities. Pilar Ossorio explains that there are no genetic indicators of race, meaning that race is not a biological concept.

Genetics once served a vital role in understanding different cultures and races around the world. Even though many commonly accepted distinctions between races have been proved to be inaccurate, they are still used to classify different groups of people. One of the most prominent examples is skin color. This trait is most commonly associated with Sub-Saharan Africa, and thought of as a trait of the black race. However, darker skin is common of peoples in Australia and South America. While dark skin can come from inherited traits, it is also largely a result of natural selection due to their environments which explains why peoples with dark skin tend to be located at or below the equator. We still use physical characteristics to judge others;

Due to scientist’s interest in human genetic variation, human racial classification became a focus of scientific investigation by evolutionary biologists attempting to categorize individual humans based on presumed patterns of biological difference. Scientists had hoped to classify humans in the same way that they classified other species. These scientists attached hierarchical titles to these categorizations; they claimed that differences in skin color, physiognomy, and geography were associated with scientifically measurable differences in character, aptitude, and temperament (Smedley, 1998). However, studies supporting these claims have been unsound (Gould, 1981). Categorization of humans by racial and ethnic groups continues, as researchers must remain aware of this historical legacy of the science of heredity as the genomic era continues to develop (Bonham et al., 2005).