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| Image credit: www.museumofman.org |
Race is a Biological Myth
In "RACE: The Power of an Illusion," Alan Goodman, an anthropologist, says that "to understand why the idea of race is a biological myth requires a major paradigm shift." Even as someone who has had people around me mention the idea of race as an imaginary construct, I still agree with this statement. I've never cared about race as a difference between people, but still somehow had ingrained in my mind that race was somehow an important concept. Despite society now generally condemning racism, race still comes across as an important enough difference that racial differences should be commented on, and while racial equality should certainly be celebrated, part of reaching the ultimate equality is stop caring so much about those differences – surface differences, differences of skin, hair, and eyes – in the first place.
| Image credit: 7-themes.com |
Because of this, I still had a shift to make after watching this film. The tiny part of my brain insisting that there had to be some biological difference that sparked the entire issue of racial disparity in the first place finally had to dissolve completely, and while it was a shift, it definitely wasn't an unwelcome shift, or a difficult one to make. The analogy presented in the video summarized it very well: "it was like hearing that someone had discovered the world was round, believing it in a sort of abstract manner, then climbing a mountain and seeing for yourself the horizon curving against the sky."
Skin Color
Near the end of the "RACE: The Power of Illusion," the students studying race in the film were asked whether they'd trade the skin color for another. My father is from a Caucasian background, light skin running far back in his family. My mother was born and lived in India until she went to college, and nearly everyone on her side of the family has darker skin and hair. I have light skin and brown hair, – can easily pass as 'white' – my coloring presumably passed down from my father's side. But really, I could just as easily have been born with darker skin and hair, and I don't believe that would change who I am in any fundamental way.
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| Image credit: www.pbs.org |
So, to conclude, trading my skin color for another would not have a significant impact on my life, so I wouldn't mind if I had to, nor if I simply kept what I have now. It might change people's expectations for me or how they see me in general, but that's a social issue, not a biological one, and in the end, I wouldn't let it influence my life.
Our idea of race, solely based on external appearance, is really about the perceptions of the people around us and even ourselves, not any genetic marker or biological trait. Really, does the color of your skin matter more than the size of your feet, or how tall you are, or how long your fingers are? In the end, variations in appearance should be part of what makes individuals unique instead of automatically sorting them into biologically mythical groups.
