Rethinking race
Thursday, 11 March 2010 09:28
This semester I’m taking a service-learning course that focuses on race, racism and community. There are lots of parallels between racism and homophobia, mainly rooted in fear of the unknown. So I’ve been wondering what we might be able to do as a country to break down these barriers of discrimination.
For one thing, we need to stop segregating ourselves into groups: the black community, the gay community, the Hispanic community, etc. When we focus on ourselves that way, we become the ones who are drawing distinctions between ourselves and other people. How can we expect to be treated like everyone else when we’re pretty much saying that we aren’t like everyone else?
We need to start thinking of our country as our community. Hopefully that might lead to the possibility of someday seeing the entire world as a single community. That, though, is farther down the road.
In my service-learning class, we watched a video about finding traces of a person’s race in their DNA. The experiment conducted was designed so that any similarities or differences would be distinguished and differences would be highlighted.
They made predictions and the white kids thought they’d have more similarities with each other, and the black kids also with each other, and so on. As it turned out, though, the white kid’s DNA had the most differences with another white person in the group, but was nearly the same as the DNA of a person from central Africa. What does this mean? That race is not traceable in our DNA and therefore is not an actual thing at all. Race is an idea.
The only thing that dictates our skin tone is the amount of sunlight that was getting to our ancestors. In parts of the world where there is less sunlight, the skin of the native people will lose melanin in order to absorb what little sunlight is available. This loss of melanin makes your skin whiter. You aren’t white because you’re Irish; you’re white because Ireland isn’t sunny enough. And if Ireland were sunny enough, you’d be black.
The thing about this experience that surprised me was a couple of the comments made afterward. Some people said that they felt like their racial identity had been ripped away from them in learning that race isn’t real. There was no longer anything for them to connect themselves to. My question to those people is: Why can’t you feel connected to yourself? And why do you need to use race or title or sexual orientation to identify yourself? Why can’t you just be you?
I understand that this concept might be hard for some people to accept and adopt, but I’m sure it was hard for white people at first when black people wanted to be seen as equals. I’m sure it made them uncomfortable. Anything that’s out of the ordinary or out of what’s comfortable is going to be hard, but if it’s necessary then people are just going to have to live with.
If everyone had this knowledge of race being a social concept rather than an actual biological fact, I bet there would be a lot more acceptance in the world, beginning with people accepting themselves, which is the most important part of this entire equation. If you accept who you are and you’re comfortable with yourself, then there’s no reason for you to fear anyone else for being who they are. An equal amount of respect would be distributed and then maybe some equal rights would follow.
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