Race the Power of an Illusion ( Extra Credit)

In class on Monday we watched a movie entitled “Race: The Power of an illusion, Episode 1: The Difference between Us”. The movie we watched explained that for several hundred years we have been classifying people by race, through clear cut categories mostly just by looking at them. It was stated that race assumes that external differences are related to internal racial which gives some a biological competitive edge. The truth is that people are actually not very different outside their external differences, and in fact are genetic make-ups are not very different at all no matter what racial background you are from. Animals from the same background tend to be more distant than humans, with the examples of fruit flies who are ten times more different than each other. During the movie we learned that for two hundred years scientist looked for some type of biological factor that could determine what makes people the racial background that they become. Basically the scientist were searching for anything they could find that could justify putting all the ethnicities of African Americans, Chinese, and Indian all at the bottom of the hierarchy and to place Whites at the very top. In this time the people in the government discovered a racial group called the WIN tribe, which a group of people made up of White, Indian, Negro or African Americans located in West Virginia. The government saw this mixture of races and thought it was disgraceful, in turn after this was discovered some twenty-eight states passed laws to save racial purity. These ideas were later adopted by the leader of the Nazi regime Adolph Hitler. Later with the rise of African American athletes, people were wondering how these athletes could have gotten so good at sports. This also prompted the research of scientists to search for reasons why African American people can be so talented. The reason why people are to have acquired their skin tones was discussed in greater detail, it was stated that people need sunlight to have the necessary amount of vitamin D to produce the right melanin which produces the skin tone. It was also proved that the skin tone was lighter and darker in certain regions to help people be able to survive in their current environments. It was also determined that through MtDNA a set of DNA found in the mitochondria that can only be inherited from your mother, is where people inherit most of their genetic backgrounds that can help people identify from what region of the world their ancestors could came from. It was also determined that the most genetic variation was present in Africa.
In conclusion the racial gap that is supposed to be so wide is actually pretty narrow once you move past an individual’s external skin tone. In actuality people are all very close indeed, and a lot of them originated from most of the same general areas. We also learned that most of the separation that occurs within society is not by biological but rather by social differences created by people who are believe that difference races should determine statuses of the people.